Friedman on Linux Desktop Expectations

An anonymous reader writes "SearchEnterpriseLinux.com is featuring an interview with Novell/Ximian's Nat Friedman on the increasing interest about the Linux desktop. Quote from the interview - "A day doesn't go by when I don't talk to a Fortune 1000 customer from the financial services market, automotives or others that are not looking at dipping their feet into the Linux desktop." And by the way, both Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza's April 12th blog entry have a picture of Miguel and Nat dancing with David Vaskevitch, CTO of Microsoft. Now that's something you don't get to see everyday!"

Comments

Re:We need a new toolkit...

[phok]

If you're going to do a next generation toolkit system, then do it right: start by creating a network protocol for it.

*cough*Y-Windows*cough*

They seem to be working on a widget set to go with their protocol. I agree that this is the way to go. Someone will hack $WIDGET_LIBRARY to use the protocol, and we can unify the look and feel. This is a lot more elegant than hacks like GTK-QT because they must all interface to the one widget set to rule them all.

Abstraction. Because the widgets are implemented on top of a protocol, widget libraries simply have to all talk the same protocol. This means that it doesn't matter what the widget library itself looks like, what language it's implemented in, what object paradigm it uses, or anything else: the look and feel will still be the same. This is markedly different from the current situation with GTK, QT, and all other Unix widget sets, each of which implements its own look and feel. A client/server architecture can, and should, abstract out the look and feel of the widget set.

You're right, it is a significantly different approach, but as I said above, this is not completely incompatible with current widgets.

Re:X works just fine thank you

[harikiri]

I agree with the post above. My mum has recently started work as a regional manager of a company based in the US, working from a home office. How does she access her corporate email? Via MS remote desktop.

Due to stupid ISP issues, to get her up and running quickly, we had to get her a pre-paid dialup account. I was seriously worried about whether or not she'd be able to do any work, based on my own experiences running X tunneled over SSH from my work system to my home boxes (and VNC across local networks).

However, I was pleasantly suprised - despite being only on a 33.6k connection, she is able to do all of her correspondence, through outlook, over RDP to a server in the US. Looking back at the latency issues in running X across local networks and over the internet, the Xwindows protocol needs some serious work to be even close to accomplishing the same smoothness.

And all this is coming from a hardened Unix geek like myself. :-P