MESSAGE
| DATE | 2002-06-12 |
| FROM | David Sugar
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [hangout] I Bid You All Adieu
|
This is a very thoughtful set of suggestions. The question as to who or
where a new and original X based desktop can come from is harder to
answer, but I think it's one that needs to be answered, for as Ruben says,
it's really the only way we can get past the "me too" approach we have
today which is one of catchup, and break new ground in areas that
proprietary desktops of today also cannot follow.
On Wed, 12 Jun 2002, Ruben Safir wrote:
> >
> > The problem is that many desktop environments, and particularly gnome
> > and KDE, seem to attempt to emulate the mechanics and form of the
> > Microsoft Windows desktop, rather than ask the more deeper question of
> > how one can make a better user experiance for the unique nature of X.
>
>
> This is not the problem of just KDE and GNOME, but this is absolutely correct.
> While having a decent filemaner is a relief, the full networkability of
> X is completely being ignored and the problems attempting to be solved are
> precisely wrong because of a failure to ask the right questions about design
> and development.
>
> The Free desktop is clearly a better system than the closed desktops of
> MS and Apple. But it's not being leveraged correctly by either the window
> manager developers, the desktop developers, or the application developers.
> