Year of the Penguin - el Reg's 2011 Linux-land roundup • The Register

Year of the Penguin - el Reg's 2011 Linux-land roundup

This year we have mainly been copying Apple

By Scott Gilbertson • Get more from this author

Posted in Operating Systems, 2nd January 2012 10:00 GMT

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It's been a tumultuous year for the Linux desktop. Anno domini 2011 saw the release of not one, but two major new desktops, the GNOME project's GNOME 3 shell and Ubuntu's rival Unity desktop. By the time most distros hit their stride in 2011, the GNOME 2.x line had been replaced with GNOME 3.

With change comes angst - especially in the open-source community - and the move away from GNOME 2 has certainly had some very vocal critics. To be fair it's never easy when something you rely on day in and day out suddenly changes, and the transition from the more traditional GNOME 2 desktop to the GNOME 3 shell or Unity has been a bumpy ride for many users.

Torvalds: GNOME 3 "an unholy mess"

Fans of the KDE desktop went through this same sort of transition several years ago with the move to KDE 4 and can content themselves with watching the current debate knowingly from afar, but for many GNOME users, 2011 meant re-learning not just how to use the desktop, but what the desktop ought to be.

What's odd about the hubbub over the new desktops is that in many ways both are the result of what critics have been saying Linux needed to do for years - work on its graphic design and create a more polished user interface. GNOME 3 and Unity are the results of many different forces at work, but certainly one of them is to make the Linux desktop experience not just work well, but look good as well.

Of course "look good" is a highly subjective phrase, and certainly not everyone will think either GNOME 3 or Unity delivers. Regardless of what you might think about the look of GNOME or Unity, both do put an undeniable emphasis on design and bring the level of polish in the user interface up to par with what you might find in popular commercial operating systems - for example, Apple.

To say that GNOME 3 and Unity are chasing Apple's tail-lights might be overreaching, but it's tough to deny that both haven't borrowed a few ideas from Cupertino. Whether it's the iOS-style toggle switches that GNOME 3 often uses instead of checkboxes, or Unity's universal menu bar and left-hand window button arrangement, clearly the designers of both find, shall we say, inspiration in Jobsian polish.

At least part of that drive to emulate Apple likely stems from years of arguments from critics of Linux that open source software needed a more appealing interface. Oddly, now that that's ostensibly happened almost no one seems happy. It turns out that while GNOME and Canonical developers may have a case of Apple-envy, Linux users often don't. Not everyone wants to relearn how to use their computer just so Canonical's designers can show off how they think the desktop ought to work.

Any significant change to a core component like the desktop, is bound to bring out some ill will from users, but the GNOME and Unity releases of 2011 have endured some particularly harsh criticism. Penguin daddy Linus Torvalds called GNOME 3 "an unholy mess" and rather publicly announced he was moving to the Xfce desktop.

Next page: A time to panic?