The OLPC project started with the best intentions of bright people. It got hyped beyond reason, first by some of its leaders (viz. Negroponte), then by gullible politicians and — at another level — by gullible idealists that failed to see what was in front of them.

Throughout its history the OLPC was flawed; flawed relationships with corporations, flawed marketing, flawed software. The intentions may have been great, when Negroponte rejected Steve Jobs offer for Mac OS X, because ‘it was not open source’, but a few years down the road, with the OLPC project laying off half of its staff, with Sugar having become something different entirely and many of the key people behind the original laptop out of the project, with Windows XP being targeted as the de facto OS for the second version of the laptop, due in some years I guess, it seems ironic, it seems stupid, but most importantly it proves that the OLPC XO-2 will be nothing if not just another ‘netbook’ device, with no particular focus on education, the open source and free culture/information movements and so on.
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GNOME, one of the two main linux desktop environments and platforms has become a very popular choice adopted by most major distributions as their desktop of choice, mostly due to its simplicity and minimalist design. While it does several things ‘right’, by generally providing a straightforward experience and ‘hiding’ advanced configuration options in its gconf system, its development has been unfocused and lacking in some areas where it needs additional work.

More specifically, the desktop is lacking very basic features one could find even on the original Macintosh or Windows 1.0. I’m going to list some of those critical omissions that should be a priority for any modern desktop and that GNOME seems to have missed:

1. Regional Settings. I’m really clueless as to why GNOME does not include a proper Regional Settings configuration panel by default. Sure, power users, programmers and *nixheads can sort out the enviroment variables, but this should be there anyway.
2. Audio Configuration. ALSA has been the standard for years, yet GNOME is missing a proper audio configuration panel. Audio is more than setting the event sounds and choosing a backend. The advent of PulseAudio has made things much worse, especially on systems where there are more than one soundcards available. Soundcard selection and configuration should be a couple of clicks away. And this includes multi-card systems and numerous backends.
3. Convoluted Settings. Why do we really need two panels for ‘Keyboard’ and ‘Keyboard shortcuts’? Why isn’t there a proper, functional ‘Service’ management panel? Why is gnome-control-center polluted with utilities such as ‘Network Tools’ and ‘System Monitor’? (hint: those are not configuration panels, but utilities). Why is ‘Default Printer’ a separate panel from ‘Printnig’ (and for those still in the 20th century, where on earth is Faxing configuration?)
4. Searching, Indexing: Chaos. On Ubuntu clicking on Places -> ‘Search for files’ shows the old GNOME ‘Search for files’ utility. Clicking the lens on the top right or going to Applications -> Accessories (?!) -> Tracker Search tool starts tracker. Pressing Ctrl-F when a Nautilus window has focus shows yet another dialogue. This is totally unacceptable.
5. Configuration: No CLI Requirement. There should be a concerted effort by all linux vendors, across all desktop environments to constitute a simple text based standard for configuration files with self-documenting facilities and coupled with a standard API for accessing, creating and modifying such files. This, in turn, could (possibly) allow for automatic generation of GUI applets capable of configuring every single aspect of the system in case a custom UI for a certain function is not available. Such a system would present a simpler, more pleasant experience to both users and developers. No GUI application, utility or system function should require the use of the terminal, although it should be possible to use a plain text editor to edit configuration files if that’s preferred. Since linux is a multi-desktop environment operating system, this should not be gconf, but something else; perhaps an XML-based standard.

I’ll be revisiting the topic over time in follow-up posts in order to add more usability annoyances of the modern linux desktop. Until then, I’d like to hear your comments.

Please do not ‘inform’ me of KDE’s strengths. I’m very well aware of them and I’ll provide a respective critique of its features as soon as the 4-series reaches a point of maturity worth spending some time for (I’m guessing 4.2 at the earliest, maybe a bit later).

Following on from my earlier post on the upcoming Ubuntu 8.04 ‘LTS’ release, I fear that my prediction, albeit harsh, was pretty accurate: Ubuntu 8.04 LTS should have never been branded as a Long Term Support (LTS) release. Despite the obvious shortcomings of having β-quality software (Firefox 3.0, GVFS) and new frameworks that — statistically — are going to break things for some people (Pulseaudio is one example; gvfs another) there are tons of bugs that I would classify as ‘Medium to High’ priority and that the Ubuntu devs could not possibly fix in time, don’t know about or probably don’t consider that important anyway. Despite all this, 10 days before release, Ubuntu Hardy is a ‘joy’ to use, if you can see beyond the LTS branding, treat it like a bleeding edge linux distribution and cope with the bugs and general instability that more or less define it; compiz, nautilus, the gvfs back ends, firefox — are all great; when they don’t crash.

Sadly, they do crash. More than I’d like. While I respect the decisions of the Ubuntu devs, I believe it is absolutely clear at this stage that a release as ‘bleeding edge’ as Hardy should have never been tagged with LTS. Still, I’m pretty confident that the steady stream of bugfix ‘updates’ will keep on coming (I’m counting more than 150-200MB daily) and hopefully by June Hardy will be a solid, usable release for everyone.
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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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