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Interview with Taylor & Pennington from Red Hat
RH-Gimp writes "OSNews has put together a long and informative interview with Havoc Pennington and Owen Taylor from Red Hat. They discuss about the KDE issues, the UI on Red Hat 8.0, the future of the Linux desktop and XFree and other interesting stuff."
Give us back the fucking virtual desktops! (aka viewports)
What the hell were you thinking when you said that "Multiple Desktops" had all the functionality needed, so viewport people were out of luck?
I mean, come on. With viewports, all you needed to do was turn off edgeflipping and you were done. Instead, you rightly say that changing your current code to allow edgeflipping would be a pain in the ass.
It is a shame that OSNews did not question the UI designers about the removal of the taiwanese flag from redhat. It is even more shameful that no one on slashdot cares about it.
The average reader appears to take the stance that "Redhat exists to make money, and if this is what they have to do, then so be it." I find this insulting coming from a movement which is supposedly all about freedom.
It appears that free software is merely all about not paying for software and the downfall of microsoft.
I would tend to agree with you, making interfaces look similar is overall a good thing, particularly when it's only the distribution doing it, not a more central or insidious group.
After all, RedHat is strong because of its popularity, not its monopoly power. If RedHat genuinely ignores consumer interests they will crash in flames. They understand this, so don't think they took the united UI lightly. They must ride the crest of user desires or perish in the process.
The marriage of two UIs was inevitable and will make the KDE vs. GNOME debates more objective. We can stop hearing about how KDE/GNOME "looks" so much nicer and know that soon the market will decide solely on technical merit. We should be excited about this, consistent interfaces may help a WM to win based on its abilities, not the skins it has available...
Now all the other desktop distributions that wants to attract users should also create a unified desktop. The problem is if all the desktop distribs create their own standards, it will create more confusion. What the distribs needs is the committee that actually makes worthwhile decisions like a desktop standard.
Believe it or not, Penn Jillette (yes, that Penn) used to write a column for PC Computing way back when it was a decent magazine. "I Heart My Dog's Head" is still a classic.
Redhat would never put apt-rpm in by default because then why would anyone pay $60/year to get their system updates via up2date? I would gladly pay for up2date if it were $60/user but there is no way I'm paying a $120/year for free software updates on my 2 redhat boxes at home. So I installed apt-rpm on my redhat machines, and gave my $60 to the mandrake club.
For those who browse without sigs
Redhat kowtows to China
And to the moderators--saying something bad about a Linux distributor doesn't automatically make a comment flamebait. Sometimes it's true.
nah - I'd argue that KDE is interested in building a desktop that is well integrated into a number of different OS's - that necessarily means they often need to do stuff themselves so that it works in places other than Linux. Redhat is just one corner of the KDE universe
I really do hate displaying my ignorance like this, but what does this mean? Admittedly, I've never really played with resolution, but as I understood it, if you really wanted to, you could set it up so ctrl-alt-[KP+|KP-] rolled you up or down one resolution level... and at any rate I know that certain apps (eg tuxracer) run at an apparently lower resolution than I usually have... so what exactly is "real resolution changing"? I don't doubt that it's something extraordinarily exciting, I just haven't the foggiest idea what you (or they) mean...
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute chat with the average voter."
--Winston Churchill
I understand where you're coming from with your argument, and in many ways I agree with you. I have a slightly different point of view, however, that might help make the case for continued work on Wine. I know I'm not the only one in this position.
I'm a Linux user (well, a newbie really, but trying and learning fast) who really prefers to work within the Linux environment for many reasons. The problem is that I have work and school requirements that force me to use Windows for some very specific applications.
First is Microsoft Access. Yes, I know, but work dictates that that is what I use for database development. Access is used where I work as a front end to interface with a variety of other databases (Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, Paradox, etc). Whether we like it or not, there just isn't any other software out there that is better at doing the things that Access does well, and therefore I'm stuck with it.
For school I have to have Outlook Express, and until there is a newsgroup reader for Linux that supports Secure Password Authentication (I've tried, believe me. Mozilla's working on it, fortunately.) again, I'm stuck. I can't even begin to tell you how nervous it makes me feel, running Outlook flippin' Express in Windows with all of the rampant virii (is that a word?) out there.
Get those two apps working on Linux under Wine, or replace the functionality they provide with other software, and I'm out of Windows.
we do not need a compatibility layer, we need native apps!
I agree, but until then...
Is the decision to label the Flag of the Republic of China as a bug. Seems wourthy of mention. Read more about it here.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
You totally do not understand the issue. Too much choice is bad for everyone except the people that really love to tweak stuff.
For everyone else, too much choice is bad.
1. It clutters up the interface
2. It complicates the software and introduces bugs, some of which are hard to track down because of the myriad of options available to complicate things.
3. It is extremely confusing.
Choice is not "good period". Choice is good if the options are good.
KDE does have a problem with being too messy. The control center is way too messy. If you like KDE then by all means keep using it, but do not try to call me an idiot for not wanting all the options you like.
BTW: your analogy stinks. Choice about what software to use is good. That is what the analogy works with.
A better analogy is if the cars had big buttons that stated how fast the windows should open or close, or big fat buttons stating what concentration the window cleaning liquid should have. This would be tweakable. Certainly fun for someone but exceptionally bad for the rest.
"Nevermind the fact that if it was too confusing for you to deal with, THEN LEAVE IT ON THE FUCKING DEFAULT BEHAVIOR!!"
This is just insulting. The point is that there are some GOOD options. But how am I going to FIND those options if the interface is cluttered up with loads and loads of crack-options?
You my friend did not understand my point at all. Options DO have costs, which means you have to be careful about what options you give, and what you just decide on.
GNOME will hopefully never be a unification of all the options and features that have ever existed in desktop environments, like "emacs" is for editors.