Harsh Words From Google On Linux Development 948
jeevesbond writes "The alpha version of Google Chrome is now available for GNU/Linux. Google Chrome developer and former Firefox lead Ben Goodger has some problems with the platform though. His complaints range from the lack of a standardised UI toolkit, inconsistencies across applications, the lack of a unified and comprehensive HIG, to GTK not being a very compelling toolkit. With Adobe getting twitchy about the glibc fork and previously describing the various audio systems as welcome to the jungle, is it time to concentrate on consolidation and standardisation in GNU/Linux in general, and the desktop in particular?"
Right (Score:5, Insightful)
'...is it time to concentrate on consolidation and standardisation in GNU/Linux in general, and the desktop in particular?'
Good luck.
Choice (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Um.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Use Qt.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not just use Qt instead? It's LGPL....why people still using GTK?
I don't see anything wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't much give a damn about Adobe being skittish, though. Are they paying Linux core developers?
How is this even a problem? (Score:2, Insightful)
How is that even a problem if there web engine works then make it for several ui toolkits or just pick one. All the work is done it would just be a matter of how its shown. Id rather have something that possibly changes the way its displayed in the future than have nothing and sit around bitching.
Yes! (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes!
(Seriously, linux needs a standard base to work off. The current mess is completely untenable)
Re:Choice (Score:5, Insightful)
Choice, many times becomes really fast synonym of fragmentation and lack of standard. And this is just a bright example. The situation described is 100% conforming to reality, as far as UI kits and sound infrastructure.
Sounds like the strength is also its weakness.
The criticism made is a fair one, and it is only when there are vocal and influential enough developers do people actually stop to pay attention. I am sure there will be many Linux developers who will go on the defensive, but until you are the number one choice for the desktop it is worth listening to what the critics say. Even when you are number on the desktop you should still listen to the critics if you want to stay there. Just look at Windows as an example.
lack of standardised UI toolkit (Score:1, Insightful)
Really?
and I thought Google Chrome was going out of its way to feel as foreign as possible on windows...
Re:Yes! (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think it's for the lack of trying, it's kind of like unifying the world governments, in some ways good, and some ways bad. Everyone has their own preferences and agendas, getting them to unify on anything isn't going to work. It hasn't worked well in the commercial UNIX world, and it looks like it's not going to work for the FOSS UNIX world.
Re:Um.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Linux's greatest strength = greatest weakness (Score:5, Insightful)
Now for the dedicated GNOME/KDE/xfce/whatever volunteer this does not pose much of a problem because your target audience has broadly the same machine makeup as you do, but for a commercial developer looking for a good ROI it quickly becomes untenable. Windows and Mac OS provide a devoloper with a guaranteed stable platform development-wise, and as such are much safer bets.
I agree that the only way Linux can make itself more attractive to commercial desktop program developers is with a mighty amount of consolidation, but the problem is that I don't think it will happen. The great OS wars that went before the dominance of Windows had winners and losers because they were systems of a closed nature, and so if you held with a losing team they closed down because it wasn't economically viable and you had to move to something more mainstream, thus consolidating the market. With Linux a project will never close down as long as someone like it more than something else.
Re:Yes (Score:3, Insightful)
I think Ubuntu implicitly has set the standard. Ubuntu comes standard with GNOME, GNOME uses GTK, GTK is therefore the de facto standard.
The more relevant complaint seems to be that GTK isn't good enough. I agree that Ubuntu and GNOME could do a lot to improve it.
Re:Um.... (Score:3, Insightful)
IMO QT is much better but who cares, its not like if they used the "wrong one" nobody would have been able to use it, qt comes with a gtk theme and qt-gtk-engine (or some such app), im typing this from firefox (gtk) on kde4 (qt). webkit already works well with both, so its just the "chrome" of chrome that needs to be tied to a specific one anyway.
Re:Um.... (Score:2, Insightful)
GNOME has an HIG. What they meant by wanting an HIG they meant they want one flexible enough that Chrome on Linux could look just like Chrome on Windows, which is not going to happen unless they use Microsoft's HIG...
Re:Choice (Score:3, Insightful)
PC vendors are missing a gold opportunity here. They could adopt a GNU/Linux distribution and make it attractive to the masses, just like Apple did with Nextstep. That would really challenge Microsoft and Apple, but require a dedicated software development department, something that many of them don't know how to do or don't want to take the risk at.
Even though it's disappointing, It's not unexpected. They only know how to brand a PC and sell it.
Are there any downsides to choice in this case? (Score:3, Insightful)
Here is the great thing about having dozens of GUI toolkits, multiple libc, and several audio APIs. You only have to choose 1! Every time somebody complains about the "mess" of GUI toolkits, it just comes off as senseless whining. Where are the downsides? There are only 2 major ones, and if you don't have experience in either, just pick one.
The only downside I can think of is that end-users need several GUI toolkits installed, for their multiple programs that use different toolkits, but a) Linux still has a better features/size ratio than any other major OS, and b) Windows and Mac have the same problem (SDL, GTK+, etc, and the dlls have to be included with the binary downloads because Windows/Mac don't have an easy to use package manager).
Re:Yes! (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree that there are too many choices, but I believe that's part of the point of open source solutions.
It's partially the responsibility of the application developers to choose the toolkits and platforms that work best for them, not complain about having too many to choose from.
If companies like Google and Adobe got together in a side meeting and came up with a "standard" they found acceptable, it would create a demand for those platforms and make those toolkits/apps the dominant. Too bad this will never happen...
It's open source, google. Fork it. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd like to see a Goo/Linux distro. In my experience as a user of several of their products, google really does a good job with user interfaces. I bet if they put some effort into a google desktop environment, it'd be pretty darn good.
It could be related to Android, or not, whatever makes sense.
Re:Um.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Unified standards (Score:2, Insightful)
I've been using Kubuntu since December 2006, and it's been my opinion this whole time that the reason Linux isn't catching on is the lack of standards. There are simply too many choices. Granted, choice is good sometimes, but Linux just has too much. It gets confusing. For a new user who doesn't know Linux, simply choosing a distro is overwhelming. That doesn't make Linux very open or friendly to the average person. Not to mention the mess with installing programs. If I want a program that isn't in my repositories, I have to go to the site and hope they have a .deb package that's for my distro, which isn't always the case. At which point I either have to learn how to install from source, attempt to convert an RPM (which isn't always provided, either), or give up and find an alternative.
Every Windows OS has one GUI and one installer/executable format that every Windows program uses. Same with Mac. But Linux gives you at least three GUIs and four or more installer formats, and it's up to you to figure out which one suits you best.
I like Linux. But if it's going to become a serious alternative to Windows or Mac, it needs unified standards. Especially in the desktop environment and package manager. But I just don't see that happening.
and this is different from other platforms... how? (Score:5, Insightful)
My Mac currently has several apps in three different toolkits open; several apps written by Apple itself don't follow standard UI conventions. The Windows situation is even worse: there are several native toolkits there (Win32, MFC, .NET, ...), plus dozens of third party ones. And UI conventions are violated constantly.
The real problem Windows programmers have with Linux is... that it isn't Windows. They start writing some big, ugly, messy Windows application (hello, Firefox), and then they moan and groan when porting it to Linux and usually do a piss-poor job at it too.
Re:Choice (Score:4, Insightful)
PC vendors are missing a gold opportunity here. They could adopt a GNU/Linux distribution and make it attractive to the masses,
And that benefits them... how?
Yes, you're correct, they *could* do that. (If you're just looking for confirmation.) But why would they? What's the business case for it?
it's why Windows took over in the first place (Score:3, Insightful)
At one point, serious computers ran Unix. PCs were just toys, not useful for doing real work with.
But Unix fragmented. You had AIX, HPUX, and around a dozen other different kinds. They all behaved differently, stored things in different places in the filesystem, had different desktop environments.
Windows came along with a single environment and suddenly *that* was the attractive place to develop software.
Fast forward a few decades, and to a 0th order approximation, all apps are written for Windows, and Unix derivatives are dead on the desktop. Ok, there are a handful of slashdotters using Linux in their basements, but from a desktop perspective it essentially doesn't exist. And the software people need to run for real productivity purposes - Autocad, Photoshop, things like that - are all for Windows.
The only way Linux can hope to succeed is to present a unified environment to developers *and* users. Period. Yes, that means the over-complex KDE will have to die. Yes, that means binary compatibility must stop being broken from OS update to OS update. Yes, that means supporting DRM so that users can play their streaming videos from Netflix.
It's simply the arrogance of Linux developers that have crippled Linux adoption.
I'm sure I'll get modded as a troll, but the fact remains that Windows *owns* the desktop, and normal users are happy with it.
Re:Yes. (Score:5, Insightful)
And drop some legacy systems (X comes to mind) along the way.
X is the only GUI* which is pretty much guaranteed to be installed on every Unix and Unix-type system in the modern world. It is to GUIs what ASCII is to text encoding schemes, or what HTML is to markup languages. We're never going to completely get rid of it, and any widely used standard that replaces it is going to have to include it as a subset. You may not like it, but it's relatively simple, its quirks are well understood, and dismissing it as "legacy" isn't going to make it go away.
*Please let's not get into the argument over whether or not X is a "real" GUI because it doesn't include this or that feature of your favorite window manager. It's as silly over the argument over whether MySQL is a "real" DBMS, or Perl / Python / Ruby / scripting language of your choice is a "real" programming language. The answer to all of these is "yes." Now let's move on.
Re:Use Qt.... (Score:3, Insightful)
I can attest Qt is a very fine GUI toolkit with excellent documentation.
Seems like the "not invented here" syndrome rears its ugly head again, otherwise more people would give it a try instead of Gtk.
Re:Just write your own widget toolkit :) (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe they should have just used Xlib/Xt instead and duplicated everything they did for Windows
And then you can cue the hardcore bitching from GNOME *and* KDE.
Re:Um.... (Score:4, Insightful)
So let me ask you this, if Chrome treated each Linux distribution as an OS, would you be happy when Chrome was ported to Ubuntu and not Fedora or SUSE?
Personally I think the whole situation is fubar. There should be three distributions, different-enough to be treated as independent OSes: GNOME, KDE, "Other/Build Your Own".
No, nobody gives a shit what the kernel is-- the OS is the UI, and the UI is the OS. (Think about it: if Apple ported OS X to run on the NT Kernel, would it still be OS X or would it magically turn into Windows?)
Re:Use Qt.... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's been time for YEARS (Score:5, Insightful)
That part in the summary amused me:
It was time ten years ago when Linux was first gaining real momentum in that area. I remember posting Slashdot comments about it and getting told Linux was about "choice" and that if I didn't like it, I should contribute code. Ten years later, even Google is bashing Linux for it. I bet nothing will change even now.
Linux is a server OS, only used on the desktop by enthusiasts. Accept it, because the kind of standardized APIs that are needed are not going to happen with the attitudes that this community has.
Re:Um.... (Score:5, Insightful)
While i'm aware that a HIG should cover more than just the look and feel, it feels like google bends the rules when it comes to interface guidelines.
No two browsers look alike. I happen to like Google Chrome's look and feel. To me, it's way superior to IE's.
While Google Chrome has a unique look, it does not have a totally unique behviour. The X button is still in the corner of the screen, making it easy to find an click. (Aren't you annoyed by apps with no X button or titlebar?)
It accepts all the standard hotkeys. I don't care if an app looks Win32, if it doesn't let me use the hotkeys I've gotten used to.
All in all, I'd say the unique interface isn't disruptive. It might even be intuitive, to anyone that's used lots of Windows programs.
Re:Use Qt.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Ubuntu is the biggest example of what you might consider a "desktop standard" in the wild and crazy Linux world, and Ubuntu uses GNOME and GTK+. It's not surprising Google went with it. It's amusing you asked why people are "still using GTK," as if Qt has somehow surpassed it or rendered it obsolete.
Re:Um.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Being an "Ubuntu user" doesn't make you a GNU user, it makes you a Windows user temporarily using something different either because you thought it would make you cool or because you got mad at your beloved Microsoft and threw a hissy fit.
And people wonder why Linux's desktop share is as small as it is....
Thank fuck the Ubuntu community forums aren't full of arseholes like you. Maybe that's why its market share of Linux pisses over other distros.
Re:RTFA, they did (Score:5, Insightful)
They argue, and I would not say that they are wrong, that GTK+ even so does not give the necessary functionality to allow all the Chrome features.
Like merging the window title with the tab bar? Why do they want a consistent HIG if they break it the first chance they get?
Re:Um.... (Score:5, Insightful)
They certainly did break the windows HIG. Then again, I'm a big fan of standards, and yet I've deliberately broken HIGs when I knew they didn't apply well to a new kind of application. I feel justified in doing that, since I've been around since the basically the dawn of GUIs and been able to slowly watch the standardisation process of most widget types. None of that means that I want to start from scratch on a platform though, without any standard HIG already in place. It's one thing breaking the HIG when necessary. It's quite another if no one has bothered to agree on the HIG necessary for even the most typical apps.
Anyway... google are quite right here, I think. When are Linux standards people going to wake up and realise that ANY good, standardised library is better than two that are both great? Especially in open source, the fact that it's a standard allows people to focus on improving it. The whole point of an API is to have something to target your software to. It's also a standard which can be evolved later, even if the next version is as different as Qt is from GTK+. I don't give a crap if the standard is Qt or GTK+ --- whichever is chosen will eventually gain the features necessary for modern apps --- but SOME standard needs to be set.
