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I think that Laura's experience is indicative of the state of the Linux desktop especially on portable kit. In short: it sucks. Here are some points. GNOME 2 is broken. There are lots of little things that don't work or don't work correctly/consistently and the GNOME devs have refused to fix them even when patches are provided. GNOME 3 is worse. For all practical purposes it is unusable. It's elegant, true enough, but elegance without functionality is a waste. Mint following the GNOME path is a lose. Doing GNOME 'right' is impossible because GNOME itself is so bad. A broken foundation can only yield a broken environment. KDE is a nightmare. While it has the consistency that GNOME lacks, as soon as one uses a non-KDE application that consistency shatters, and everything that you may have done to tweak the environment doesn't work for those non-KDE apps. Like Emacs, Thunderbird and Chrome. I simply hate Unity. I give Canonical props for the effort, but "effort" is not the same as "good". I find that Unity spends more time getting in my way than letting me work. That's a bad start for a UI. XFCE and LXDE exist for the technically proficient. They're certainly usable but they lack what average users expect from a desktop. The Macintosh desktop works so well because of the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines and the uniform enforcement of those guidelines. The HIG ensures UI consistency across all applications. It makes sure that things like copying from from one application and pasting into another "just works". Microsoft finally figured it out and instituted the Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines, their equivalent to Apple's HIG, for Windows Vista and Windows 7. Windows 7 still has some rough edges but overall the experience is remarkably usable. In some ways it is better than Macintosh, and I expect that to improve as Apple focuses on the iOSification of OS X. Linux... doesn't get it. It takes no effort to pick any three different applications and point out how they look and act differently and refuse to interoperate even when they use the same toolkits. The ultimate problem is a lack of specialized UI people at the cores of the desktop projects. The major Linux desktop projects are stuck with Windows 95's mentality: copying the frontrunners with no understanding of why the frontrunners made the decisions that they did. I've wanted an elegant, functional Linux desktop for 16 years. I've grown tired of waiting for it. -- Rich P.
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