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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."
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...
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.
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.
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...