[clug] Why isn't Java popular on the Linux Desktop?

[James Ring]

Hey,

On Sat, Jul 11, 2009 at 8:50 PM, Francis James
Whittle<fudje at grapevine.net.au> wrote:
> It's interesting that the argument often comes down to what most
> benefits lazy people.    Fact is that there's a number of projects out
> there that have done a lot of the hard work of enabling cross-platform
> code (GLib springs to mind) so that writing a cross-platform application
> that doesn't rely on a third party virtual machine isn't as painful as
> it might otherwise be.  True that Java has some other advantages like a
> unified toolkit, but that's also provider by, say, wxWidgets.

What do you mean by "lazy"? You mean, people who don't want to worry
about differences between Solaris and Linux or Mac OS X? Where I work,
if we all had to worry about this all the time, we just wouldn't get
any work done. Raising the level of abstraction above the individual
platform frees the developer to discover and solve more interesting
problems and Java (and other languages) do this very well.

> That said, the question was to do with the desktop, and more often that
> not people coding desktop applications for Linux are trying to catch up
> or mimic applications for other platforms written by people who laugh at
> concepts like "cross-platform."  That's where the layer of indirection
> becomes unnecessary - why try to compete with an application that
> already exists on other platforms?

I guess. If you are going to spend x hours writing software, wouldn't
you want to maximise the number of platforms it runs on? Maybe it's
just me. Anyway, there are many problems with targeting Linux as a
platform for desktop applications beyond which language you choose to
write the application in.

Regards,
James