To Improve on What We Have or To Try and Do Better
In a recent interview with Linus Torvalds, he said that the desktop in general is getting to a point of maturity and that at this point, further innovation is not necessary, and therefore people should focus on small improvements to what we already have. To state it bluntly, the desktop is good enough, there is no need for major innovation.
While this sounds crazy at first, he has a point. Right now, most people view the desktop as whatever their desktop looks like right now. When they move to a new operating system that is different, they view that as bad, so there is a real argument that simply polishing the current desktop is the best thing to do. On the other hand, we could have said the same thing before GUIs existed. Most of us (yeah, yeah, I know there are people that still use the terminal for everything) think the GUI is a huge improvement, so what is to say something like that transition cannot be done again?
This issue is a very difficult issue to take a side on. On one hand, the desktop works now and it is very hard to identify specific shortcomings of it, so why change? On the other hand, it seems like an oppertunity to make something that could revolutionize computing is too big an opportunity to just ignore. So what is the right answer? I don’t know, but, luckily, with open-source, it does not matter. Some people will go to work making small improvements to what will happen and others will go to work on a whole new idea for what the desktop is. Proprietary companies will be forced to choose one path or the other and if they choose wrong, they will die, but open-source does not have that problem. Whatever is the right answer, if there is a right answer, open-source will have choosen that path, because open-source never has to take a single path.
