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Ars Technica Interviews Robert Love

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the getting-to-know dept.

functor writes "Ars Technica has interviewed kernel hacker Robert M. Love of MontaVista/Ximian fame. He covers current and future developments in the Linux kernel and on the desktop, particularly concerning the Linux process scheduler and its enhancements for system responsiveness and also his work toward Project Utopia, an effort to make Linux's device management on the (GNOME) desktop transparent and seamless. (Robert Love is the principal hacker who worked on kernel preemption for the Linux 2.6 kernel.)"

1 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Gnome is more then creating a desktop by nitehorse · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Just a few comments.

    1) KDE, as a project, is not Borg-like. We like to use other technologies when they work, and we use (and/or invent) better ones if the existing things don't work properly. (See CORBA.)

    2) While it's nice to leverage existing technology and architecture, if you make use of too many existing projects it becomes an absolute nightmare to build everything from scratch. Even installing from binary packages is a huge pain - there are literally dozens of packages, and getting the dependency order correct is just insane. Can you tell me off the top of your head which libraries gdk-pixbuf, gtkglarea, ORBit, and libzvt depend on? I didn't think so.

    3) Using all sorts of different projects means that you have different APIs for every library. One of the really nice features of having KDE based on Qt is that Qt provides a very nice, sane, predictable API for all sorts of different things - the same methods are available whenever they make sense. And since all of kdelibs is distributed as one package, and developed as one large package, the entirety of the API is much more cohesive than the ORBit API plus GTK+ plus libxml plus libsoup plus any other independently-developed libraries that you might need to include to get the functionality you need.

    KDE and GNOME are evolving to serve very different markets and that's ok. I'm a KDE developer and I'm excited about everything in Project Utopia, even the GNOME-specific parts, because it gives me a chance to see what they do that I like and what they do that I dislike in their GUI and I have the opportunity to do things differently without duplicating the entirety of the Project Utopia tree. To use a very common analogy, it's much better for someone to reinvent the hubcap on the wheel than to keep reinventing the entire wheel every time.