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

Too Many Toolkits

[Dante Shamest]

Linux is plagued by too many toolkits. We've got Tcl/TK, Java, Motif, Athena Widgets or the old X toolkit, GTK, and Qt, and all of them look and feel totally different. Applications written in those toolkits do not follow the same standards and guidelines and are a mess to use. Especially if you have them side by side or you need to use them frequently. - Chris Schlaeger from Novell/SUSE

This has been said many times before, but I have to agree because there hasn't been much improvement in this area.

To an experienced Linux user, multiple applications using different toolkits doesn't pose much of a problem. But for Average-Joe, who is used to most applications having the same look-n-feel on Mac OS or Windows, this is a BIG deal.

We really need some simple standards, e.g. standard shortcuts. But alot of people think this would kill the flexibility of Linux.

Re:Too Many Toolkits

[chez69]

so why don't all the versions of ms office that look different confuse windows users?

Re:Too Many Toolkits

[FooBarWidget]

There aren't many Motif apps left today. The only Motif apps that I know are Netscape 4 and RealPlayer. Netscape 4 is dead; nobody uses it anymore. The latest version of RealPlayer uses GTK 2. 99% of all GTK and QT apps use the same or similar keyboard bindings. Also, inexperienced users are likely to use RedHat/Fedora/Mandrake, which have unified themes, thus making both toolkits look the same.

Re:Too Many Toolkits

[Brandybuck]

One of the more insistant and vocal themes heard in the desktop debate
is that that Unix desktop needs to be like Windows. It is said that
multiple widget toolkits, inconsistant dialogs, and other evidences of
a decentralized development model must be removed before the masses
will accept a Unix destkop. This cry for uniformity can be especially
shrill, almost as if the very survival of a certain free operating
system depended upon it. But is the underlying premise true? Is
Windows really a consistant and uniform desktop?

The answer is resoundingly negative.

While conducting a quick survey of configuration dialogs under
Windows, in an attempt to understand what a newbie user of my software
would be familiar with, I discovered that there was no standard
procedure for these dialogs. Even configuration dialogs from the same
manufacturer varied wildly. By all Slashdot accounts, Windows users
must certainly be mentally damaged from their constant exposure to
such inconsistant interfaces.

Where is the configuration dialog located for a Windows application?
Using the Windows system I use every day at work, I discovered that
even this simple item was highly variable. Microsoft Word had two
configuration dialogs, "Tools->Customize" and "Tools->Options",
while Microsoft Outlook added an additional
"Tools->Services". Microsoft WordPad had only one under a completely
different menu "View->Options". Moving on to non-Microsoft products, I
see that Adobe Reader and Quicktime Player have
"Edit->Preferences". But lest you think those are consistant, Adobe Reader
has a single dialog, while Quicktime Player has a submenu of three
dialogs. Firefox and Roxio Creator Classic follow the WordPad model of
placement.

What about the dialog contents themselves? Microsoft Word has modal
tabbed dialogs, while Microsoft Outlook has a modeless tabbed dialog without
a help button. Adobe Reader and Firefox have modal dialogs using a listbox
instead of tabs to separate the pages. Quicktime Player is similar,
but uses a combobox instead of a listbox. Some of these dialogs had
help buttons while the rest lacked them.

Okay, what about the look and feel? Certainly the Windows platform has
a consistant widget set? Sadly, no. Adobe Reader has an
almost-but-not-quite Win2K look, that matches neither the Windows
Classic nor Luna themes that comes with Windows XP. Roxio Creator
Classic has a "brushed plastic" look with odd splitter
controls. Quicktime player has, of course, a look and feel straight
out of another operating system! Comparing native Microsoft
applications only improves matters slightly. Microsoft Word has a
completely different toolbar style than Microsoft WordPad! I could
continue on to some truly egregious examples of inconsistancy, but
I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.

I think by now that I have thoroughly debunked the notion that the
Windows desktop is uniform and consistant. The question remains
though, is the Unix desktop better? The answer is similarly, "no". But
since Windows isn't consistant, the urgency of the question is clearly
lessoned. Newbies aren't going to be rendered insane by seeing
Evolution running alongside Konqueror. They aren't going to go running
back to Windows when their distro forgot to include Plastik icons with
Mozilla.

