On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 5:47 AM, Dennis Jacobfeuerborn <dennisml at conversis.de> wrote: > I think the problem is that you simply have to draw a distinction > between technology and product. > The rise of the Linux desktop will never happen because Linux is not a > product but a technology and as a result has to be a jack of all trades. I'm unconvinced. True, Chromebooks uses the linux kernel, and thus it qualifies, sorta, as Linux desktop. But this is something analogous to OS X using a FOSS kernel and some other BSD stuff, but the bulk of it is proprietary. Maybe Chrome isn't quite that proprietary, but it's not free either. And Chrome OS definitely is not jack of all trades. What it can run is very narrow in scope right now. > The reason Apple is so successful I believe is because they understood > more than others that people don't care about technology but want one > specific consistent experience. They don't core how the harddisk is > partitioned. > So I can see the rise of the "X desktop" but only if X is willing to > have its own identity an eschew the desire to be compatible with > everything else or cater to both casual users and hard-core admin types. > In other words the "X Desktop" would have to be a very opinionated > product rather than a highly flexible technology. Hmm, well Apple as a pretty good understanding what details are and aren't important to most people. That is, they discriminate. People do care about technologies like disk encryption, but they don't care about the details of how to enable or manage it. Hence we see both iOS and Android enable it by default now. Change the screen lock password, and it also changes the encryption unlock password *while removing* the previous password all in one step. On all conventional Linux distributions, this is beyond confusing and is totally sysadmin territory. I'd call it a bad experience. OK so that's mobile vs desktop, maybe not fair. However, OS X has one button click full disk encryption as opt in post-install (and opt out after). This is done with live conversion. The user can use the computer normally while conversion occurs, they can put the system to sleep, and even reboot it, and will resume conversion when the system comes back up. Decrypt conversion works the same way. They are poised to make full disk encryption a default behavior, without having changed the user experience at all, in the next major release of the software. I don't know whether they'll do it, but there are no technical or usability impediments. Linux distros experience on this front is terrible. Why? Linux OS's don't have a good live conversion implementation (some people have tried this and have hacks, but no distro has adopted this); but Ok the installer could just enable it by default, obviating conversion. But there's no one really looking at the big picture, looking at dozens of packages, how this affects them all from the installer password policy, to Gnome and KDE. You'd need the add user GUI tools to be able to change both user login and encryption passphrase passwords, to keep them in sync, and remove the old one. And currently LUKS has this 8 slot limit, which is probably not a big problem, but might be a sufficient barrier in enough cases that this needs extending. And so on... -- Chris Murphy