But then politics happened. If it doesn't work the same way it did in 1968, it's not allowed in the OS that was the child of the 90's. Pulse Audio, Unity, Gnome 3, systemd (along with anything else Poettering has touched) are evil because they're new. Unix never did it, so Linux can't.

GNU's Not Unix (yet... we'll get there someday though!).

At least for Unity and Gnome 3 (including GTK3) I'd rather say: Great ideas but they're evil because they are badly designed, full of bugs that don't get fixed due to complexity, constant API changes, almost no documentation or only wrong and outdated documentation and a lack of flexibility that annoys even the casual Desktop user.

Nobody is against progress - most people love to use OS X as a UNIX GUI these days... it's not perfect but it's not that bug ridden mess GNOME became.

You'd be surprised. Just listen to the arguments against giving Linux a more logical directory setup (somewhat like OS X's).

Personally, I think the various flavors of directory setup are already so divergent that tradition no longer holds massive value, but that's not something to be proud of.

The problem is the comparison point.

When original Gtk/Gnome came out, it was a WAY worse BPOS than Unity or Gnome 3 are today.

The trick was that when Gtk/Gnome came out there was no existing solution. So, even a bad one was okay.

The problem is that the new solution is competing against an existing solution that has more than a decade of development behind it.

It would take a Herculean effort to win that comparison.

There were existing solutions, e.g. Motif or Athena widgets if you wanted a GUI library, or FVWM if you wanted a desktop environment. Of course, GTK/GNOME was a significant improvement.

Qt and Gtk were a breath of fresh air. And Qt got everybody's dander up due to 1) license and 2) C++ requirement.

So, Gtk basically stepped into a vacuum.

I sometimes wonder if good visual and interaction design can succeed in the open source model. In software development, tasks can be parcelled out in a modular way to many developers. But this model doesn't work well for visual and interaction design. If you want all the parts of an Operating System or piece of software to feel consistent and cohesive, you need a more focused approach. And that means handing design tasks to a designated design team and entrusting them to make the UX decisions. But with open source projects, we all want a say in the UX (me included); thus the endless (and often bitter) discussions about how a piece of software should behave.

The model of open source code has influenced and inspired countless companies. But who can point to examples of visual and interaction design from open source software that has had a similar effect? I see the influence going much more the other way i.e. open source software often follows ideas or conventions from commercial companies. I'd love to see this change. But how?

I think, the same thing works with visual and interaction design. But you'd need a small group of people to make the basic UX decisions and write concise guidelines others can follow. Like Apples «Human Interface Guidelines»[0].

This isn't really purely democratic, but I think it's almost impossible to find the "one way of doing things" if everyone has their say in every micro decision.

For me its much more important to have consistent user experience than the details of it. Its like tab vs spaces in programming or semicolon vs no semicolon in Javascript. I have my personal preferences, but i'm fine with either one as long as it is consistent at least within the project.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/Documentation/UserEx...

The same goes for any democratically appointed UX team.

On the other hand, we, the people are soon to vote whether Switzerland should terminate european human rights contracts. It's insanely democratic and it scares the shit out of me because it might actually get a majority.

You can shoot yourself in the foot with too much democracy.

The right wing fear machinery fed with millions of donation money has really poisoned the political climate over the last decade. Whether you agree with their points, a system like ours, where basically every citizen can trigger a nation wide vote about almost anything (e.g. reintroduction of death penalty) only works if the debates are driven by reason, not populism. The other parties recently jumped on the same train, saying it's the only way to defend against those scare mongers … sigh

I still love our system, it gives the people not only power but also a sense of responsibility. It's not the government that fucked things up – you did. But it doesn't make a country completely immune to dedicated actors with enough influence and money like many believe.

1) A number major commercial UNIX vendors have moved in the direction dumping the old startup scripts in favor of something more explicit and declarative. This isn't just engineering for engineering's sake, major corporations have customers with needs. Redhat and company are no different.

2) It's incredibly easy to be vocal. What's really lacking is a compelling alternative. The most vocal opposition have made anonymous web sites, have made tons of noise but done very very little in the way of actually solving the problem, many even refuse to acknowledge them.

