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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."
At first I criticized Redhat's blending of KDE and Gnome, but now I am beginning to appreciate it. It is adding yet another dimension to Linux on the desktop, and seems to be doing so in the same spirit of creative development that has driven Linux as far as it has come. Maybe having only two choices wasn't enough?
The article states that after many years of "It's not a bug, it's a feature!", real resolution changing has just been added to XFree86's CVS.
About bloody time.
It was really a no brainer that some distribution would finally decide to try to piece together the different UI's, and at least try to make them look similar to one another. Imagine a bathroom with a gold shower head, a chrome drain, and marble knobs. Things look much better when they are in sync. Kudos to RH for finally getting the ball rolling in this area.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
I'm glad they're busy tweaking out a decent interface and making it more readily-usable -- making sure everything's aligned right, implementing an xFree86 that can actually do dynamic resolution changes, sticking to a GUI standard, and so forth.
But if people spent more time working on or with Redhat and less time talking about/flaming it, it would have a lot more commercial success and would serve as a better bulwark against you-know-who.
Kudos to RH for raising the bard ...
...
To KDE, or not to KDE: that is the question:
Whether 'tis GNOMEbler in the mind to suffer
The flames and trolls of outrageous UserInterface,
Or to take arms against a sea of disparate apps,
And by opposing end them? To kill -9: to sleep;
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
RedHat is one of the most important companies involved in getting linux accepted and used outside of its traditional audience, along with IBM and now Sun. I personally like RedHat 8 and wish them coninued good fortune.
Listen, you have to run out and get an exta rpm for playing mp3s. As always you have to download Nvidia drivers and if you have an ATI card I suggest going to the gatos.sourceforge.net and using those drivers. Fonts are an install away from the corefonts sourceforge project and dvd playback requires an ogle download.
I can understand every single bit of this. However, apt-rpm needs to come with the distro.
Also what is the deal with the extras submenu? I understand simplifying the menu structure. The SuSE distro menu is a huge mess with a hundreds of programs organized fairly well but still hard to find and half with no icons in the menu! Still, when a new program is installed the user should have a choice of whether they want it merged into the main or the extras menu (can't they come up with some better frickin' title for the thing?) not very easy for an end user.
Finally they need to be hit by a clue-by-four from of all places with the dipsticks at Lindows. Every desktop OS has at one time or another a compatibility layer to ease users over to its use. Mac OS X has one for old OS 9.2 apps. Windows had one for dos and Win 3.11 apps. We need a compatibility layer that runs Windows apps and it is called Wine. It is time that the distros come together and I mean everyone including the OpenLinux distros, Redhat and Mandrake and figure out how to make Wine as good as it can be without it being completely taken over by codeweavers and transgaming.
A good compatibility layer that works as well as CrossOver Office does right now out of the box with no messing around. Install Redhat, and then install Office 2000 and it just works. This is needed not by me but the newbie easing into Linux use.
It is still going to take a shift in thinking to get Linux to the desktop in any numbers even within IT departments.
Currently the Distro is still seen by too many as simply being the OS layer -- kernel, GNU shell and the GNU utilities.
The Distros need to think of the Linux OS as being made up of three parts as most OSes do --
OS layer -- kernel, GNU shell and GNU utilities.
Compatibility layer -- Wine
GUI layer -- kernel frame buffer support to Xfree86 to finally the desktop
Redhat is almost there and considering how quick the shift in focus came from Redhat they did a pretty good job.
ACK
Why is it freedom only goes on to the point where it offends you, and then it becomes money-grubbing?
Seriously, if you're so all-fired worried about freedom, why not defend the freedom of RedHat to do something which is implicitly allowed in the GPL in the first place, namely adding and removing parts of a program to suit tastes?
I think the reason OSNews didn't bring this up is because either
1) They didn't know
or
2) They knew but didn't care
seems like a safe bet, because I didn't know, and now that I do I don't care.
I do sympathize with you though. It seems pretty spineless, but RH still can't get in anyone's way who wants to implement a retrofit with the Taiwanese flag.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
Fortunately, somebody has managed to emulate most viewport functionalies with workspaces. The only thing that missing (from what I can see) is edge-flipping, but this script provides the infrastructure with which to implement that.
More scripts can be found at the WikiSawfishLibrary .
OLPC Australia
Not everyone who uses Linux thinks that Free Software is a viable moral argument; some of them just use it because it is free-as-in-no-cost, not free-as-in-freedom.
How about right on their MISSION STATEMENT?
http://sources.redhat.com/mission.html
The one where they not only reference "Free Software" MULTIPLE TIMES but include 3 links to the FSF in the space of about 2 paragraphs?
