Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

An Interview with Jeff Waugh

Posted by michael on from the underwear-gnomes dept.

An anonymous reader writes "LinuxWorld has published a nice interview with Jeff Waugh, one of the core members of the GNOME community. In the interview Waugh talks about the upcoming GNOME 2.6, his views on software patents and on the involvement of the big vendors in the GNOME development process. Waugh is the current chair of the GNOME release team."

5 of 183 comments (clear)

  1. KDE and Gnome *do* run side-by-side by jonathanbearak · · Score: 5, Informative

    I don't understand how people keep saying that KDE and Gnome don't work together. They're different environments, but all they're parts are pretty darn interchangeable. A while ago, for the heck of it, I replaced gnome-panel in Session prefs with kicker. Worked perfectly. After reading your post, I called kwin --replace to switch from metacity to kde's wm.

    And OO.org ... that's for running across OS's, not KDE/Gnome. Besides, Native Widget Framework is due for the next major release AFAIK.

    Mozilla ... it uses gtk+ or gtk2, many of which would consider to be (sort of) Gnome. XUL is not a KDE/Gnome issue. Like OO.o, it's another platform issue.

    Gnome and KDE don't need to converge. At this point, they're aiming at different markets. KDE is uber-customizable. Gnome is focusing on KISS usability issues. The important backend stuff is already being taken care of via freedesktop.org.

  2. gnome 2.5 by prockcore · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm using Gnome 2.5 (Subscribed to the 2.5 channel in Red Carpet, automagically upgraded everything for me). I have to say that Nautilus in the 2.5/2.6 branch is amazing.

    How amazing, you ask? It's as fast as gmc used to be. Although it is a little strange to switch back to the old OS9 style Spatial Finder style of file management.

    Things are a little buggy, Nautilus crashes every once in a while, and Evolution sometimes doesn't quit correctly. But in general, the whole desktop is great. Gimp1.3 is super sweet, and finally supports re-editable Text layers (ala photoshop)

  3. The reverse? by Gyan · · Score: 4, Informative

    Waugh: The whole point of the patent system is that they're supposed to be obvious things. But there are a lot of things in computing that are unobvious to a point

    Umm, isn't it the opposite? Only those insights and ideas which are "non-obvious".

    1. Re:The reverse? by jdub! · · Score: 4, Informative

      Yeah, the interview was done in the middle of the linux.conf.au wireless area, with a tape recorder. It seems a fair few things were lost along the way. ;-)

  4. Re:Here is the roadmap by claes · · Score: 4, Informative

    There is more to convergence than just toolkits. It is unfortunate that every comparison between Gnome and KDE always involves comparing toolkits and the differences between them. A desktop is so much more than just the stuff that builds the GUI. Actually, I think we should stop talking about desktop at this point, since the "desktop problem" is more or less solved. I would say both Gnome and KDE have accomplished what was envisioned at the point when the KDE project was started. I say there is a need for a new vision now, something that goes beyond just the simple toolkits on the desktop.

    Convergence can take place in a number of areas. The configuration problem needs to be dealt with. Ideally, all programs should have a common configuration mechanism. Apache, Samba, mail servers, X, drivers etc should be easier to configure. There is a need for a common approach to these problems. This is a major problem to solve, since it needs cooperation and a common vision between all developers, not just the desktop developers.

    Better hardware handling. There is work in progress here, and it is more important than most other things going on in KDE or Gnome.

    Documentation and help systems. Every program should deliver documentation in a way so that can be integrated in a common help system. It should contain relevant metadata, be easily translatable, viewable in different environments. The information about available programs in the system today is scattered: there is information in the package management database, in the man pages, in the doc directory, in the menu hierarchy, but it is loosly coupled and it is not easy to find the documenation given the .desktop entry in the menu directory. I believe the free software community should define a metadata format like the one that freshmeat uses. Every tarball should include descriptions in a common format, and it should be usable in a number of contexts. There is a need for a distributed web of metadata. Today it seems the metadata is centralized in the package repositories and on freshmeat. There is a gap between description of packages and descriptions of the programs they install. Every available application needs good descriptions. Not just "Mozilla" "Web browser". "Konqueror" "Web browser".