Re:Linux needs to stop forking around (Score:3, Insightful)
What's it with all these people thinking that focus is the issue here? There's a theoretically unlimited number of programmers out there in the FOSS world already. The problem isn't focus: if you put the same developers currently active on a smaller number of projects, the development speed will not increase. Heck, it might even slow down, because more people will want to give the bike shed a nice color. And in that sense, the huge amount of forks and pet projects actually speeds up development, because it quickly becomes clear what works and what does not.
Re:Are there any downsides to choice in this case? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with having several GUI toolkits is that then you fragment the user experience. I use GIMP on OS X, and having X11 running makes it a very awkward, sometimes annoying experience - not only do I have to make sure I'm properly in GIMP rather than X11, but all the keys change command button to control button depending on which one you're in. It's really pretty awful, and I expect non-techy users to find it more confusing than I do.
Consistency is important to a user experience. Learning how to complete tasks in an OS is very much like a language skill. When you force people to learn different sets of hot keys, different ways of achieving the same task, then you're burdening them with another language. The only good reason to break away from having a single HIG standard, as far as from the user's perspective, is if you're writing a really novel application where you're trying to provoke a different mindset; writing yet another average GUI toolkit doesn't come close to qualifying.
Why does Linux hate compatibility? (Score:2, Insightful)
And yet Debian Gtk chose to recently arbitrarily rename the glib package, breaking binary compatibility. Why? Who knows? Will they ever fix it? Who knows?
Why does this Linux community have such a deep and abiding hatred of backwards compatibility? Library versions, device drivers, audio systems, hot-plugging, device naming, anything even remotely related to multimedia. This list goes on and on.
Until the Linux community decides to settle on some standards, it will never be ready for the end-user desktop.
Re:It's been time for YEARS (Score:5, Insightful)
Accept it, because the kind of standardized APIs that are needed are not going to happen with the attitudes that this community has.
1986
BYTE: Given that manufacturers haven't wanted to fund the project, who do you think will use the GNU system when it is done?
Stallman: I have no idea, but it is not an important question.
GUI standard is a myth. (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no universal standard GUI toolkit on Windows either. Firefox and Opera use their own. OpenOffice.org uses its own. Even Microsoft Office uses its own. On the Mac, there is even more GUI dissonance. Current Macs make the typical Linux environment look downright uniform.
Why is this always considered a problem on Linux but not on Windows or on the Mac?
If the Chrome developers feel too constrained by GTK, they should have chosen a better toolkit, such as Qt (which, incidentally, is also popular on Windows). They can't blame their own bad choices on Linux. Their gripe sounds like the standard "how dare Linux be different from Windows and make us have to learn something new" whining.
Re:it's why Windows took over in the first place (Score:2, Insightful)
You're forgetting about OS X here.
Won't happen. Period.
What you're saying is along the lines of "The EU will have to die, and all countries will have to become states of the USA". Nice ideal maybe, except for all those people who want to have nothing to do with the american government. And things will go exactly the same way if phrased as "America will have to die, and all countries will have to become members of the EU".
KDE won't die so long there are people interested in working on it. It doens't matter how many people proclaim that it, or Gnome, or whatever else must go in the name of unification.
Even if what you said is the complete undisputable truth, the fact is that in the absence of any effective pressure nobody really gives a damn about what you or anybody else thinks.
two bad decisions in a row made by Google (Score:1, Insightful)
Three excellent paragraphs.
Re:Um.... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want it to be either/or us versus them then you have to make a product that meets ALL of my needs and currently no one does so I use Ubuntu (and previously FreeBSD, Suse, Gentoo, Slackware, or Redhat) when I feel it meets my needs and OSX or Win when they do.
Re:Are there any downsides to choice in this case? (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you smoking some form of new, experimental, highly-potent form of crack? Are you seriously asking this?
It's not an issue of "omg too many choices," it's an issue of lack of standardization. Want to download software you need? Better hope it supports your package system, and better hope it was made for Gnome or GTK or whatever you're using. The messed up patchwork of packages that constitutes sound on linux is an embarassment, and sure, pick 1, then hope the software you downloaded uses it.
Re:It's been time for YEARS (Score:2, Insightful)
In the context of the story, the issue at hand is that Google is being pressured by "the Linux community" to develop a version of their browser "for Linux". If your Debian desktop is different than my Fedora desktop, then we can't both run Chrome. Either Google targets Fedora, or Debian, or OpenBSD, or, or or... That's the "problem" (challenge?) with "developing for Linux." In many instances there isn't a Linux standard. Even different flavors of Linux have different versions of the kernel. If the kernel isn't even standard across distros, how are they supposed to standardize an API across them?
This situation has been going on for as long as I've been using computers. I remember when I was a kid, I had an Apple IIgs and when I visited Egghead, I found a bunch of great games in the IBM section that I couldn't play. Then I finally got a PC, and all of the Apple programs I had didn't work on it. That was in the 1980s. It hasn't changed significantly since then. Even companies that release applications for both platforms (like Adobe) can't manage to standardize the user experience. Sure, you can run Creative Suite on a PC, but I don't know a single graphic designer who does it. They all run it on OSX.
Re:Qt (Score:4, Insightful)
I've read the BS answer, and it is BS.
First off, Qt apps look and operate just fine on Mac and Windows. They don't jump out as looking "foreign" to the platform, where as Chrome on Windows does look extremely foreign in its UI design. This isn't an issue here.
Secondly, Qt provides VASTLY more functionality than GTK, and wouldn't limit what Chrome could do on Windows or Linux. Chrome didn't choose seperate platform codebases to better enable those platforms. The Chrome devs admitted they wrote a very Windows-centric app because they didn't know anything about Linux and coded how they knew how to with what they were familiar with. Again, this reasoning is completely BS.
Lastly, the advantages of cross-platform development not only means no initial time to fork, but it means fewer bugs, less complexity, and the entire life of the project with have a much smaller codebase to manage. Ignoring that major advantage is foolish at best.
Then when you consider how well Qt and Webkit are natively bound, and how well Qt deals with multiple processes and multithreading, it was just plain dumb to not build Chrome on Qt from day 1.
Re:Choice (Score:3, Insightful)
... but until you are the number one choice for the desktop ...
I care that my OS lets my programs share resources effectively and keeps my data safe. Why would I care whether 5%, 25%, or 95% of the other computer users in the world are running the same OS as me or not? It's not at all relevant what "the number one choice for the desktop" is, unless by "the desktop" you mean the computer on my desktop. It's incredibly important that the OS is the #1 choice for my desktop. As for other peoples... I know how different people are. It's a sign of a highly distorted market if any one choice has a majority of the userbase. If there's a goal to be shooting for, it's a world where NO operating system has over 50% of the desktop. Of course, even in such a world, there will still be a "number one choice", one that has 28% when the next most popular only has 24% or something like that. But this fact will be a bit of trivia. There's something wrong in the OS marketplace as long as it remains true that which OS is the #1 choice is something more important than an answer to a geek trivia question.
