Coding The Future Linux Desktop [updated]

the.jedi writes "With the release of GTK+ 2.4, and Gnome 2.6 due out some time next week, it seems of some the Gnome developers are looking at how they'll be coding Gnome and the rest of the Linux desktop. Havoc Pennington of Planet Gnome has written a short blog pondering and analyzing the available options as coders move towards high-level languages like java and C#. He gives a good overview and assessment of technologies like mono, OO.org's UNO framework, as well as other ways of tying new languages to the existing code base. An extremely interesting read for desktop linux hackers everywhere." Update: 03/17 14:44 GMT by T : Speaking of the future of Gnome, aeneas writes with a list of Gnome 2.6 release parties around the world (linked from gnome.org/start/2.5).

Comments

Dump X11

[mrnick]

Step 1 Dump X11
Step 2 Focus on 1 distribution of Linux
Step 3 ???
Step 4 Profit

Truly, the reason that ALL Linux window managers stink is just that, they are not GUIs they are a window manager stuck on top of a GUI that most intelligent people would have to agree stinks! The next problem is that there are a ton of competing window managers and a ton of competing Linux distributions. How the heck is anyone supposed to make commercial products for an operating system that is really 20 different operating systems with 20 different GUIs? Some people will say forget about commercial apps but if people want Linux to ever be more than a hobby OS, at least on the desktop, then this has got to change. Yes OO.o is nearly as good as MS Word but heck I would shell out the $$ for MS Word for Linux if it existed and never look back. I am the first to say that Microsoft as a company is bad and their operating system stinks but I will also stand up and say that Microsoft office (Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint) is the best office suite in existence. Notice I did not include Outlook as I believe it to be a virus distribution program.

It's not impossible to code quality desktops for a *NIX based system. If you want proof of that look at Mac OS X. Thank god they did not try and build it on top of X11. Instead they let you run X11 on top of their GUI. Wow, what a concept.

All these competing distributions just splinter the Linux market into smaller segments. And the smaller market share you distribution has the more likely you are to be left out in the cold when it comes to commercial products. And for ANY freeware program that runs on Linux I can name a better closed source product. For word processing you have MS Word and believe it or not it's better than OO.o. For graphics you have Photoshop and we all know that it is better than GIMP.

Well, I'll step off of my soap box now and let you flame away but at least think about what I am saying BEFORE you become irrational.

Nick Powers

Re:Dump X11

[mrnick]

Well, at least you think so... This was modded down as redundant. I wish people would at least post a response if they are going to mod a post. Slashdot should make that a requirement in fact.

Nick Powers

Re:What happened...

[Bluesman]

>They added support for one more language, to the other ones out there.

But...they haven't. The only languages supported acceptably in the environment are C, C++, and Python. Maybe Perl. Maybe Scheme. I haven't checked lately, but I doubt it. With every API change they make, they break a ton of bindings, and it's tough to keep up. cl-gtk and clg are not up to date at all. Last time I checked, I couldn't compile either on FreeBSD, or run the HelloWorld example on Linux. This was two months ago.

Not to mention, having language bindings to GTK is a far cry from the original idea of having language interoperability through CORBA. With the current development tools, writing a stable "C and Perl" Gnome app is NOT easy. You basically have to extend the C program with run-time dynamic linking, which you can do without Gnome anyway.

Gnome as a development platform is a mess. If they had stuck to the original goal, "switching" to a new language would NOT even be an issue. It would be a matter of replacing components written in one language with another. If there were a proper interface, the language and run-time wouldn't matter.