On 22 July at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention there was a call made by Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical-Ubuntu Linux, to improve the presentation layer of Linux to exceed that of Apple’s OS X:
“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?”
As a Mac user and sometimes Linux experimenter, I hope this challenge is taken seriously by the open source developer community and it’s undertaken in such a manor to make the presentation beauty more then skin deep. Having a beautiful desktop and windowing system without improving the functional simplicity of the user interface would be a mistake.
In many ways Microsoft Vista is visually more beautiful then Apples OS X but that beauty doesn’t translate to a great user experience. While often overstated, the Apple Mac saying of “it just works” does have some base in truth.
Linux also needs to adopt the goal of going “It just Works” one better.
Competition between the major desktops is good for all of us. Improvements and innovations have a way of “migrating” across the arena. ;-)
Beauty is only skin deep. Real beauty is what is found beneath the surface. Although many new Linux distributationâs look more and more like Windows their real beauty comes from their functional user environment.
Why do we expect developers tune their Linux creations to look like Windows? The answer is because so many users experience with a PC has been on Windows based systems. We have grown accustomed to the look and feel of Windows based systems, but as you made the Vista implication just because it looks nice doesnât mean it is.
Linuxâs real beauty comes from within. If you want to pursue Linux development as if it was a art form, as it is, I say donât spend too much time worrying about appearance, but concentrate on user experience. I am not implying that the Linux development community is not worrying about the user experience; on the contrary, they are doing a fine job. Let us not get so caught up in appearance that we forget what is important-user experience.