Re:Why does Linux hate compatibility? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no "Linux community". There is a lot of communities of different sizes, many of which don't give a damn about each other, plus individual developers doing their own thing.
It's like asking, why does the "programming community" keep inventing new languages? Can't we just all settle on C?
There's a guy somewhere working on some project who got really fed up with say, artsd, and decided that writing a successful sound daemon would look good on his resume. And we end up with yet another sound system. And if you come to him complaining about the lack of unification he'll tell you he's doing it on his own time, has X very happy users and doesn't really care about what you think.
Re:Choice (Score:4, Insightful)
Welcome to one of the issues with the service and support model - it needs to be profitable almost from day one, because tomorrow the user might no longer want service and support.
So one of the PC vendors get behind Linux heavily, probably burning a lot of cash in the process. Let's just assume that it's a stunning success, though I have my doubts on that too. What's going to happen? Well all the other PC makers will see it too and also put Linux on their computers. Ok maybe the first one out will have a "brand name" Linux but you know as well as I do that a Gnome desktop or a KDE desktop looks very much the same anyway - if you've first gotten people to use all the Linux apps they'll have no issue using a different distro as long as it too is preinstalled and all the drivers work. Not to mention that most of the rebranded Linuxes have been terrible and most ask "Why not just put plain Ubuntu on it?", but I'm assuming this one would be different. So they're all again selling the same product but the one who broke new ground got very little advantage, little price premium opportunity and thus no return on investment.
Face it, "compete by quality" would in reality have to translate to "educate the masses" to sell Linux. Can you imagine how many zillion phone calls they'd have to take with "I used to do X on Windows, but this 'Linux' you've sold me doesn't work" to really sell Linux? There's a reason the warnings are basicly screaming at you "This is not Windows. This is not a normal computer. If you don't know what Linux is, you don't want this. Are you REALLY, REALLY sure you want to buy a Linux computer?" It's not because they're pro-Microsoft. It's because most people have no idea of the relationship between hardware and OS. To the degree they know anything, they know that there are special Mac boxes, which are different from "normal" boxes - generally while plastic design stuff. If Apple sold a Mac that looked like a PC, people would ask why they can't run Windows apps on it. Seriously. People's understanding of computers is that shallow.
Re:Why does Linux hate compatibility? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure if I want it to be the end-user desktop, I want it to be the
cutting-edge desktop.
As for backwards compatibility, why would you want that
as long as you can just recompile your app towards the new version.
Do you know how many of the bugs/cruft that is in windows comes from trying to be
backwards compatible? There is a reason they finally had it (same with Apple),
and recommends xp in a virtual machine for windows 7 users if they need to run old apps.
Apple had their OS9 emulation layer going on for long but OS X is not backwards compatible
with OS9/8 etc.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's been time for YEARS (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess you have problems. I for one have stopped using Linux and switched back to Windows because I am tired of things not working without hours of hacking and configuring. I want to use on board RAID without pulling my hair out. I know it is not as good as hardware RAID but it still provides redundancy. I am sick and fucking tired of the stupidity of calling it fake raid and refusing to support it. It is not fake, it stripes and mirrors the same as all raid. So it doesn't have all the features and uses some of the cpu resource to run, it is still real raid.
That is just one example of my frustration. Constantly having to use second rate programs because the the GPL is so restrictive and viral that no software vendor wants to deal with it. As much as people spout 'open source' it isn't. It places as hard or harder restrictions on its use as any proprietary software, they are just different restrictions. But it definitely is not open. Not to mention that trying to get consistency in standards is like trying to herd cats.
It is almost like the Linux community is full of spoiled kids who only want to play if they get their own way and will pick up their ball and take it home if they don't. But I guess that is the Asperger in them. Hey and I like Unix systems better than Windows and concede it is way more secure. I programmed C on Unix for years. But being more secure is not the be all and end all. I haven't had an infection on a Windows machine (at home) since 1995. I have had one infection at work (it got the whole dev centre) and it was cleaned up in one morning. How about getting a zeroconf type interface that works so I don't want to gouge my eyes out every time I want to set up a wireless card in Ubuntu or Fedora? And don't forget my real on board RAID. Or the fucking atrocious sound system (there only needs to be one).
I know I'll be modded down for this, but I had to say it. There will never be a year of the Linux desktop. The community can't get it's shit together enough to do it. Servers are easier to build since there are so many less things to build and integrate. And that is probably the only reason Linux as a server is decent... that and big corps like IBM contribute so much they force a consistency on Linux server software. Good night and last one out shut the lights out.
This is also why Linux gaming is substandard (Score:3, Insightful)
I love me some Linux, all my server boxes run it and I do do app and gui work on it, but the last time I tried to port a game to it I just gave up in disgust after hitting the sound stuff. And it wasn't just the sound, it was getting the mouse input, getting gamepad input, and a bunch of other things you don't even think about normally but have to work right to get a game running.
This is why my desktop runs Win7 - I like my games. The Direct X family (including Direct Sound, Direct Input, etc) was possibly the smartest thing Microsoft ever did. Yes, you can get it all working under Linux with enough work, but why bother except as a work of love? I write cross-platform stuff using PyGame now, which works pretty well, but since it's using SDL there are sound issues on Linux (the sound nightmare again).
I'm not sure I have a solution here, just whining. Really, you need a unified API for /everything/ involved in making a game that doesn't care what mouse or sound card or sound drivers or gamepad or video card you're using. And I realize that's a big 'Good Luck With That' with open source. There are cases where a benevolent dictator is better than democracy - as long as they stay benevolent, which is another 'Good Luck'.
Re:Qt (Score:4, Insightful)
First off, Qt apps look and operate just fine on Mac and Windows.
No.
Better than GTK+, definitely. Not "just fine." Not even good. Especially on Mac, where they're extremely weird in many fundamental ways.
Typically, people saying things like this about cross-platform frameworks really have little or no experience designing GUI apps-- they don't have the eye for detail that that job requires, and they literally don't see anything wrong with the QT apps. But find an advanced Mac user, show them two UIs and tell them to pick-out the QT one, they'll get it 100% of the time.
Re:RTFA, they did (Score:5, Insightful)
Consistency in any Windows applications is hard to come by. Running MS Office 2007 or Windows Live Messenger 2009 (and several earlier versions) in Windows XP will show you that. Yes, I realise they were made to look like Vista and 7 and fit in with Vista and 7's interfaces, but that in itself is a terrible crime of design! If they're made to look like Vista and 7, that means they probably aren't using the same code for their appearance. Big waste of resources if you add up every program that ignores the system theme and does it's own thing.
