Wednesday 6 March 2013

Miguel de Icaza moves to Mac

This is a fresh news: Miguel de Icaza, founder of Gnome and Mono projects, declares in this post he moved from GNU/Linux to Mac OS X.



While I missed the comprehensive Linux toolchain and userland, I did not miss having to chase the proper package for my current version of Linux, or beg someone to package something. Binaries just worked.
Whoa! This sentence hits me like a punch. I personally don't appreciate Mono (a MS-Oriented Java Clone), but being a Mac-User since 2010 I can understand Miguel's feelings. I don't want to say what's wrong or what's right on GNU/Linux systems, but I would like to say what I would like to see on GNU/Linux desktop to use it profittabily.
  1. Easy Packages: Set Linstaller as default way to install desktop programs. I admit Ubuntu Software Center is good, but I would like to download something from a site and install it with a double click, with no worries about my distro
  2. Application Directory: When I try to locate an executable on my box I must look into the (in)famous /usr/bin directory, where desktop applications are among system commands. Back in the old days, /opt was used to install StarOffice, Netscape, KDE and Java. Maybe today Java and KDE should be on system directories, but Inkscape, Eclipse, Netbeans, The Gimp, Chromium, LibreOffice ecc. could be placed as "sandboxed directories" on a Application Directory
  3. Drivers: I can tollerate some proprietary drivers in my box, if lack of them means to do not use my machine. I know mr. Stallman will hate me for this, but reverse engineering all drivers looks like a fight aganist windmills
  4. Desktop: what made great Ubuntu was (IMHO) its desktop. Clean, usefull, sober. No bright stars, no special-fx. Gnome 2 for workers. It just works. Now, I tried Unity and I found it uncomfortable, so I installed cinnamon on my Ubuntu-Box.
  5. Desktop Customization: when I used GNU/Linux at home, I spent more time to customize icons, GTK themes or KDE Look'n Feel instead of working. This is no good. A good distro should present a clean and efficient desktop theme. It's like what happens in Android World: how many users buy a Android-phone just to install Google's default theme?
These are just my thoughts: but thoughts of a user whom passed to Mac OS X for these reasons.

2 comments:

Power Cords said...

All features are better than a Windows XP built system. I love the Linux and Unix systems.

JaK said...

I don't like Windows XP and I love some GNU/Linux's features, such as packaging systems like yum and apt. I install also homebrew on my Mac OS X because it's easier to download libraries and software on this way. But some things could be changed on GNU/Linux desktop. What's wrong with my points?