Re:Too Many Toolkits

[M. Baranczak]

Mac OS X is a little more consistent, but there are separate Aqua and Brushed Metal styles, with some apps using one style and other apps using the other style.

The differences between Aqua and Brushed Metal are purely cosmetic. The behavior of widgets is the same in both. And the placement of common items is consistent: undo, cut, and paste will always be under the Edit menu, cmd-Q will always quit the application, etc. Which brings me to my next point:

The biggest issue here is not GUI libraries, but application design. For Mac OS, there are well-established standards for interface design, and most developers actually stick to those standards. This is not the case with Linux (Linux is catching up, but it's not quite there.)

Re:Groupwise Integration

[lukewarmfusion]

I like the "yes, you did receive it" part, but it's also nice to have your privacy. I turn off email notifications for just that reason. I've had clients call and ask me why their request wasn't done because they saw that I opened the email yesterday and it should only take a few minutes to do.

People don't always respect your time.

Re:Too Many Toolkits -- only two that matter

[Anonymous Coward]

This statement is silly, the problem does not really exist any more.

Tcl/TK, Motif, Athena Widgets and plain-X-toolkit are not really in common use anymore, atleast not for recent apps. They're out there, it is not like the can be recalled, but who cares?

Java is not a GUI toolkit, he probably means Swing, but there are not alot of Swing apps. Anyways, QT and GTK+ can both have Java interfaces, so unless Sun opens Java, Swing will die too.

So really there are two GUI toolkits, GTK and QT, and that choice is A GOOD THING.

Re:Too Many Toolkits -- only two that matter

[Ars-Fartsica]

So really there are two GUI toolkits, GTK and QT, and that choice is A GOOD THING.

Not if you are planning on rolling out a thousand desktops across an organization to users with potentially no experience outside of Windows. Stop applying Debian rules to the business market.

Re:Dual desktop approach for Novell is silly

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading the interview I got the impression they simply want to have all the options available until the Linux desktop market consolidates. Keep in mind that we are only beginning to see corporate adoption of Linux on the desktop and it is far from clear what changes that will bring and which desktop will come out on top, or even if one desktop will come out on top eventually.

In this situation keeping your options open does seem like a reasonable idea to me.

Re:Too Many Toolkits -- only two that matter

[be-fan]

Then you better recall those thousands of desktops across the organization that are running Windows. Because on your average desktop, you've got a *minimum* of three toolkits (.NET, Office & Luna), and four look & feels (.NET, Office, Luna, Media Player).

Re:No more Suse?

[Proteus]

the teacher refered to Red Hat and Linux as one in the same.

And *that* is part of the reason Linux isn't more popular. Teachers and PHBs who find that RedHat doesn't fit with their business model suddenly discount all distributions. We need to educate these people that part of the benefit of Linux is choice between niche distributions.

His pronunciation of Suse bothered me as he said it like 'Sue-say', where I prefered 'Suzy'.

'SOO-zuh'. If you're following the pronunciation rules of German, that's most likely. A previous client solved the dilemma by using the acronym SLES (SuSE Linux Enterprise Server) pronounced as 'slez'.

You don't even want to know about the d-bee-ann vs deb-e-an fights we got into.

Actually, there is a right way for that. IIRC, the people who first created the distribution named it after Deborah and Ian -- thus Deb-Ian or Debian. Ian is pronounced "ee-an", so it's "deb-ee-an". This is (was?) buried on the Debian website.

Re:Novell/SuSE?

[pete-classic]

This joke is getting awfully tired.

RMS only wants "Linux" systems that use the GNU tools to be called GNU/Linux. He doesn't want, for example, embedded systems that don't use GNU to be called GNU/Linux. He doesn't want the Linux kernel to be called GNU/Linux. He just wants systems that are constructed predominantly from GNU code to be called GNU/Linux.

Linux is great, but we wouldn't get very far without GCC, the binutils, bash, the coreutils (which include chmod, cat, su, ls, tail, and on and on), etc.

Just a little credit where credit is due. This seems reasonable to me.

-Peter

Re:Novell/SuSE?

[pete-classic]

Well, GNU covers Gnome. To my chagrin it seems to be the most popular desktop. Getting X in there would be good, but you can operate without that stuff.

IMO the "OS" is kernel plus the basic tools I mentioned above. So I would want to call the OS GNU/Linux.

-Peter