Re:Qt (Score:5, Insightful)
A Qt browser on Windows looks just as native as Firefox, or Opera, or Chrome. Note, every one of those browsers uses a non-standard UI. Qt provides styles to mimic native widgets and can look perfectly native. Chrome wasn't even designed to look native. They are blowing smoke to obfuscate the reality of the situation.
Chrome wouldn't have looked one ounce more "foreign" because of Qt. It looks foreign because they designed it foreign.
Re:Um.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The freedom (free as in liberty) aspect of Linux make that sort of standardization somewhere between extremely difficult and absolutely impossible. Freedom and autonomy are the enemies of standards.
Re:It's been time for YEARS (Score:1, Insightful)
I would hope that all desktop OS's are used by enthusiasts.
And this attitude is exactly why linux remains marginal on the desktop. 99% of computer users do not use a computer because they are "enthusiasts". They use them to get tasks done. Browse the web. Read email. Watch videos. Do research. Run spreadsheets. They aren't "enthusiasts" any more than I am an auto enthusiast because I drive to work each day. The computer is a tool, not an end in itself.
Re:Use Qt.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why not just use Qt instead? It's LGPL....why people still using GTK?
Because MOC sucks ass.
The *one* extra level in stack frames you'll see from metaobjects is peanuts compared to the horrors of all the boilerplate crap you have write out in your source code to support the hackjob OOP we call GObject.
Re:Qt (Score:5, Insightful)
I am a Chromium developer, and if you don't think Qt apps "speak with a foreign accent", especially on Mac, you don't pay close enough attention. It's not an immediate appearance difference, it's the way that subtle details are wrong. By contrast, Chromium appears _very_ different on Windows on the surface, but we go to great lengths to get small details right. Big differences can be accommodated. Small differences drive you crazy.
Also, most of us were Linux developers, not Windows developers, before writing Chromium, so again you are asserting things that are completely wrong.
Re:Um.... (Score:1, Insightful)
GTK isn't as nice as everyone makes it out to be.
Everyone doesn't make it out to be nice. Many people consider it awful-looking, inconsistent junk. So do I and believe that the Qt licensing change is the beginning of the end of GTK and I can't wait until it's buried. I'm also curious to see what sort of spasms Ubuntu will have since no matter what, it will affect the entire Linux community for obvious reasons. On the one hand it uses Gnome but on the other, it tries to bring Linux to the masses and that goal benefits greatly from standardization. So if standardization based on Qt would be within reach, if Ubuntu made the change too, what should and could they do? If Gnome switched to Qt, it is quite likely that it would at first be just as buggy (and poorly redesigned) as KDE 4 compared to KDE 3.5 and by then KDE 4 will probably suck slightly less than it does now. Thus Ubuntu would risk losing a lot of users to Kubuntu. I certainly wouldn't mind that since I use it myself but think that Ubuntu will face a great dilemma.
Re:It's been time for YEARS (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess you never tried Debian.
Re:Are there any downsides to choice in this case? (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason we have so many choices is because....the users and developers want choices. OSS choices exist almost by definition because people are choosing them. To say, "your choice sucks, choose a better one" is ridiculous. Google is showing off the corporate mentality here. If you're not paying the thousands of developers of the toolchains for the major (and minor!) distributions, you don't get to complain about what they're producing. If you want standardization, you don't bitch about it - you make your platform of choice far superior to the other options.
There are choices because they all have something to offer to someone.
Google could *PAY* for a standardized UI in Linux (Score:2, Insightful)
We hear complaints from Google but where's the
resources?
Certainly Google could provide some direction
to one or more of the UI toolkits in Linux
by either joining or helping to set up a standards
consortium.
The only way software can be designed is by setting down
requirements, guiding the development with solid standards,
and actively participating in all levels of the process.
Standing back and saying "Whoa! Linux is a mess there are no standards...etc"
is a bit if a lark. When we recall all the workarounds we still have to do
with other operating systems simply because they don't follow standards,
or disregard them to control the marketplace, there is no difference
in the level of additional work that is required.
So, I spend money using/learning QT or build my own GUI toolkit, or use something stable
and homely like lestif. On the other hand I spend my money on licenses for build tools
on some other operating system. Either way I have to spend time and/or money
to get the job done.
I get the feeling that Google has been hiring too many Microsoft campus
programmers who just can't get their heads around anything outside
directX.
Re:Use Qt.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Factor in the tendency of human beings to make non-rational choices and it makes a lot more sense.
Asinine. (Score:3, Insightful)
Except GTK is so poor that you have Gnome devs calling for a major restructuring, and Mark Shuttleworth of Cannonical/Ubuntu fame calling for Gnome to be built on top of KDE. Ubuntu hitched their wagon to Gnome very early on, and ships broken KDE packages to this day, but I have to wonder if Shuttleworth regrets that decision today.
So this is how the QT people get to feel better about themselves after a horrible major restructuring that made Linus Torvalds of the Linux kernal fame team begrudgingly switch to Gnome even though he hates its approach to UI design. Seriously, your post was asinine. GTK has grown extremely long in the tooth because of the extreme dedication of the group to incrementalism, but that is not a sign of poor design.
So Gnome's 2.0 structure was so bad that it is going to last longer than KDE3's? I also doubt it's going to have the rockey ride that was 4.0/4.1 for KDE users either. After so many years, most software needs reworking. The reason for the outward protests at Gnome is that the developers are absolutely against the KDE4 kind of developement unless it is 100% necessary. If people didn't protest, this kind of reworking would never happen have happened. The original plan for the gnome folks was to have the 2.xx series continue indefinitely.
Re:It's been time for YEARS (Score:5, Insightful)
Er... Why is that a problem again?
Why can't billions of people use computers and technology to improve their lives *without* making their OS choice a matter of philosophy or identity? If they choose for more pragmatic reasons (requirements, price/value, simplicity), why is that a 'problem'?
Most people have only a few things in their life that really matter to them to the point you can call them 'enthusiasts'.
Most people use stamps without collecting them, drive cars without obsessing over engine models, drink wine without knowing merlot from cabernet, enjoy music without playing any instruments, use electricity without having the least idea about their house wiring... There are enthusiasts for everything, but as a matter of practicality (and probably mental health) humans have to pick the few things on which they invest their time and energy.
Fortunately, most enthusiast communities are not so arrogant that they assume everyone must share their interests and obsessions - as some kind of political or religious choice. They're the better for it.
Those who demand their pet interests to be *important* to everyone else demonstrate not just arrogance, but a selfishness that is most likely self-defeating.
Technology has continuously improved the standards of living of billions of people - but the greatest values of each advancement are only reached when they are so omnipresent and require so little training they're taken for granted. Billions of lives are saved/extended when electricity is in every building, when every child is vaccinated, etc. Computers are not different.
