The basic failure of the free Linux desktop is that it's, perversely, 
not free enough.

There's been a string of Linux desktop quality problems, specific 
incidents reported by Linas Vepstas , Jon Masters , Linus Torvalds and 
others, and reading the related G+ discussions made me aware that many 
OSS developers don't realize what a deep hole we are in.

The desktop Linux suckage we are seeing today - on basically all the 
major Linux distributions - are the final symptoms of mistakes made 
10-20 years ago - the death cries of a platform.

Desktop Linux distributions are trying to "own" 20 thousand application 
packages consisting of over a billion lines of code and have created 
parallel, mostly closed ecosystems around them. The typical update 
latency for an app is weeks for security fixes (sometimes months) and 
months (sometimes years) for major features. They are centrally planned, 
hierarchical organizations instead of distributed, democratic free 
societies.

What did the (mostly closed source) competition do? It went into the 
exact opposite direction: Apple/iOS and Google/Android consist of around 
a hundred tightly integrated core packages only, managed as a single 
well-focused project. Those are developed and QA-ed with 10 times the 
intensity of the 10,000 packages that Linux distributions control. It is 
a lot easier to QA 10 million lines of code than to QA 1000 million 
lines of code.

To provide variety and utility to users they instead opened up the 
platform to third party apps and made sure this outsourcing process 
works smoothly: most new packages are added with a few days of latency 
(at most a few weeks), app updates are pushed with hours of latency (at 
most a few days) - basically it goes as fast as the application project 
wishes to push it. There's very little practical restrictions on the 
apps - they can enter the marketplace almost automatically.

In contrast to that, for a new package to enter the major Linux desktop 
projects needs many months of needless bureaucracy and often politics.

As a result the iOS and Android platforms were able to grow to hundreds 
of thousands of applications and will probably scale fine beyond a 
million of apps.

(Yes, we all heard of the cases where Apple or Google banned an app. 
Don't listen to what they say but see what they do: there's literally 
hundreds of thousands of apps on both of the big app markets - they are, 
for all practical purposes, free marketplaces from the user's point of 
view.)

The Linux package management method system works reasonably well in the 
enterprise (which is a hierarchical, centrally planned organization in 
most cases), but desktop Linux on the other hand stopped scaling 10 
years ago, at the 1000 packages limit...

Desktop Linux users are, naturally, voting with their feet: they prefer 
an open marketplace over (from their perspective) micro-managed, closed 
and low quality Linux desktop distributions.

And yes, I hear you say "but desktop Linux is free software!". The fact 
is, free software matters to developers and organizations primarily, but 
on the user side, the free code behind Linux desktops is immaterial if 
free software does not deliver benefits such as actual freedom of use.

So, to fix desktop Linux we need a radically different software 
distribution model: less of a cathedral, more of a bazaar. The 
technology for that is arguably non-trivial:

- it would require a safe sandbox enforced both on the kernel and on the 
  user-space side. Today installing a package is an all-or-nothing 
  security proposition on most desktop Linux distributions. Users want to 
  be free to install and run untrusted code.

- totally flat package dependencies (i.e. a package update does not 
  forcibly pull in other package updates - content duplication can be 
  eliminated at a different [for example file system] level).

- a guaranteed ABI platform going forward (once a package is installed 
  it will never break or require forced updates again). Users want to be 
  free of update pressure from the rest of the system, if they choose to.

- a mesh network of bandwidth. Users want to be free of central 
  dependencies.

- a graph of cryptographically strong application reputation and 
  review/trust status, so that different needs of security can be served: 
  a corporate server requires different package credentials as someone 
  trying out a new game on a smartphone. This kind of reputation system 
  allows people to go with the mass (and thus seek protection in numbers), 
  or go with authority (and thus seek protection by delegated expertise) - 
  or a mix of these concepts.

The Android market comes close functionally I think, except the truly 
distributed mesh network and structured reputation architecture, and 
it's not FOSS either, of course.

I see elements of this thinking in the Gnome3 extensions 'market' - but 
it does not really handle security nor does it guarantee a stable 
platform.

Free software has stupidly followed closed source practices 10-15 years 
ago and we never seriously challenged those flawed closed source 
software distribution and platform assumptions. Today closed software 
has taken a leap and FOSS will have to react or go extinct. I think FOSS 
software will eventually react - I think free software is ultimately in 
the position to deliver such software distribution technology.