Short answer: no.

Some old claim chowder

“The great task in front of us over the next two years is to lift the experience of the Linux desktop from something that is stable and robust and not so pretty, into something that is art,” Shuttleworth said to applause from the audience. “Can we not only emulate, but can we blow right past Apple?”

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, maker of Ubuntu, 7/22/2008

5 thoughts on “Short answer: no.”

  1. Don’t bag on him, he just missed by one word: he didn’t mean the next two years but the next two decades…

    1. I thought the one word he missed was “how”, as in “HOW can we not only emulate, but HOW can we blow right past Apple?”

  2. Can we, the Ubuntu people, do that? No. Of course not.

    Could someone make a Linux desktop that was OSX-quality or better?

    Sure.

    But they can’t do it the way they’re all trying to do it, which is by trying to keep X. X is, in plainest terms, bullshit.

    It was a great windowing environment in 1988. It was an acceptable one in 1994. It’s complete shit in 2011 – primarily because it’s not really any different than it was in 1994.

    (Oh, they’ve added things like compositing, which is pretty. But the underlying grot is the same – and nobody in the Free Unix world has the raw power that Apple has to just make a completely new API that is not X* and get people to actually use it.

    This is why they’re doomed, and why the Year Of Linux On The Desktop will always be Next Year.)

    (* Of course, even Apple didn’t make a completely new API as the only thing; OSX never would have gotten anywhere without Classic.

    But I’m not saying the Free Unix people need to prevent people from running X applications; I’m saying they need a new parallel API – and that one simply isn’t plausible from them.)

  3. I really don’t see what X has to do with it. X is very low level, only 0.01% of programs ever directly call an X API.

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