As a geek, I would like more people to become tech enthusiasts and share the same interests. But I'd also hope we recognize, considering the richness of the human experience, most people will (and should) care a lot less about the OS on their laptop than about most things in their daily life.
Re:It's been time for YEARS (Score:2, Insightful)
It is fake. There's no RAID on that board. You get no increased performance from it. All you have is a config app in the BIOS. The actual RAID happens in 100% software in the Windows driver for it.
Linux has a software RAID that works just as good, and which will let you assemble the array on another motherboard without any problems.
I must be imagining Red Hat, and Novell, and IBM, and Apple (KHTML is LGPL), and a few other companies.
That's a strange argument. Sure it's open. You can look at it all you want. You can even mess with it all you want. That's open.
Now you can maybe argue that it's not "free" if there are restrictions on it, but that's a different argument.
See, not everybody really wants a year of the Linux desktop. Personally I'm pretty happy with things where they are. If a year of the Linux desktop happens, great, if not, I won't consider it to be a huge deal. I use it because I like it, not because that's what other people use.
Re:Are there any downsides to choice in this case? (Score:3, Insightful)
Will never happen, and that's a good thing. (Score:2, Insightful)
First, the article says nothing of the sort. As usual, the summary is completely off the point.
But to address the summary and the other comments, rather than the article:
The Free OS world (whether you call yours Linux, GNU, GNU/Linux, OpenBSD, NetBSD, OpenSolaris, etc etc) does NOT suffer from a lack of standardization. I've been hearing this for 13 years (people who are in the community longer than me have been hearing it for longer) and I'm sick of it. It wasn't true then and it wasn't true now. We have lots of standards, maybe more than I would prefer. We have standards for a lot of things that other OSes don't.
And we also have a lot of people who choose not to follow them. It's a freedom we have and it's one of the things that makes it so great.
Standard UI toolkit? We had one in the 90s, and it sucked. So people decided to write Qt and GTK+ and we're much better off now. Standard HIG? KDE has one, GNOME has one, and XFCE has one, take your pick. Standards for binary compatibility? Yes we can, and as another commenter mentioned, Skype uses it rather effectively for their crapware.
Now, does all that choice pose a minor problem to proprietary vendors who want to offer non-free, closed-source software in our platform(s)? Yes, it does. However, I don't care. They have a very simple solution: give us the source, and if the product is good, the people who care will help you port. You can provide one, bare-bones port, and the GNOME/XFCE/KDE/portable/etc people will work out the customisation and integration for you. Don't want to give us the source? Then I'm sorry, it's going to be your problem.
Incidentally, this is exactly Google's solution, well, almost exactly. I doubt there's going to be, say, a XFCE port of Chrome, but chances are there will be a XFCE-integration version of Chromium (or an add-on that does it). Everybody wins, nothing to bitch about.
Christ, everybody just shut up about look and feel (Score:5, Insightful)
I am sick to death of hearing developers bitch about "native look and feel". Grow up! Get a fucking life! I couldn't care less how the goddamn app looks COMPARED TO OTHER APPS as long as the look enables the FUNCTIONALITY to be performed correctly.
What matters is that the program does it's job - not that the widgets look the same as some other app on the system.
Christ, what a fucking waste of millions of man hours farting around with bullshit cosmetic issues! Fucking programmers think they're goddamn "artistes" when they can't even get their shit to RUN PROPERLY, NOT CRASH, BE FUCKING USABLE, and BE SECURE!
Shut the fuck up about look and feel and concentrate on making the thing fucking usable, reliable, and secure.
You want to be Picasso, get a fucking paintbrush!
Re:Um.... (Score:3, Insightful)
I have no idea what people mean when they write things like this.
WTF can you not do in Gnome that you want to? What?
Personally, I've absolutely mutilated the interface and re-built it to my liking, and 99% of what I did was accomplished using options in menus. None of it was done in their stupid registry-like thing--in fact, I've only ever used it once, and that was back when they first started using it.
Is there some amazing set of things people can do in other DEs that I'm missing out on?
Re:Qt (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing wrong with being Windows centric. However, I would not count his opinion as objectively fair. The UI is only the tip of the iceberg in Chrome as Windows specific. If they really wanted to make it really a universal application, they could have done so since the beginning. It now feels like versions for OSX and Linux are an afterthought, and the complain about toolkit just an excuse for something they could have done since the beginning.
(as a side note: Google Earth is built with QT already and they work beautifully on Windows as well as Linux)
Standard closed source problem :( (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, tough. Calling for "standardization", uniform GUI and what not is not going to help - different companies would like the standard to match what *they* need and nobody would be happy anyway. Furthermore, I do not see why Linux should change to match the (terrible) development practices on Windows.
The solution is to try to release as much code as open source as possible and let the distro packagers do the integration work for you. Or, if you must keep it proprietary, work with the major distros at least. Their developers will be happy to help - unless one is providing the OS as well, the user will likely need an OS to run the super-proprietary application anyway and it is a win-win situation for both sides. This works a lot better than whining about how terrible Linux is ...
And to answer the poor soul that asserted that Ubuntu is the standard Linux - I am sorry for you. I can as well say that standard way of using a computer means using Windows, making your argument completely irrelevant (number-wise, the Windows desktops dwarfs all Linux installs combined ..). Make yourself a bit better informed next time - Ubuntu is far from standard, it just happens to be popular in US. Not so much in Europe and elsewhere.
Re:It's been time for YEARS (Score:4, Insightful)
The community can't get it's shit together enough to do it.
Well, that's what you get for choosing an anarchic project management style. It's like the FOSS community is just waking up to the fact that it's hard to do something coherent when anyone only does what they want. The forces of the people involved put together are mighty, and produce great tools, but the Linux crowd really is just a mob. They can do a lot together, but they're a mob, not an army.
To further the mob/army analogy, they want to invade the empire of Microsoft. It can't happen, a mob can't do that. Apple has a better shot at it, because of their wise dictator and well-trained army.
Re:Choice (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would you care that only 1% of the other computer users are running Linux too? Well, see, I'm a commercial programmer, and I made a program originally for Windows, and planned to port it to both Mac OS and Linux. While I got over 100 e-mails asking me for the Mac version, I've had 0 for the Linux version.
So I'm not going to port it to Linux, I have no reason to. Apparently the very few Linux users out there are content enough with running my program in Wine... Good for you if you're fine with that.
Re:It's been time for YEARS (Score:1, Insightful)
BYTE: Given that manufacturers haven't wanted to fund the project, who do you think will use the GNU system when it is done?
Stallman: I have no idea, but it is not an important question.
And, 22 years later... the answer is, every person on earth who owns a computer.
