I recently tried Ximian Gnome 2. What do I think? Well, it is definitely a good try, but it is very similar to the Gnome desktop I had on my machine more than 18 months ago. I don’t know whether it is me or it is really happening, but I find the Linux Desktop developments slowing down in the past year or so.

I have been privileged with a ’switch’ to Macintosh computers, thus making my interaction with Linux boxes more infrequent, and even then from a server administration point of view which is not really focused on getting fancy desktop environments, but — really — has there been much happening on the linux front (at least from a Desktop/HCI/User Experience point of view) in the past 18 months? I don’t think so.

Ximian Gnome is very nice, very polished (although I did find several bugs here and there) and definitely a product I would choose over Windows for Enterprise use, considering the costs involved. But where is the Linux Desktop scene going? With both MacOS X and Windows evolving into composite-based desktops, and the industry slowly adding those same human-centric features that they claimed they would add ten or fifteen years ago (think Object orientation, the Cairo OS, the Taligent OS et al), such as file meta-data and associations, increased integration between applications etc., how is linux going to compete?
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Part of my development efforts in the past few months has been based on Java and since MacOS X is the operating system of choice for me I usually use it for Java development.

On the C/C++ and of course Objective-C front, MacOS X is doing alright, despite the largely obsolete development tools involved. It has, not only due to Apple’s engineering efforts, a top-notch (albeit not the fastest one) compiler, gcc, a good debugger, gdb and an excellent RAD API, Cocoa. So, on this front I have no reason to ditch OS X and choose another platform for my development. OS X is as great as an OS a developer could ask. And with the advent of XCode, things can just get better — although maybe not as good as they could.

On the Java front, however, things are less rosy than this. Sun does not officially support Java on the OS X platform. Instead, due to a (very good!) relationship between the two companies, Apple gets to optimise Sun’s JVM for OS X usually releasing a J2SDK/JRE some months late. This is not just Apple’s fault. Apple shipped Web Start in 10.1, it also included support for Cocoa development in its development tools. Apple supported Java from the first moment, when Microsoft dropped support whatsoever in Windows XP. Apple is definitely trying.
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