Recently, I’ve upgraded the HP 874W power station to Linux Mint Maya, 64-bit, MATE edition.
It’s pretty stable, the performance is brutal, and it has very new packages out of the box, like VIM 7.3 (I’m looking at you Debian Squeeze). But the Gnome2-MATE conversion is still a work in progress. A few things are still broken, like the power button brings up the shut-down dialogue for exactly zero seconds and, unfortunately, Compiz does not work out of the box.
It took me two evenings to play with the Configuration Editor (gconf-editor), the Configuration Editor (mateconf-editor) and CCSM to reach a state, where Compiz places, decorates, wobbles and peeps through windows in the desired fashion, and the virtual desktops are spinning and exposing as in the old times. Except, there is no way to start the old hierarchical menu with Alt-F1. So I’m forced to use the chaotic MintMenu. By now my readers have figured out, correctly, that I’m a keyboard-guy.
So Ubuntu Lucid Lynx will stay on the ultra-portable ASUS UL20A for at least another year. This OS is the symbol of the golden era of the Linux desktop, 2010. Dark clouds were already gathering on the horizon, but here, down on Earth, everything looked rosy and happy. The Linux desktop was so good that Apple and Microsoft could not help copying it at an astonishing rate. Full screen for ALL apps for the first time in Mac OS X Lion, anyone?
But while we, proud users, were showing off semi-transparent rotating desktop cubes to the Apple fanboys in the neighbourhood, William Jon McCann had a feeling of terrible insecurity. He, as the lead designer of Gnome3, felt that the Linux desktop was crap and something new, more apple-ish was required. At the same time Miguel de Icaza, the founder of Gnome, had already been a closeted Mac OS X user, waiting for the great coming-out moment. Allegedly, his sound was not working and he could not play videos on Linux. I’m at a complete loss here…
But anyway, Gnome3 was born, Gnome2 was discontinued, Ubuntu defaulted to Unity, and everybody else got real angry. There is a silver lining in the clouds though, thanks to Linux Mint, but it’s still a long way. But what caused this mayhem?
It’s called inferiority complex.
It’s harmful.
No, the desktop is not going away, and no, OS X and Windows were not better than the Linux desktop, and no, goodness is not measured by market share. These gentlemen were hankering after the wrong things from the Apple world. They wanted to copy looks and features and gardens and walls. They should have noticed something else:
Self-confidence.
It’s the ability to notice that you’re good at something. The first Mac OS from 1984 and the present OS X basically look the same. They stuck with their interface even in the valley of the shadow of death. Their user interface is still the same, while they have changed the internals to Unix. The same is true for the Linux kernel. The external interfaces never change. Linus’ bash binary from 1991 still runs.
Miguel de Icaza thinks Linus Torvalds is an arrogant low-level kernel guy. But the fact that you’ve been a guilt-afflicted closeted Mac-fag, does not mean that someone else with a healthy dose of self-confidence is arrogant. In fact Linus Torvalds is an extremely humble person. He goes to great lengths to protect his users. Yes, on the surface you see the “shoot-yourself-before-you-reproduce” and the “you-are-full-of-BS”, but the comforting self-mockery is always there, and it’s all for the users’ sake.
On the Gnome side there is McCann’s polished and politically correct corporate lingo, which in fact is full of ignorance, insecurity and bullshit. And they could not care less for their existing users. But it’s Linus’ fault, of course.
Go to therapy, get rid of your inferiority complex and start using mplayer.
