Slashdot Mirror
Ars Technica Interviews Robert Love
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.)"
...is a bad idea. Who are the users to think their trivial tasks are more important than the kernel's?
I haven't had enough sleep, because that headline came out as "Slashdot Interviews Robot Love". I thought we were going to have the interesting story of the worlds first robot pornstar.
Oh well, back to my deranged little world...
People that believe in their opinions don't post AC.
What the hell are you on about man? KDE does use libraries -- Just not the ones GNOME uses. And here, I see we have yet another mass-manufactured windows hater who says that generic uniformity of interface is a bad thing. Personally, I would rather have all my applications have similar dialogs, etc and be as similar as possible in operation (hence why Windows is actually reasonable sometimes, and why I use KDE) More than that, point out 3 examples of public whining the KDE team has made about GNOME. I haven't seen anything on their website. Meh. People like you make me want to go back to DOS. :D
Project Utopia is going to glue a whole bunch of stuff together. Meanwhile, some of the pieces look interesting.
Is udev ready for use by typical Linux users (as opposed to kernel hackers)? How about sysfs -- that is just part of 2.6 and is completely ready, right? How about D-BUS?
Meanwhile, on a flamefest^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdiscussion about KDE and GNOME, I saw a claim made that "hardly any GNOME applications use Bonobo". Is that true? If it is true, is it changing? (Wasn't a Network Object Model one of the fundamental things about gNOMe?)
I browsed RML's blog, and some of the screenshots look really cool. I'm really looking forward to this stuff.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
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.
I find it always funny that KDE supporters always list re-use of existing libraries as a big minus point of Gnome, as if it is a bad thing to re-use and adopt none-Gnome supporting libraries,
---
It is at once a strength and a weakness. By reusing existing libraries, they gain interoperation and speed up development. However, at the same time, they give up any semblence of a highly architectured, well-integrated platform. KDE has an extremely high level of integration and consistency precisely because the KDE project has an habit of making sure that anything that goes into KDE fits naturally into the desktop. One of GNOME's principle weaknesses is that its usage of external libraries tends to destroy integration within the desktop. In KDE, pretty much everything uses the same text-editing component. You write a text-editor KPart, and it'll work in KMail, KWrite, Kate, KDevelop, etc. In GNOME, pretty much everything uses a different text-editing component. When the Kvim KPart was developed, all of the above mentioned apps automatically got support for editing text with Vim. When Evolution got vim mail-editing support, gedit and anjuta didn't automatically get it. When GNOME's HIG adopted a new Okay/Cancel button order, apps had to change their code to adopt to the new format. In KDE, if the developers wanted to change the button order, they'd change a single line of code in a library!
Now do you think that at KDE they will be glad to get such technology? Oh sure they will take it and probably "adapt" it (like the Borg that is)
---
That really doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Most of Project Utopia is desktop agnostic. Its like the Linux kernel, or glibc. KDE will "adapt it" as much as they "adapt" any other low-level API. They'll write a KDE wrapper for it and be done with it. (Without the KDE wrapper, it'd be C code, and C++ programmers don't want to use C libraries any more than C programmers want to use C++ libraries.) I don't really understand what's so borg-like about using APIs that were meant to be used in the first place?
into there desktop, but for sure the work they will put into it will only benefit KDE
---
Its hardly KDE's fault. They are building a well-integrated platform. They make extensive use of code-sharing because that is good software design, not because of some political reason. Anybody is free to use KDE's technologies, just as much as one is free to use GNOME's technologies. If people don't want to use C++ code, or depend on Qt, that's really their problem. I mean, the GNOME project seems to have no problems spreading the glib dependency all over the place.
Project Utopia
---
Most of this project (udev, hotplug, d-bus, HAL, etc) is not under the GNOME umbrella.
GTK+
---
Qt is there, and has the same number of dependencies as GTK+. And its GPL to boot. What's the problem here?
Freedesktop.org
---------
Freedesktop.org is *not* a GNOME project. None of the freedesktop.org software projects are related to GNOME. Enchant is the closest, because it comes from AbiWord, which has a GNOME version... Hell, KDE has more representation on freedesktop.org than GNOME does, because D-BUS is directly modeled on DCOP, and is a key component for freedesktop.org.
Gstreamer
---
Again, not a GNOME project. It uses glib, but then again, so does aRts! What gives people the idea that these things are GNOME projects?
ATK, Pango
---
These *are* GNOME-related projects, though Pango is more GTK+ related than GNOME-related.
other projects (Xfree86, XFCE4, etc) without making everything it touches Gnome
---
The GNOME project seems to have a tendency to push the idea that all the software it "adopts" is related to GNOME. Key example: many people now think that OpenOffice is a GNOME app, because it is part of "GNOME Office." Its absolutely ridiculous!
one big API
---
KDE actually has a highly modular API. Try developing for it sometime. Its very complete and very consistent, but that doesn't mean
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
not to complain, but I remember one of the first beta lists I ever was on was for the product called "Microsoft Project Utopia" which apparently was the internal code name of the development project later to be released as "Microsoft Bob".
Just thought you'd find this interesting ehhe