J_K9 @ Linux

Linux Foundation: A Couple of Links

January 29, 2007 on 5:39 pm | In Linux, Desktop Environments & Window Managers |

As you may have heard, the LSB and OSDL merged recently to form the Linux Foundation. There a high hopes that the Linux Foundation will further standardise the main desktop environments and their underlying APIs, package management, and Linux in general. Here are a few links which may give you a better insight into the aims and goals of the Linux Foundation and why standardisation is required (particularly with the desktop environments):

Linux Foundation: Corporate Lackey or Linux Savior? – This is an interview of Jim Zemlin, the Linux Foundation’s executive director. This provides a look into the future of the Linux Foundation and how it will support the growth and development of Linux. It’s well worth the read!
Editor’s Note: Orphaned Desktop Environments — This is an article by Brian Proffitt, the editor of the Linux Today news website, concerning the topic of desktop environment/user interface standardisation and why it is required. Which desktop environment, GNOME or KDE, will get the guillotine? Hopefully neither.

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I personally think standardization is not required. Standards are meant for technologies, not for user interfaces. User interfaces should continue evolving according to the varied tastes of users, not according to what the corporates *think* their users want. Otherwise we’d be in a position pretty similar to Windows.

Let the corporates focus on supporting Linux for their customers first and then think about utopian ideas…

As far as community (non-commercial) Linux is concerned, I think nothing’s going to change and Linux will evolve naturally and not in a single fixed direction.

Comment by hari — January 30, 2007 #
Using Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.1 on Windows 2000
On the other hand, I think that standardisation is required. At the moment, most developers are writing apps for a specific desktop environment using that environment’s default toolkit. This means that if a user of one environment wants to use an app designed for another environment they will have to download all of that environment’s libraries, which is hardly easy on bandwidth and hard drive space. A KDE app usually looks quite bad when run from GNOME and vice-versa, which is an additional downside to the current method of development.

I don’t think that Linux development should be fixed in a single direction - of course not! However, I do think that increased compatibility between KDE and GNOME would help enormously as it would make the UI of most applications more similar and thus less confusing to a new Linux user.

Not only that, but “cross-environment” development should also be less difficult thanks to the APIs which the Portland project will hopefully implement.

I’m also a big fan of the package management project… It must be quite a nuisance for developers to have to compile a specific type of package for each different package management system. And, in the cases in which they can’t be bothered to compile even a single package format of their application (:P) the user is left with a tarballed source code to download and install - and, let’s face it, this is hardly the easiest of things to do, especially for a new user (I remember dependency hell quite well).

In summary, I don’t think that Linux and its applications should be pushed in a single direction, but I do think that a backbone should be created so that all the different branches can be united to work together and yet remain different

Comment by J_K9 — January 31, 2007 #
Using Internet Explorer 6.0 on Windows XP
The problem is that most developers use GNOME or KDE libraries and not the underlying GTK or QT libraries which are much more portable. Ultimately standardization is not in the underlying library, but should be in the technology. E.g. like using XML for UI design and things like that. Not in visual appearances.

Comment by hari — February 2, 2007 #
Using Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.1 on Windows 2000
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Trackback by Ultram. — May 29, 2008 #
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