Posted on 09/21/2011 5:02:12 AM PDT by ShadowAce
What does the Windows 8 Developer Preview have to do with the Linux desktop? Not much, you might think at first, especially since the final version is likely to be vastly different than the preview.
But as I explored the preview, I couldn't help asking myself: is this the first hint of how major desktops will look in the future on all operating systems? It's a distinct and -- for a Linux desktop user -- an alarming possibility.
If you haven't already downloaded the Windows 8 Developer Preview, then Jason Perlow's informal video will give you the general idea (as well as the key to installing it virtually: use the newly released VMWare Workstation 8).
The preview is really two desktops in one. One is a standard Windows desktop that differs little from Windows 7. The other is the default Metro API, which resembles the Windows Phone.
Scrolling horizontally, the Metro desktop consists of clusters of widgets, with square ones for applications, and rectangular ones for utilities and online services. These widgets can be moved around, but a garish desktop is nearly inevitable, partly because of the two different sizes, but also because, so far, the widgets can't be themed. Metro apps open full-screen, and intentionally do not support plug-ins -- for those, you need to use the legacy interface.
Verdicts about the Metro desktop would be premature, because in the preview it barely exists. Yet the trends could be summarized as more of the same. Metro is a desktop where users can do even less than ever before without drilling down into the remote depths of the interface, and can do little easily except launch applications. In Metro, Microsoft appears to have labored mightily, only to produce a glossy modern version of Windows 3.1.
One of my first thoughts while looking at Metro was that I've been too hard on GNOME and Unity in the past few months. For all my misgivings about the directions of these two desktops, their current versions are far preferable to the Metro preview.
If GNOME and Unity sometimes make me feel that I'm constrained and distanced from the tools I use, then Metro makes me feel that I am locked into my chair with steel bands and forced to type with down-filled mittens.
But, thinking more carefully, I realized that the difference is largely a matter of degree. Right now, it's an extremely large degree, but what's worrying is that it isn't a difference in kind. If Metro is successful, then the difference in degree might easily diminish, or even vanish altogether.
Consider: the free desktop has always looked to proprietary rivals for design inspiration. KDE's Kicker menu looks mightily like recent Windows menus. Similarly, Unity's imitations of OS X have become the source of endless jokes -- jokes that have a sting in them because they contain a grain or two of truth.
Sometimes, such borrowings can be justified because they make sense. The arrangement of system settings into categories, for example, is more efficient for users than a long list of options, and never mind that Windows had it first.
At times, however, the justification is less obvious. KDE's default placement of the menu in the lower left corner, for instance, is usually justified on the grounds that Windows users expect to find it there, rather than as an efficient arrangement.
Too often, I suspect, developers are simply unable to shake the now-obsolete conviction that the Linux desktop lags behind Windows and OS X, and needs to emulate them. Examples of free desktop developers trying to innovate in their own right, as GNOME 3 or the KDE 4 series does, are still relatively rare. And even these examples are not completely free of a sense that proprietary desktops need to be imitated.
The possibility that Metro could be imitated on the free desktop seems all the more likely because many developers already subscribe to the same design principles as Metro. Development of GNOME 3 and Unity in particular already seem driven by a drive towards simplicity that users don't seem to want, apparently on the grounds that what might be suitable for a novice must also be suitable for intermediate and advanced users.
Even more importantly, most free desktop developers seem to have decided -- apparently independently of each other -- that mobile devices should be the model for all computing desktops.
This decision frees developers from maintaining multiple code-bases, and can also be justified on the grounds that users are familiar with mobile devices. Never mind that users may be familiar with mobile desktops, but not actually like them. Never mind that mobile desktops are used for relatively trivial activities compared to a laptop or a workstation.
Just as on the Windows 8 preview, the preferred design principles in most of the free desktop are those used in mobile devices. Only KDE has resisted this tendency, offering a variety of views that share a common code base aside from their interfaces.
Under these conditions, a popular release of Metro might easily encourage imitators on the Linux desktop. Instead of innovating for themselves, free desktops developers could be distracted by a race to the bottom, with each development team looking to find a lower common denominator than all the others.
Should that happen, then the user revolts that are already happening might seem like minor grumbling in comparison. Everything that people already complain about -- inconvenience, restricted work flow, lack of customization -- would become twenty times more troublesome than it already is.
That is why Metro is potentially so alarming. If it is successful, the result could be a magnification of all the existing problems with some of the leading Linux desktops. The old values of the free desktop -- control and autonomy -- could be overthrown for inferior interfaces that in the end might become self-defeating. After all, why switch from Windows 8 to Unity or GNOME if all you are offered is more of the same?
