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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."
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.
I continue to be confused as to where Novell is going here, and I suspect they are confused too. To simplify, if businesses wanted a vendor-supported "kitchen sink", they would already be using ClubMandrake.
Novell needs to make a choice and go forward with one desktop. Some people will express disappointment in the short term but they are likely already Debian or Fedora users anyway who are not actually in the Novell target market.
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...
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.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
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