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!"

Re:We need a new toolkit...

[phok]

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

*cough*Y-Windows [y-windows.org]*cough*

They seem to be working on a widget set to go with their protocol. I agree that this is the way to go. Someone will hack $WIDGET_LIBRARY to use the protocol, and we can unify the look and feel. This is a lot more elegant than hacks like GTK-QT [kde-look.org] because they must all interface to the one widget set to rule them all.

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.

You're right, it is a significantly different approach, but as I said above, this is not completely incompatible with current widgets.

Re:We need a new toolkit...

[be-fan]

Windows cannot do this. It is way to diverse as well. Hell, Microsoft itself uses 3 different toolkits for its major app lines!

Re:X works just fine thank you

[codepunk]

No for dialup and dsl users you pay yes I said pay for a copy of nomachine (go look it up) it makes x efficient even across a modem.

Re:X works just fine thank you

[harikiri]

I agree with the post above. My mum has recently started work as a regional manager of a company based in the US, working from a home office. How does she access her corporate email? Via MS remote desktop.

Due to stupid ISP issues, to get her up and running quickly, we had to get her a pre-paid dialup account. I was seriously worried about whether or not she'd be able to do any work, based on my own experiences running X tunneled over SSH from my work system to my home boxes (and VNC across local networks).

However, I was pleasantly suprised - despite being only on a 33.6k connection, she is able to do all of her correspondence, through outlook, over RDP to a server in the US. Looking back at the latency issues in running X across local networks and over the internet, the Xwindows protocol needs some serious work to be even close to accomplishing the same smoothness.

And all this is coming from a hardened Unix geek like myself. :-P

Re:X works just fine thank you

[codepunk]

Actually I would never deploy straight mozilla we always use firebird for thin client deployments. I cannot say I have been on a even marginal network with 200ms latency. Hell I get better than that off of a cable modem across the internet to nearly any site.

A couple of hints

No screensavers all of them have been removed

No fancy background they have a straight color background to keep refresh rates down.

We currently use kde but are switching to bluecurve because of it's polish.

20 of those clients are wireless and that works
fine as well.

Re:I guess you've never used Mandrake Linux, then?

[jsprat]

SWMBO is "She Who Must Be Obeyed"

You must not be married ;)

Re:Linux will take-off...

[Paul Jakma]

Roaming user profiles controled by logons is also something that Windows does well but Linux doesn't do out of the box.

RedHat Linux (and hence now Fedora) have done this out of the box for *ages*. Run authconfig and you are given a choice of several Network directory systems to use for account information (NIS, LDAP and/or Hesiod), and a choice of several authentication services (LDAP, Kerberos and even SMB). Then run autofs to automatically pick up the appropriate network volumes..

All of this presumes you actually have some kind of directory service in place, which is not trivial to setup be it on windows or unix. On unix one might use the 'directory administrator' GTK LDAP tool to manage user accounts, or the more level (but still graphical and user-friendly) 'gq' GTK LDAP frontend. There used to be a nice GTK kadmin app included with GNOME 1.2 or so, to administer Kerberos, but it appears defunct and dead. (the command line kadmin still works obviously, and can be run from anywhere, kadmin has its own network protocol).

I regularly use a large, global, corporate Unix network. No matter where I go on this network (ie access it from), I can always just sit in front of any arbitrary computer and just login. My home directory and my files are always there, so my browser's config and bookmarks are there, my email client's config files are there, the config files for my desktop are there, my custom background is there, etc.. I log in and its all just there, as it always is and just works the same no matter where I am. Wherever I lay my hat, my /home is already there. (the only downside is that being far from home can mean slightly slow NFS access, but its fine for running a GNOME desktop from, it's more noticeable from the shell.).

I have never seen or even heard of any decently sized Windows network having such transparent and wide-ranging roaming support for its users. Indeed, I suspect the reason windows requires this intricate "roaming user profiles" support and such is because of its idiocy in not confining users to a "home directory".

Anyway, I suspect you never actually have seen a large corporate network, never mind a large Unix or heterogenous network. If ever you do, you'll probably find Linux (and solaris, and IRIX, and ..., but not Windows) does "do it" out of the box, with just a quick twiddle of the RedHat (or other) GUI configuration tool or, for lots of installs, with a few lines in a kickstart config.

The difficult part is, by far, in setting up and administering the infrastructure required, not the clients, unless the clients are Windows.

Compression adds latency

[Moderation abuser]

Most X performance is about latency rather than bandwidth. If you're on a LAN, straight X is a much nicer proposition than the compressed protocols because the latency is lower, imperceptible even.

So, if you're running it over a high latency link like ADSL or god forbid a modem then go for it with the protcol compressors.

Re:Ximian Bails Out

[miguel]

I remember that particular case, because I had the
marketing people calling me on the office.

What happened is that someone had scheduled Nat
without letting Nat or his assistant know about
this particular trip, someone forgot to follow
up and Nat was in Boston when that happened.

Miguel.

Re:We need a new toolkit...

[chewmanfoo]

I've been coding in Qt about as long as I've been coding in Java. If you think Qt is a beautiful API, you really gotta get out more.
Java from Sun is much better.

Try netbeans [netbeans.org]!