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Interview with Havoc Pennington of Red Hat
JigSaw writes "OSNews published an interview with Havoc Pennington, the head manager of Red Hat's Desktop department, also known for his freedesktop.org initiative and his very active/leading role in Gnome. Havoc discusses the internal changes on Red Hat, the future of the desktop version of Red Hat Linux, the XFree86 fork Xoutert, GTK+ and Gnome while he characteristically says regarding Linux eating UNIX's marketshare: '...nails are firmly in the UNIX coffin, and it's just a matter of time.'"
1986 called, they want their screen shot back.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
What a bunch of useless points.
/etc don't count), we need to be using gconf&scrollkeeper!
> Ditch the Foot/K-gear and replace it with a standard menu button, something like start but better.
Who gives a shit, if it's in the lower left corner.
> Unify font/color configuartion. So when I choose green with arial size 12 on KDE my gtk programs comply too.
That's more making one utility edit both GTK+ and Qt, not GNOME and KDE.
> Common shortcuts. For example, to open a tab on Konqueror you have to press ctrl+shift+n while mozilla and freinds use ctrl+t, Konqueror should switch to ctrl+t!
Yeah, Konqueror should switch its tab shortcut, but it really isn't that important. Now, if they had really easy to configure shortcuts in everything, that'd actually be useful, because then the DISTRO could make it work, which is fine by me.
> Standards for icons/emblems/backgrounds
WTF standard would this be? You mean format? They already both accept all the standard formats. Sizing? It's not like I want all my icons identical size anyway. I want the menu different from the desktop, and that different from the toolbar. And I don't really care if every toolbar is identical.
> Unified help/control system (man and
Why on earth would we use gconf & scrollkeeper? Is it in any way superior to anything else? Not that KDE beats it really. Their help system isn't even searchable from inside of it, because they haven't thought of such Obvious ideas yet.
As far as GOOD help goes, I'd say OpenOffice has the best large help system of any OSS item. And that's not modular. Should they then just write a new help system? Yes. Yes, they should. And it shouldn't suck like their old attempts do.
(On a personal rant-note, the help system should have a quick-loader deamon, so it isn't the slowest loading item in the system. When I want help, I want it now, and their current attempt loads slower than any portion of KOffice, and that is sad.)
> STANDRARD BUTTON ORDER! THIS THE MOST IMPORTANT! And make it easy to switch. People usually say yes or no! Not no or yes in real life.
Standard button order? HTF does that relate to the Desktop Environment? That's IN THE PROGRAMS. It's something that should be done according to Usability Guidelines, and would be fine if ANYBODY thought about it when making their programs. Also, most programs have different button sets.