Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Ingo Molnár" in English language version.
The basic failure of the free Linux desktop is that it's, perversely, not free enough. There's been a string of Linux desktop quality problems, specific incidents reported by +Linas Vepstas , +Jon Masters , +Linus Torvalds and others, and reading the related G+ discussions made me aware that many OSS developers don't realize what a deep hole we are in. The desktop Linux suckage we are seeing today - on basically all the major Linux distributions - are the final symptoms of mistakes made 10-20 years ago - the death cries of a platform. Desktop Linux distributions are trying to "own" 20 thousand application packages consisting of over a billion lines of code and have created parallel, mostly closed ecosystems around them. The typical update latency for an app is weeks for security fixes (sometimes months) and months (sometimes years) for major features. They are centrally planned, hierarchical organizations instead of distributed, democratic free societies.
So, to fix desktop Linux we need a radically different software distribution model: less of a cathedral, more of a bazaar. [...] - totally flat package dependencies (i.e. a package update does not forcibly pull in other package updates) [...] - a guaranteed ABI platform going forward (once a package is installed it will never break or require forced updates again). Users want to be free of update pressure from the rest of the system, if they choose to.
Linux distributions mostly use package managers for everything. While this is perceived superior to Windows and the Mac by many Linux enthusiasts, it also creates a number of disadvantages: Centralization [...], Duplication of effort [...], Need to be online [...], No recent apps on mature operating systems [...], No way to use multiple versions in parallel [...], Not easy to move an app from one machine to another [...]. The AppImage format has been created with specific objectives in mind: Be distribution-agnostic [...], Maintain binary compatibility [...]
Linux distributions mostly use package managers for everything. While this is perceived superior to Windows and the Mac by many Linux enthusiasts, it also creates a number of disadvantages: Centralization [...], Duplication of effort [...], Need to be online [...], No recent apps on mature operating systems [...], No way to use multiple versions in parallel [...], Not easy to move an app from one machine to another [...]. The AppImage format has been created with specific objectives in mind: Be distribution-agnostic [...], Maintain binary compatibility [...]