Re:Asinine. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know what QuickTime has to do with it but if you mean Qt then I'm afraid all that was a storm in a teacup that was made a big thing of by some fanboys after Linus had made it known that he believed that Gnome had no real functionality. It simply meant that the KDE 4.0 as shipped by Fedora was not usable for him, which isn't surprising since distros were actually told this and they just replaced 3.5.x regardless and then whinged.
Oh please, it is exceptionally poorly designed. GTK was chosen as a knee-jerk response to the whole KDE thing in the 90s to build Gnome on. To this day we still have brain damage like libegg and libsexy and where developers even copy and paste GTK code that they need liberally around their codebase if they want things like toolbars. The only reason there is a HIG is that things such as spacings cannot be inherited by applications. Leave a 12-pixel border between the edge of the window and the nearest controls?! The horizontal spacing between the buttons [on an alert] is 6 pixels?! Give me a fucking break. That's why we have component based programming and inheritance. If you give that to a Windows or OS X developer then he'll piss himself.
KDE bit the bullet when they looked at the proprietary competition and what they were doing in Vista, Windows 7 and OS X. It's a rocky road but it was necessary if anyone was even going to fart in the general direction of an open source desktop.
Why not? It happened for Gnome 2.x.
No. The protests against doing what KDE 4 has done have come about because it's like the elephant in the room - the developers know in the back of their minds that they need to do something if open source desktops and Gnome are to stay relevant when people look at Windows and OS X, but they don't want to do it because the infrastructure is so rotten that it will take them years to build it, years to build a desktop out of it and years to build any applications.
Re:Linux's greatest strength = greatest weakness (Score:3, Insightful)
Every software you buy for Windows will probably run in the next releases. This is important if your not a freeloader or a kid but rather someone who depends on sophisticated software (engineering, etc.) made by third-party experts.
With Linux, just you try. Six months from now, when Ubuntu fucks up their upgrading, everything will brake and you will realize that you live in an ocean of pain. Maybe you like reverse-engineering proprietary software just to get it working, but I do not.
And what you touched on (Score:5, Insightful)
Is that most people who use computers are NOT going to be enthusiasts. They use computers because the computer is a tool. They have something they want done, maybe it is e-mail, maybe it is watching video, maybe it is playing games, maybe it is staring at hampsterdance.com all day, doesn't matter. They have something they wish to do and the computer is the tool to allow them to do it. Thus their concern is getting the variety of tool that allows them to do this with minimal fuss. They aren't interested in technical merits, they aren't interested in becoming "fans". They want the shit to work and get out of the way.
Normal users are not OS "enthusiasts" any more than normal people are hammer "enthusiasts". I really don't give a shit about hammers. I don't are how they are made, I don't care about their design, I don't care about their merits. What I care about is their ability to pound a nail in to what I want. So I'm going to get a hammer that does that well for me. In my case, it is a standard claw hammer, about 1 foot long. I'm not interested in technical arguments as to why I ought to like a sledge hammer better. Yes, there are things a sledge hammer can do mine can't. I don't give a shit, I don't do those things and a sledge hammer is rather heavy and unwieldy. I have the hammer I want, and that's all I want. I'm not an "enthusiast" I'm a user.
So for most people, this is how computers are. For technical people, sure the computer itself can be fun. The process of running the system can be as interesting as anything you might do with it. However technical people aren't most people. Most people just want to d various tasks with the computer, and they want to the computer to not cause them grief as they do said tasks.
Re:GUI standard is a myth. (Score:3, Insightful)
There is no universal standard GUI toolkit on Windows either. Firefox and Opera use their own. OpenOffice.org uses its own. Even Microsoft Office uses its own. On the Mac, there is even more GUI dissonance. Current Macs make the typical Linux environment look downright uniform. ...
I made it until here.
Corporate freeloaders (Score:4, Insightful)
So corporations are complaining that the software that they get for free and use to make truck loads of money isnt exactly what they want.
Ive got an idea, WRITE YOUR OWN DAMNED SOFTWARE, or maybe participate constructively in the community. Dont just complain, do some work yourself on the same terms as the work you received.
"Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no body to be kicked and no soul to be damned?" - Edward Thurlow
Re:It's been time for YEARS (Score:4, Insightful)
The GPL is only viral in the sense that microsoft is viral. If I use MS source code, I am required to release my code to Microsoft under their control and copyright, and am almost certainly an employee.
The GPL grants you additional freedoms on top of this. Viral is just a criticism whiny people use because they want something shiny for free.
If authors of free software want to complain about viral GPL, I can see something of their criticism, but companies are just playing smoke, mirrors, and hypocrite.
You want to talk about proliferation of incompatible free software licenses that's fair, but whining that requiring other people to give back what you used is no sillier or more restrictive than charging $10/unit for others to use your code.
Re:Use Qt.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is one of the many reasons I use KDE. Startup speed (KDE 4.2 vs. GNOME 2.26) is about the same on my Ubuntu jaunty box (about 15 seconds from login), but once the DE is booted, KDE apps are literally several times faster to start than the equivalent GNOME apps. e.g. Amarok starts in 2 seconds, while Rhythmbox (which is throughly inferior anyway) takes about 7. Konqueror starts in another couple of seconds, Arora also takes about 2 seconds, Firefox takes about 8 or 9. Once upon a time it used to be that GTK/GNOME apps started up faster, I don't know how they've buggered that up.
Re:Um.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Qt (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, yes, you would, which is exactly the point. You shouldn't be able to. The UI should look like part of the OS - it should conform to the OS standards, behave in the same way as every other program on the OS, etc etc etc.
Most toolkits don't manage this. Some fail stunningly (see Java/Swing), some are relatively close (QT), none, to my knowledge, are perfect.
So, in answer to your question: yes, "just fine" equates to "indistinguishable from whatever Apple uses". Apple uses the OSX native API, and your app should, in all respects, look like it was built directly with the OSX native API.
Unless it's on Windows, in which case it should be the Win32 API.
Re:Qt (Score:3, Insightful)
Small differences drive you crazy.
BS.
BS, but not complete BS. Small differences drive the highly sensitive *UI designer crazy*. 99.9% of end users (the ones that don't program UIs) don't care at all. I've got a multitude of apps running on my OS X box. The native cocoa ones are iTunes, Mail, Terminal, Preview, and Disk Utility. The best UI, though, is probably firefox. I have a scientific program (motif?) running via X-forwarding. It looks fine. No one is going to sweat the details like how wide the scroll buttons are or an off-shade border around a progress bar. Users just don't care.
Here is what is important to an end-user: making buttons and menu items for common tasks easy to find and quick to execute. The other related important consideration is consistency of keyboard shortcuts. I think Adobe sucked at this for a while. Things like font kerning really don't matter to anyone but UI designers.
Re:It's been time for YEARS (Score:3, Insightful)
> Half of the apps I want to use are GTK, half QT. I don't want to spend the time to try to get them to look similar.
