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Interview with Chris Schlaeger from Novell/SUSE
Fabrice Mous writes "At aKademy I had the chance to talk to Chris Schlaeger about SUSE and their relationship with the KDE community, his view of a Linux enterprise desktop and the speed of development of several key features in KDE. Read the interview at the KDE news website."
It's Konqi Konqueror
One of the nicest features in Groupwise was the message tracking. Without setting up back notifications, I could see if the message was received, opened, and/or removed. Then, when someone told their superiors they did not receive a message, I could grab the history and show if it was received and just ingored or removed.
Adding this to Linux is a good improvement.
so why don't all the versions of ms office that look different confuse windows users? Really, only the colours have changed. The shortcuts/etc remain the same. =) And the changes aren't as drastic as Motif to KDE.
Interview with Chris Schlaeger from Novell/SUSE
Interviews Posted by Fabrice Mous on Wednesday 06/Oct/2004, @23:05
from the where-less-toolkits-are-needed dept.
At aKademy I had the chance to talk to Chris Schlaeger about SUSE, its relationship with the KDE community, his view of the Linux enterprise desktop and the speed of development of several key features in KDE (a Dutch translation can be found at Bart&David).
Kolab logo
Chris and Fabrice
Please introduce yourself and explain your role within the KDE project.
My name is Chris Schlaeger and I'm the Vice President of Research and Development SUSE Linux at Novell. I'm a long time KDE developer and I used to be the maintainer of KSysguard and before that I worked on the previous version called KTop and I hacked on kdelibs.
Not long ago Novell acquired two companies that deal with Linux: Ximian and SUSE. While Ximian is a derivative from the GNOME project, SUSE is well known for its support of KDE. How does this all come together?
Better than most people seem to believe. Novell is committed to supporting both GNOME and KDE desktop environments in its Linux desktop. We are fortunate to have acquired a robust set of desktop technologies through our acquisitions of Ximian and SUSE LINUX, giving our customers a considerable amount of choice.
We are working on our next generation Enterprise Desktop currently called Novell Linux Desktop which will feature a KDE desktop as well as a GNOME desktop. In the enterprise market the situation is still very open regarding which desktop will have the greater following. For a Linux provider like Novell it is a great opportunity to offer both desktops to our customers and see where the market is going.
During your presentation at aKademy you mentioned that SUSE offers two product lines now: Novell Linux Desktop and Novell SUSE Linux Personal/Professional. What are the differences between these product lines?
Novell's Linux desktop is currently still under development. We are still offering the SUSE Linux desktop, however this is based on the SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 8 code base, which has now been superseded by version 9 (released in August of this year). This represents our business offering as opposed to our consumer product offering.
They both target very different user groups which have different requirements. We have the old traditional SUSE products which really target the private user who is using Linux at home.
The Personal/Professional versions are consumer products targeted at home users. Users who either want to do very little or very specific work with their PC like writing email, surfing the web, word processing, spreadsheets, printing and the like. For those people we have the Personal version. The Professional version is basically the swiss army knife of Linux. You've got everything in there that we feel is of some interest and benefit to our customers. Both products have a comparatively low purchase price and are therefore very cost effective.
We provide security updates for a period of 2 years for these products which is something customers tend to forget. There is a lot of work that needs to be done to keep the products secure during their lifetime. A new version is released roughly every six months.
However, in the enterprise arena 2 years doesn't cut it as people want 3 or 5 years support at minimum. So for the enterprise customers we created a new product which was called SUSE Linux Desktop. The next version will be a Novell Linux Desktop which will be based on the SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9 code base and combines the best of SUSE LINUX Desktop and Ximian Desktop. It will have a lifetime of around 18months and we guarantee to provide support and maintenance for the product for up to five years. Also the quality assurance is much higher. In an enterprise arena you need to do integration tests to a much higher degree and we test extensively so that we don't inject any side effects when we pr
mirrordot
;)
i whore, therefore i am
#!/usr/bin/english
Important quote:
"Customers that do web application development heavily use DHTML and other special features that Konqueror doesn't handle very well and it is a lot of work to implement this. Although I like KHTML and the architecture quite a bit I am sad to say that probably the Gecko rendering engine will be the dominant one used in the enterprise arena, and as KDE developers we've got to make sure that we can integrate Gecko fairly well into KDE.
So Lars Knoll and Zack Rusin started working on this at aKademy and I was delighted when they put me aside and showed me what they have done in just three days. It is amazing! I think it is the right way to go! It is a bit sad for KHTML and I hope that despite this people will still maintain it as it is a nice lightweight browser. If it would be a purely technical decision, KHTML has the better architecture, but sometimes you need to go the shortest way to get to your target."
applications having the same look-n-feel on Mac OS or Windows,
.NET toolkit. Note the flat buttons and .NET combobox.
In what alternate reality? Windows, in particular, is completely schizo. You've got so many toolkits:
Office XP toolkit. Note the lack of Luna-style buttons.
The Visio toolkit. Note the freaky blue gradient toolbars.
The
Windows Media Player 10 theme.
And here's Luna. Note the distinctive Luna-style buttons and tabbar.
Now, this doesn't count any non-Microsoft apps! Yes, all this schizo-osity is from a single company! Throw iTunes in there, or ephpod, or musicmatch, or AOL (all common apps), and you get even more schizo-osity. Just having GTK+ and Qt is looking pretty good right now, isn't it?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
What linux needs is a window manager thats more scalable. So that 1 guy could have his desktop set up in a *box config and another guy could have his set up in a fully loaded KDE type config, and yet they both use the same toolkits and stuff.
The closest thing to that right now is GNOME and XFCE. GNOME provides your big heavy "provide all the libraries you could need" approach (which is very useful for most people), while XFCE provides a fairly light fast Desktop environment. Both use GTK2, and share a certain amount of configuration.
Yes, XFCE is not as light as a pure *box WM, but then it is actually providing a reasonably rich desktop environment rather than just window management. It is a remarkably fast and light DE all things considered.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
You're mixing two things here. First, Apple has to abide by the restrictive GPL, and they do. However, nowhere does the GPL say you have support the code you borrowed from. If the modified Apple code doesn't work on KDE, tough luck.
The main reason for choosing Gecko is purely practical. The KDE team can concentrate on making a better desktop and not reinventing the wheel. Mozilla has a lot of people working exclusively on the HTML engine, so it's a win-win situation. KHTML's design might be better but the result is that Gecko is the best html engine you can get today (open source or commercial).
Erlang Smorgreff
There are too many toolkits and because of QT being proprietary, Novell has to concentrate on one desktop.
Erm, QT is GPL.. You can fork the GPL QT version, if you so desire.