Feel like a fool? You should. On the plus side, you could probably get a job as a Slashdot editor considering the skill you just showed in spouting off without doing any basic double checking to make sure you're right before you post.
The point of distributions is freedom! Noone is restricting you to use one distribution. There is no BEST distribution. It is different for everyone. You should use it if it fits your needs and requirements. If none fits your environment, create your own. This is the freedom given by open source.
I never thought about:
"OWT: A lot of it was misunderstanding, but there are certainly real issues as well. Red Hat is interested in a desktop that is well integrated into the OS. The KDE project is interested in a desktop that is well integrated with itself. These goals don't always completely coincide. "
Now that I think about it this is so true KDE seems to try and do everything itself, gnome apps seem to add onto things while KDE makes its own program for something already there.
"of course thats just my opnion, I could be wrong" --Dennis Miller
-- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
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.
You don't understand free software at all... Free software is about letting the market decide, and if they decide that the removal of the Taiwanese flag from Redhat 8.0 is acceptable then you should know where you stand. Don't assume that market forces will support you just because your story is sad...
The difference between a linux user and a linux sysadmin is that one can only work with one distribution and complains when it's changed, whereas the other is happy to work using any distribution, assuming it has the basic tools.
Just my 2 cents.
And yes, a good sysadmin _can_ still have a preference.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
As a young developer (14), I couldn't agree more. I see a lot of young programmers who don't know what this whole "open-source" thing is all about. This is not a good thing: at the least, they should know about what OSS is and what values it stands for.
I for one, think that the best place to reach out to get OSS rolling past the Juggernaut is to get our young programmers involved. After all, I don't think even Linus can hack from the grave.
Well I'm not gunna even begin to care about the Taiwanese flag until the Texas flag is in there.
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.
They've stopped sucking for a long time now. I don't know what cookie-cutter distro you use, but my Gentoo installed automatically included a TT-bytecode interpeter enabled FreeType and MS Windows fonts. When I got my UXGA laptop, there was initially some problem because the LCD looked best when all fonts were anti-aliased (it has enough resolution that AA text looks sharp rather than blurry) but all I had to do was download FreeType2 CVS, get some nice Postscript fonts, and I ended up with font rendering that whips OS X all over the place and easily matches ClearType.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
we do not need a compatibility layer, we need native apps!
"Every desktop OS has at one time or another a compatibility layer to ease users over to its use. Mac OS X has one for old OS 9.2 apps"
Yea so what's your point? These compatibility layers were for running apps from the previous OS, NOT apps from an entirely different OS! OS 9.2 couldn't run windows apps, and Win 3.1 couldn't run Mac apps. We already have an OS that can run all of the windows apps, it called Windows.
Making wine work perfectly only serves to enforce the Windows monopoly. Do you now want the MS Office monopoly, proprietary file formats and all, to dominate the linux platform? Because that is what your idea leads to.
How is a "compatiblity layer" even a marketing tool?
You: Hey switch to linux you can run all of your old apps.
Customer: But I can already do that now.
You: Yes but you also get to enjoy zero tech support because your running in an unsupported configuration
Customer: runs away
Wine is a crutch that keeps people stuck in the windows world. It's not like I don't understand why you or anyone else wouldn't want to stick with some old app you've been using for years, but the fact remains native apps are better in every way imaginable way.
I look at Open Office when I'm in Redhat 8.0 and think God, I remember using Netscape composer for word processing because there were no gui word processors for linux. It apps like that and Evolution that will over time surpass the very same MS versions you want to bring over. Don't you think that end result is better?
Linux gaining the ability to run all windows apps natively leads to a windows clone, and I didn't switch to linux so that I could use IE, Office and Photoshop.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
- The control center contains an incredibly useful "Information" section that unifies a lot of the info that can only be found on the console with a bunch of different utilities or cat'ing parts of
/proc.
- The incredible integration of konqueror with manpages and infopages (if you haven't tried this, you really ought to, the manpages are much easier to read in a konq window.)
- I haven't tried the gnome-terminal from gnome2, but the kde2 terminal allows multiple terminals from one window, which allows very easy access to those console utils.
KDE can import gtk+ themes quite handily if you like.
- There's a wealth of basic KDE utilities to do OS specific functions like changing password, managing users, and runlevels.
- The power of Konqueror as a file browser. Easy Samba browsing. Automated CD ripping and ogg encoding with drag and drop. Multiple window configurations. Embedded terminals. FTP and web browsing.