The future may not be the way I describe. Metro could morph out of all recognition, or face its own user revolt. Free desktop developers could change their direction in the next year, or even find the failure of Windows 8 an occasion for self-contemplation.
However, given Microsoft's power to impose whatever it chooses upon users, the possibility remains strong that Metro could become the new standard for interface design on all desktops -- not because it is useful, but simply because it is what users are accustomed to seeing.
The fact that a standard Windows desktop is available behind Metro is some consolation, but not much. Microsoft is promoting Metro heavily, and whether that standard Windows desktop will be available in the final release of Windows 8, or disappear after a few minor updates, is uncertain.
Ordinarily, I don't care much about what is happening on Windows, and neither do many Linux users. However, in the case of Metro, I make an exception, and so should you. It just might be the first indication of a nightmarish future -- the return of everything we thought we'd escaped by switching to GNU/Linux.
The ultimate intent, as I understand it, is to allow the user to flow from his computer to his tablet and to his phone fairly smooth.
I like the intent, but I don’t like those Windows tiles.
I bought Windows 7 so I won’t have to deal with it for a good 4 years or so.
The author appears to be an old-school “give me DOS” type.
Easy, colored blocks for the masses to use is the wave of the future in our publicly educated society.
Windows 8 will allow you to get away from the Metro UI and use the OS in the same manner as Windows 7. This will remain until all programs are updated to use the Metro UI.
Right now, there are people running the Windows 8 Developer Preview on PCs and Tablets. On a PC it is irrelevant, but on a tablet, it finally brings Windows Tablets on the same playing field as iOS and Android.
My understanding is that the current Windows 8 includes a browser that is amazing. It is smooth and seamless on the tablets tested where Windows 7 stuttered.
If MS can pull all this off and integrate XBox, Windows Phone and PCs into the same user experience with a seamless transition from one to another, they may leap forward of their competition.
Only the free market will decide (unless Obama is re-elected)
Gnome is already taking it on the chin for Gnome-3.
I work for a Linux distributor, and I don’t know anybody who likes Gnome-3.
Besides, there are many window managers besides Gnome, KDE, and Unity. For the ultimate in simplicity, there is always Tom’s Window Manager, or, for real hard cases, there’s ...
# init 3
:)
I haven’t tried Gnome-3, is it that bad? I’ve been fooling with Unity since Ubuntu introduced it, trying to give it time to grow on me... and I just can’t get there. I’ve been seriously looking at KDE based distros and/or Kubuntu.
Users do want this power users and admins do not. Same thing is happening to the game market. While I love XBOX, the kinnect experience is great, but they are now doing too much with kinnect at the expense of the core gamer. Fact is the masses love kinnect and they love simplicity in their computer. Plus it helps keep them from doing stupid stuff.
> I haven’t tried Gnome-3, is it that bad?
Heh. I don’t have a system with the graphics punch needed to run Gnome-3, so it defaults to the standard gnome interface, though it’s a bit glossier and has more themes.
I can’t say exactly what the complaints are. I get the impression from some that Gnome-3 is “too windowsy”.
I’m in the same boat. I tried and tried and tried to adjust to Unity... it’s just... meh!
“I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me fluxbox or give me death!”
Just when I learn DOS 6.1 they bring out something new! But not necessarily better.
> Just when I learn DOS 6.1 they bring out something new! But
> not necessarily better.
You ARE behind the times.
DOS is up to 6.22, now.
I still have my box and the floppys for 6.22. I bet they don’t work anymore :(
Give me CP/M!
> Give me CP/M!
LOL!!!!
That goes way back to 1975! You are dating yourself!
The way I heard it, Gary Kildall was supposed to meet with IBM to create an OS for their new PC. He wanted to reschedule the meeting so he could keep a hang glider date.
IBM was getting impatient. One of the IBM board members had a son, Bill Gates, who had been working on an OS and asked if the directors would consider his efforts.
According to the official Digital Research site, Billy stole the basics of the OS from Kildall.
http://www.digitalresearch.biz/CPM.HTM
Yes, that is a sentence.
bump.
Actually, I started on a SWTPC 6800 with 21k of memory and a cassette tape drive. It was only 1979.
Then, I moved up to HDOS on my Heathkit H89. Finally moved to CP/M on that.
Wow.
You and I have LIVED computer history.
:)
I had a pocket Trash-80 (Radio Shack TRS-80) with all my engineering formulas on it written in Basic. It was indispensable and was a permanent fixture in my briefcase.
Then I got an Otrona Z80 portable with CP/M on it, booting from 80K 4.5” floppies. Later had an upgrade to an 8086 motherboard and MS-DOS with 160K 4.5” floppy drives.
Wrote all my circuit modelling programs in Turbo Pascal and even used MultiPlan spread sheets.
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