It's really easy to think it's a civil war of sorts but the reality is it's mostly just a very vocal group that are against it, and FWIW, they don't seem to contribute that much. The BSD world has had it's share of these too, it's just a more dramatic fork when you startup OpenBSD project or NetBSD or DragonFly or one of the more minor forks.

Openness means you get to see the bad as well as the good, the decision. A very vocal group of folks were crapping on GNOME 3 when it came out, now it's good. If you think systemd was contentious, while I love the idea of unifying configurations, just wait until that debate starts... It's probably not possible to represent all of the different things that the "tower of bable" has without a nightmarish XML schema, if it can be done. I welcome the ideas though, especially if FreeBSD get's serious about mobile and power, there will certainly be some interesting stuff.

That was my point: there are well-known limitations to those systems which are the stated reasons for developing systemd in the first place. It's reasonable to disagree about the priorities or the approach which systemd uses but instead pekk instead just pretended that there aren't any unsolved problems.

> You're doing it right here: anyone who disagrees with you is a troll

Here, try filling in the blanks: “[ ] is hard to do with SysV init. I don't like the way systemd does [ ] because [] and prefer the way [] does [] instead"

See the difference?

And that definitely doesn't imply that the poster was a troll. You didn't even address that. That is a personal attack, and is typical of how systemd supporters shout down the opposition.

> Here, try filling in the blanks: “[ ] is hard to do with SysV init. I don't like the way systemd does [ ] because [] and prefer the way [] does [] instead"

> See the difference?

So anyone who criticizes systemd and doesn't fill in those blanks is a troll?

Linux isn't quite in this world in such a dramatic way as the BSDs, but it exists very close to it.

So "choice" isn't some abstract concept that comes later as an afterthought, it's kind of the whole point in a very concrete and literal sense, in a way that other systems do not offer. Naturally you will see people with their workflows based on that, or some indirect form of that. And these people have working systems, no matter how much people wax philosophical and longingly on forums for "missing" features that are irrelevant to people with already working systems.

So from a certain perspective it's a bit weird to see something like a slide here say that such a system needs to address 99% of people. Who says? It's working fine in its niche.

I think there is also a very simple difference of opinion and difference in personality types here, in a way that I don't often see people acknowledge. On one side you have people who crave authority, order, centralization. One component to manage boot and hardware. One UI toolkit. Choice is bad, freedom is slavery. (OK, just joking on that last one.) Then there are people who just happen to like it the other way. I'm glad that some systems don't bring up a GUI until I ask for one, and even then, it can be whatever I say it is. I find it pleasingly simple that the OpenBSD upgrade instructions basically tell you to run tar and patch. These things are an anathema to those whose personality types are more aligned with, say, OS X, but they work well for me.

But I did not want to imply that "decentralization equals less choice". As an example: Android is as centralized as you can get for an open source project. That does not stop people from customizing it to bits, so much that it's barely recognizable as Android anymore. The beauty however is that people can do that without influencing the direction of the original project (although that happens to a limited and uncredited degree), or bitching and moaning about it.

Coming from an OpenBSD background (hey - it's the only OS in the world allowing you run Xorg as an unprivileged user [1]) -- what I'd like to see is an intra-BSD desktop environment based on Google's Material Design guidelines:

http://google.com/design/spec/material-design/introduction.h...

And for ol' times sake, the IRIX® Interactive Desktop User Interface Guidelines:

http://menehune.opt.wfu.edu/Kokua/Irix_6.5.21_doc_cd/usr/sha...

Similar to Quantum OS (Linux):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8645504

--

[1] http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20140223112426

Wait, what?

https://imgur.com/ZrdgN1H

This isn't some custom repo or anything, I'm just running stock Arch and have startx in my bash profile. It runs in user mode, and has for about the last half year.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd/User#Xorg_as_a_...

  Unfortunately, to be able to run xorg in unprivileged mode, it needs to run inside a session. So, right now the handicap of running xorg as user service is that it must be run with root privileges [...snip...] It seems likely that xorg could be modified [...snip...], and then it could run unprivileged from a user service outside a session.