Why bother? The apps are there to get work done, not to work pretty.
Now if those two groups of apps have a need to share data and can't
because one set is from GNOME and the other set is from KDE then that's
another matter.
The multiple toolkits are really nothing worth whining about. These are
GUI apps we're talking about. An arbitrary app from an arbitrary OS or
toolkit should be able to be dropped into any other without any real
bother. That's the whole point of the extra overhead UI to begin with.
The whole GUI concept in general should allow any user to move from OS
to OS with complete ease regardless of whether or not you are talking
entirely separate machines+OS or the same machine.
Re:Um.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit.
That freedom and diversity is why Microsoft can't simply attack and destroy a single competing vendor the way they have so many others.
Re:Um.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Until Jaunty with KDE, the Vista of Ubuntu. Not happy with the amount of work it's going to take to revert THAT.
I run KDE 4 on Jaunty. It is perfectly usable. Indeed there are some rough spots, but there are also compelling improvements. For example, in Kate, the programmer's editor I prefer, you can now change the order of documents in the edit list by drag and drop. A small improvement I use a lot, and now find the lack of it in earlier, tried and true versions, more than a little irritating.
My general impression is, KDE 4 is a few bug reports away from a very slick offering. On the whole, I am productive and happy with it.
Re:It's been time for YEARS (Score:3, Insightful)
Going from Windows to Windows + MacOS grows the possible market by 6-7%. Going from Windows + MacOS to Windows + MacOS + Fedora + Debian grows by... maybe 1% at what kind of cost increase?
That's why the x86 architecture was standardized upon. No one bothers running anything else.
And until that's not a requirement, don't expect much cross-platform development. Make a bed, choose a side... either you want Linux ports of popular programs that otherwise force people to have Windows/OS X boxes in which case there needs to be a closed-source option, or you'll be happy with only F/OSS alternatives.
Both options are valid, they're just mutually exclusive.
Photoshop/Max/Maya/Microsoft Office/Etc. ... even Chrome will not regard opening the source in order to get on Linux anywhere near acceptable cost/benefit.
Re:Um.... (Score:2, Insightful)
The freedom (free as in liberty) aspect of Linux make that sort of standardization somewhere between extremely difficult and absolutely impossible. Freedom and autonomy are the enemies of standards.
I disagree. A good standard is about enabling and informing so that different groups/technologies/interfaces can communicate effectively, not about restricting choice. Unfortunately many organizations don't realize this. All that said the nature of an open system does make it harder than simply declaring a "standard" by fiat but standards will evolve as obvious best practices win out. I think it's slower in the case of Linux for a number of reasons.
1. Some subsystems are immature
2. The user base is restricted so there isn't a monetary driver isn't there to accelerate development of various standards
3. The user base is relatively sophisticated so they put up with a less polished interface that requires tweaking and hacking
4. The broken Patent system (I still don't get how patenting an abstract concept or math makes any sense) blocks some standards and creates barriers to evolution of technology by closing off some paths of competition.
There are probably many more reasons that I haven't thought of but in general my point is I don't think "standards" for Linux are impossible they just aren't subject to immediate drivers and as such they aren't currently a priority (and may never be) but there isn't anything fundamental to an open system that says standards aren't welcome.
Re:Use Qt.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Sounds like KDE modified Qt.
No. Qt has several event loops - it will default to the glib-based one if glib is available at compile time. It will fall back to the generic Unix event loop if glib is not found. You can also disable the glib event loop by setting the environment variable QT_NO_GLIB if you need to - for example debugging is simpler with the generic Unix main loop.
This was developed by Trolltech back in 2006, see here [trolltech.com]. Interesting quote: the ideal would be for all applications on the X11 desktop to use the same event dispatching mechanism. Here are Trolltech, we think the Glib main loop should be that mechanism...
This has the nice side-effect of being able to use gtk and Qt in the same process. This can be convenient at times, for example I have been developing a Qt-based user interface for the mupen64plus emulator. The glib event loop makes it possible to use plugins with gtk interfaces where no Qt interface exists yet. It also makes integrating glib-based things in general pretty much completely painless.
Re:Um.... (Score:5, Insightful)
What I find kind of funny about the whole situation is that absolutely nobody is complaining about making software for Linux, except people who want to make money with their software.
Don't forget that for instance Fedora has thousands of very useful software packages in their repositories, ready to install with a quick 'yum install blah'.
Now comes around Adobe, Google and other bigshots and what do they do? Complain.
I still understand that it might be difficult for them, but I'm just saying.
Re:Um.... (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean if I am a hardware manufacturer it takes just three drivers if I want to support Windows past, present, and future with a binary driver. Four if I want to cover the niches. I just have my developers write a Win98/ME, A win2k/XP, and a Vista/Win7. I add a WinXP64/Vista64 and since Win7 can use Vista drivers I have everything from 1998-2014 completely covered with just four binary drivers and no more out of pocket. There just ain't a way to do that in Linux.
What horseshit. Let me tell you how we "do that in Linux." You release one driver. Just one open driver, and we'll take care of the rest, forever. Not just til 2014 or whatever arbitrary date you're throwing around. Forever. You never have to write another line again.
What's that? You don't want to release an open driver? You want to play the "follow the binary blob" game? Well then go fuck yourself.
Re:Corporate freeloaders (Score:3, Insightful)
So corporations are complaining that the software that they get for free and use to make truck loads of money isnt exactly what they want.
Ive got an idea, WRITE YOUR OWN DAMNED SOFTWARE, or maybe participate constructively in the community. Dont just complain, do some work yourself on the same terms as the work you received.
This is fucked up on so many levels I can't even begin to think on how to reply to it.
Ever since Chrome was released, the constant /. whine in every single Chrome-related news story was "so when will it be released for Linux?!!". Google was aggressively bashed for not writing a cross-platform browser in the first place. Never mind that there's no business case for them doing so, but somehow FOSS'ies think that Google is obligated to do so nevertheless (just to spite Microsoft?).
Now Google has finally decided to do what was asked of them, and port Chrome to Linux (I still wonder what's in it for them). As they were doing so, they've stumbled into some things that made their work harder than it could, and, in all honesty, should have been. They have brought those problems to the attention of the community.
So, what exactly did Google "get for free", and where's the "truck loads of money" from Chrome for them? So far as I can see, it's the other way around - they're indeed "WRITING THEIR OWN DAMNED SOFTWARE", and offering it for free (Free, even - since Chromium is FLOSS) to the community. And you're calling them "corporate freeloaders"? I'm not a Google fan by a long measure, but in this case they're doing the whole OSS thing by the book, so you'd think the community would be grateful for that, and supportive of their efforts. But nah...
You, sir, have a fucked up thought process for sure. What's even more interesting is that someone modded you Insightful.