Empathy and the Linux desktop

In answering the question of what killed the Linux desktop? Miguel de Icaza proposes two dimensions: (a) things change too fast, breaking both open source and proprietary software, (b) incompatibility across Linux distributions.

Miguel de Icaza’s claim is a loaded one, because it declares dead something that some question was ever alive, and that for others is still not a settled matter. But the truth is that many developers who ran Linux as their desktop have switched to Mac OSX. Why?

Because the curious thing is that Mac OSX, with all its virtues in terms of usability, hardware integration, and integration with the other devices in its ecosystem, is a trap in terms of freedom, at least as it is understood by many of the more fundamentalist hackers who defend free software (the ones who like to talk about Gnu/Linux, for example).

I think the Linux desktop’s problem has its root in a phenomenon that has to do with empathy, or to put it in more cartoonish terms, that sort of “aspergerization of technology”¹ we fall into in computing. Zero empathy for the user; what matters is the intellectual fun, architecture for architecture’s sake, technology for technology’s sake.

Architecture is about thinking through the environments that human beings will use, and to develop an architecture you need to have a notion of what the human needs are, and one basic need is to have a degree of security and stability, along with the need for the architecture to cover the basics, so that it doesn’t force us to worry about things that should be taken care of.

The key is in these paragraphs of what de Icaza says:

“As for myself, I had fallen in love with the iPhone, so using a Mac on a day-to-day basis was a must. Having been part of the Linux Desktop efforts, I felt a deep guilt for liking OSX and moving a lot of my work to it.

Backwards compatibility, and compatibility across Linux distributions is not a sexy problem. It is not even remotely an interesting problem to solve. Nobody wants to do that work, everyone wants to innovate, and be responsible for the next big feature in Linux.
So Linux was left with idealists that wanted to design the best possible system without having to worry about boring details like support and backwards compatibility.

Meanwhile, you can still run the 2001 Photoshop that came when XP was launched on Windows 8. And you can still run your old OSX apps on Mountain Lion.

Back in February I attended FOSDEM and two of my very dear friends were giggling out of excitement at their plans to roll out a new system that will force many apps to be modified to continue running. They have a beautiful vision to solve a problem that I never knew we had, and that no end user probably cares about, but every Linux desktop user will pay the price.

That day I stopped feeling guilty about my new found love for OSX.”

What Miguel de Icaza is telling us is that the people working on the Linux desktop are not interested in what it costs the end user to make the changes they have to make to their environment, because what they care about is chasing a technological ideal that has little to do with the user’s needs. Empathy: none.