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."

Comments

Groupwise Integration

[grunt107]

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.

KHTML will be obsolete

[Dulimano]

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."

Re:KHTML will be obsolete

[LMCBoy]

No, KHTML will be used in Safari and it'll mature through Safari.

I wouldn't be too sure about this. Think of Apple's WebCore as a fork of KHTML; they are no longer one and the same.

Once the slashdotting subsides, go to the linked article and search for "So what is happening with Safari Patches?" (can't expand the discussion right now; they've gone static to face the /. horde).

Apple has already changed WebCore enough that backporting changes to KHTML is very non-trivial. As usual, we are starved for developers, especially when the task is simply porting someone else's code, rather than solving problems for yourself. Many devs would much rather do the latter, even if "results" come more slowly.

Re:Too Many Toolkits

[be-fan]

applications having the same look-n-feel on Mac OS or Windows,
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 .NET toolkit. Note the flat buttons and .NET combobox.
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?

Re:Big Green Thing?

[Coryoth]

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.