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

OOoo, first post!

[Trogre]

"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"

No no, not more triple negatives!

We need a new toolkit...

[kcbrown]

I sent this in response to this, but I think it's quite relevant here, too, because it addresses the problem of desktop consistency:

Btw, if you have been following my posts on my blog and on the desktop-devel-list, you will know that my feeling is that all of the existing toolkits today (Gtk, Qt, XUL and VCL) will become obsolete and we need to start looking at the next generation toolkit system.

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

You heard me right. The right way to do a toolkit is to make it networkable in a client/server fashion. There are a few reasons for doing so:

1. Speed over the network. Instead of having to transmit low-level graphics primitives, you now only have to transmit higher-level widget information. This should represent an order of magnitude reduction in the amount of network traffic required. It also means the bandwidth between the code that draws the widget and the code that renders it will likely be as high as possible (a local socket or some such).

2. Consistency. With a client/server widget architecture, all applications running anywhere will have the same look and feel when they're displaying through your widget server. Additionally, changing the theme in use will change the look and feel of all the applications using the widget server (which, ideally, should be all of them).

3. 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.

Do it that way and I think it's likely that you'll finally eliminate the one big problem on the Unix desktop: the disparity in look and feel between applications written for different widget toolkits.

Ximian Bails Out

[geomon]

"A day doesn't go by when I don't talk to a Fortune 1000 customer..."

Not *exactly* true.

We had Nat scheduled to show up and he blew us off. I was left standing in a conference room for nearly 1/2 hour telling participants that I was sorry that Ximian bailed on us.

I had to apologize for their no-show. Not a great feeling.

Guess a national laboratory isn't the market segment Ximian was interested in.

Re:triple negative

[Swamii]

"Erkie gee whizzle guys that's a triple-negative!", shouted the nerdy-looking young fellow. Just then, a pig-skinned covered ball sailed through the air, breaking the glasses of the poor, grammatically-correct soul.