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Re:What killed the Linux desktop by mratzloff on Wednesday August 29, 2012 @04:02PM (#4450763)
Maybe collaborative development is incapable of producing something as complex and difficult as a clean, well-designed desktop environment and API? Forking, competing spinoffs, factionalism are all useful things in some ways, but they're death to this kind of project.

The Rails community seems to manage.

Re:What killed the Linux desktop by scrumper on Wednesday August 29, 2012 @06:09PM (#4451659)
Well, Rails is a web framework. It's not an end user desktop environment like Gnome, KDE, NeXTStep, Windows or what have you.

Collaborative development does rather well with developer tools.

Re:What killed the Linux desktop by mratzloff on Wednesday August 29, 2012 @06:37PM (#4451813)
Sure... so why the culture difference?
Re:What killed the Linux desktop by msbarnett on Wednesday August 29, 2012 @08:26PM (#4452210)
Because developers understand what they want and need from their own tools.

Now, they might have different wants, and disagree on how to meet their needs, and march off in 800 different directions, but ultimately with enough effort any one group is capable of meeting their own needs.

UI/UX that works well for "normal people" is something that most developers don't understand; they know the UI/UX that meets their needs, but developer needs are quite rarified and abnormal compared to the typical user.

Thus, when they respond to disagreement with a UI/UX engineer by marching off in 800 different directions to scratch their own itches, they end up with no solution that meets the "normal user"'s needs. There's no culture of shutting up and following orders for the greater good of the project.

tl;dr you can't solve the problems of someone different from yourself if the only thing you do is scratch your own itches.

Re:What killed the Linux desktop by mratzloff on Thursday August 30, 2012 @02:32PM (#4456053)
Nicely put. Seems reasonable.
Re:What killed the Linux desktop by jmelloy on Wednesday August 29, 2012 @05:31PM (#4451431)
Rails has a pretty strong leader in DHH.
Re:What killed the Linux desktop by mratzloff on Wednesday August 29, 2012 @06:38PM (#4451817)
But there are strong personalities in the Linux community as well.