- The KPackage program for use with RPM or dpkg/apt.
These are just some of the basic things that KDE2 does to integrate in to the OS (I haven't even tried KDE3 yet). The KDE project just focuses on integrating with itself because they want to have a very well integrated environment. And they've obviously succeeded in that (just look at the programming model for evidence). Sure, they don't go out of their way to integrate with the Gnome folks, but then Gnome isn't doing any better. I think Redhat has a bias towards Gnome (there's a lot of historical evidence of this), and it's on display here. KDE does a good job of integrating with itself, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't integrate with the underlying OS as well."I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I cannot agree more with their stance on the closed-source nVIDIA drivers. Not only their closedness hamper the development of their open counterpart, it slows down their very adoption and resolution of real problems, as opposed to imaginary IP threats.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
Now it is easy to install TrueType Fonts in Linux /usr/share/fonts/ttf and within 30 secornds the Xft2 font engine finds the fonts.
Copy your truetype fonts in
Red Hat 8.0's new consistency is provided using Xft2/Freetype with 'heavy modifications' and the Bluecurve theme. Underneath remember, it's still Gnome 2 and/or KDE.
The world is a big free and happy place. Which means you too can have the Red Hat desktop goodness on your distribution of choice and not have to complain about Taiwanese flags, RPM, additional packages for MP3 playback etc.
I haven't got a hard disc spare to install Red Hat 8.0 on (I'd really like to see it based on all the screenshots), but I do have a couple of Debian systems. Someone could make me a very happy man (and earn some serious karma) by taking the bits that are good about Red Hat 8.0 and making them available in other distributions.
That's how Linux works. Take the bits you like, ignore the bits you don't. Is Bluecurve on Freshmeat's themes section yet?
I don't miss options at all. Page-flipping could be sort of nice, but I'm seriously glad that there is only one choice for workspace/viewports now.
If I had a dime for every time I've heard someone scream about some option being removed from GNOME I'd be rich by now. If everyone was to be satisfied we would be back to the mess that was GNOME 1.4. Instead I have a beautiful, easy to use and clean desktop.
The point is that while an individual outcry for an option might be acceptable to include, including options for everyone will not because everyone wants different options. One thing people never seem to remember is that preferences do have costs. They are not something to just throw in so that everyone is happy. If the GNOME-team starts backing down on option after option then eventually NOONE will be happy because GNOME would be a bloated and unstructured mess.
Unless the requestor has some more insightful arguments about why the option needs to be included other than "this prevents GNOME 2 from being useful" it won't be included, simple as that.
I'd like to quote the questions put forward by Havoc Pennington when someone requested panel configuration:
"For all those options you need to go through these questions:
- why do you want the different behavior
- why would someone _not_ want the different behavior
- if _everyone_ wants the different behavior, we should just switch to it, not make it an option.
-Does everyone want it? Why or why not?
- if there are two different behaviors needed, can the two cases be autodetected? if so let's do that, no need to make the user configure it manually.
- is the reason for wanting or not wanting a minor issue that doesn't matter much? if so, then we should just pick a default, it's not worth a preference."
It's notable that the interviewees admitted that RH is still not ready as a consumer desktop.
Rather, RH is meant to be used by non-technical users on a carefully controlled system, installed by a knowledgeable systems administrator.
A lot of the PR I've read on 8.0 are breathless in proclaiming 8.0 as a Windows replacement, but as RH's own developpers point out, this is not the case.
evanchik.net
Sigh... it always comes back to this. "If Linux doesn't have it, do it yourself!"
Then why bother trying to make normal desktop users, companies, anybody that doesn't program, use Linux? And when they come back and tell you "Umm, I'd like to, but it doesn't have [missing feature], so I can't" you reply with "gee, that's too bad, you fix it".
They didn't miss the boat or anything. Slashdot asks time and time again why Linux isn't being adopted. Then you have to accept to be answered by people that have no skill, time or interest to actually fix it (or money, if there was a commercial alternative running under Linux). It's not like they all see GPL programmers as a bunch of people they can leech free (as in beer) software of, they just gave you the facts. Deal with it.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
One of the interviewees said, "But in general: say you woke up one day and everyone on earth simultaneously agreed to switch from windows/icons/mouse to some new paradigm. It would still take 20 years, trillions of dollars, and be mind-blowingly difficult."
This is more than an understatement. We've been trying to make the metric system switch for more than 20 years and we're still only inches off the starting line.
System/application developers frequently forget this point and underestimate the importance of backward compatibility. Evolution will always win in a war with revolution; even if revolution wins a few of the early battles.