Desktop Linux: The Dream Is Dead

[Christopher Browne]

On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 11:04 PM, Howard Gibson <hgibson-MwcKTmeKVNQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>   Is the desktop really dying?
>
>   I accept you can do email on a Blackberry, but can you do serious work on one.  For any kind of documentation, I go looking for the largest screen I can.  This is absolutely necessary for CAD and for spreadsheets.  It is less critical for word processing, although I love having two documents side by side up on my screen.
>
>   How secure is the cloud?  If I want something secure, it goes on _my_ computer, and it stays there.  The application is contained within my computer too.  When I see free stuff offered by servers, I want to know where their revenue stream comes from.

Both of these factors point to the notion that this isn't a strict thing.

-> There's certainly still a place for large screens and keyboards.
-> This doesn't prevent there from also being a place for:
   - Tablets that are fairly large, with a preference for touch-sensitivity
   - Tiny devices (e.g. - mobile phones).

Entertainingly, I just figured out, the other day, that the latest
release of my phone's software (CyanogenMod version 6) at last
natively supports Bluetooth keyboards, with the consequence that I can
hook a fullscale keyboard up to my cell phone.

The screen's still microscopic, but hey, steps ahead are a good thing,
and the story certainly isn't done.
A number of recent Android phones offer HDMI output (Acer Stream, Dell
Streak, HTC Evo, Motorola Droid X, Motorola XT720), which is
promising.  No doubt tablets will have a higher propensity of this.

In the end, it's not clear what one would carry in one's pocket.
  - 32GB of storage isn't outlandish now, but having storage "in the
cloud" isn't outlandish either.
  - GHz of meaningless processor cycles are getting to be available
on-board; connecting to CPU cycles either nearby or afar off, in the
cloud, isn't outlandish.
  - Obviously you can't have a big screen or keyboard in your pocket,
but those are getting to be
    readily connectible.

What you *really* need, when mobile, are the 'keys to the kingdom,'
the pointers to enable access to your data, wherever it may be.
That'll fit trivially onto a 1GB USB stick, so the debate falls all
around "how much more do you want to carry?"  Which bits are necessity
and which are "nice to have" fall into a matter of taste, to a
considerable extent.  I suppose the question is, what needs to be on
the "server in my pocket?"

The amount of storage and CPU horsepower available on mobile phones is
steadily increasing, so there's room for a fair bit of "matter of
taste."

As for "trusting the cloud," that's also, to a degree, a matter of taste.

Entrusting *everything* to The GooglePlex doesn't seem notably wise,
even if one holds to a most optimistic view as to their "corporate
morality."  But in the whole "Web 2.0" realm, we're seeing more and
more applications where responsibility, and hence risk, is
increasingly widely distributed.  Pointing simply at apps on my
Android phone, I have:
a) An application manager (AppBrain) which uses a Google
authentication API, but which seems otherwise separate from them;
b) A weight tracker that uses some XML-RPC-like interface to connect
and sync data to a web framework-based system, again, nothing to do
with Google;
c) An SMS backup system, available in source code form, which happens
to sync my messages into IMAP folders;
d) Twitter's a separate service, obviously;
e) I use "Shuffle" for ToDo list, which syncs against a
Ruby-on-Rails-based web app called Tracks;
f) ThinkingSpace is a diagrammer tool that interoperates with FreeMind
and MindJet, and allows pushing docs "thru the cloud."  Not sure how
much I want to trust the operators of Appspot.com with my data; I'm
not too comfortable with this one...

We may discover that there are only a small fraction of documents or
applications that *truly* need big screens and local storage.  I don't
have a super answer to that yet.
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