2018 Desktop Linux Platform Issues
2018-09-29, 10:30–11:00 (UTC), Kuppel

TL;DR: Stop making "Desktop Linux" a moving target by agreeing on a minimal baseline that third-party application can take for granted to exist on each Desktop Linux system.


Will the year of the Linux desktop ever arrive? What can we do to make it happen?
To make "Desktop Linux" a viable platform (as in: Windows, macOS) to develop against, we need to insist on backward compatibility and either need to find the "least common denominator" by experimentation (as we have done for over a decade now), or get the main Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Debian, etc.) to agree on a certain set of infrastructure that can be expected to be "there", in a consistant way, without unnecessary differences.

A guaranteed minimal set of infrastructure (available in the default installation of all distributions) with guaranteed backward compatibility is required for "Desktop Linux" to become viable as a platform.

Theresa is a PhD student and research assistant at the Internet Network Architectures (INET) group at TU Berlin. With a background in telecommunications and computer science, she is doing research in computer networking. Her PhD topic is about how getting information about multiple available access networks from a host perspective, and how to make useful choices between them.