Slashdot Mirror
Hackers on Linux's Exciting Desktop Future
Gentu writes "OSNews features two interviews with prominent open source developers: Robert Love started working at Ximian this week and he will be leading the 'effort to improve the Linux desktop experience via kernel development'. In this Q&A, he explains what he will be working on hardware integration, freedesktop.org's D-BUS & HAL, low latency optimizations, power management, X & 3D and a 'Linux answer to WinFS'. The second interview is with Red Hat's Owen Taylor. Owen speaks of GTK+ development and where he sees the project going in the Gnome 3 timeframe: freedesktop.org's new X server, Cairo support, GTK#, OpenGL & other widgets and more."
It seems that there are many here who are flaming any topic that relates to mainstream desktop penetration of Linux.
I thought this was the point of the GNU system? Isn't any step forward (KDE, GNOME, etc.) towards some degree of appealing to users a win for the Freedom of GNU?
Uhh...right...because C has all of those things...
You're 100% right, it doesn't. But the current crop of popular programming languages is almost equally lacking in these regards -- C++'s templates are basically textual substitution, you can't type-constrain template arguments, you just have to see if it works; Java's generics are still in development, but other than that Java's libraries are already a total mess. Since the least common denominator isn't much worse than the best of what's popular, might as well keep the flexibility of C so that we're not tied to a incompatible halfway solution when the right thing finally comes out and is accepted.
Copy&paste is still inconsistent in X and just annoying.
Copy-and-paste is completely consistent in X. As is the selection mechanism. What is inconsistent is the support by toolkits and applications for them. Unfortunately, Gnome and KDE both are to blame here. Instead of supporting X11 conventions, Gnome and KDE are each doing their own thing, mostly like Windows but not quite, and definitely inconsistent with X11.
When I first used Linux and I ran X, my thought was "damn, this is slow." This feeling is echoed by a lot of other people. It's nice to see that a replacement is on the way.
X is not slow--it's as efficient or more efficient as Windows GDI, and it runs rings around Macintosh's Quartz. All of them are, of course, client-server system so there is no particular reason why X should be any slower than the other systems.
What makes X-based desktops slow is the desktop environments themselves. In part, that's because some desktop environments try to emulate graphics primitives in client code that X11 does not support (e.g., transparency, anti-aliasing), and in part it's because they don't take into account the client/server nature of X11. And in part, it's because they are just slow completely independent of any display-related functions (e.g., inter-application communication, huge memory footprints, etc.).
Identifying the bottlenecks correctly matters a great deal: if you are trying to fix Gnome or KDE performance by hacking around in X, you are mostly wasting your time.
The only thing on the X server side that will help a lot is the RENDER extension, because the RENDER extension for X is eliminating the need for Gnome and KDE to emulate graphics primitives client-side.
How does the system know where the binaries are if you put them in application specific directories? This is one of my huge gripes with windows, you can't just type a program name in the run dialog and expect it to open (unless you add each and every program directory to your path). /etc Then I can back it up in one fell swoop. Having it all scattered would blow goats. Having to go to 8 different directories to change configuration files.
I love the fact that I can run any program just by typing it's name. Usually faster than hunting for it in a menu. And its great to have all configuration in