zlacker

>>rbanff+(OP)
Wow, talk about being out of touch with the real world. Developers, especially Linux developers, really need to give up on this whole "Desktop" operating system idea. It's not going to work. It is already dead. And I can hardly believe we are still using these ancient systems for many tasks even today. There is no future in WIMP, and people really need to stop developing these Windows clones already. It was lame 10 years ago. If you are still working on desktop OS clones today, you so are terribly out of touch with the real world there really is no hope for you or your product. Get over it.

Touch-based (and by extension, NUI-based) OS'es and mobile applications are the future. Windows always sucked. Mac OS always sucked. Every desktop OS ever built sucked because it is a horrible way to use a computer. Nobody ever really wanted to use these terrible desktop metaphor systems... they only ever did because they had to.

>>dj2ste+j4
I'm going to go ahead and guess that the people behind Qubes were worrying less about the fact that the desktop paradigm may be fundamentally flawed in terms of usability (not going to argue on that one), but more about security, which is the stated goal of the project. Desktops may be on the way out, but that doesn't mean that we can't do some very basic security work on the heart of the OS. Looking at some of the documentation, it appears that their VM-per-application-group idea could scale very well to touch- and app-based interfaces with some work.

Security has a vital place in every OS, regardless of the skin you put over the top of it.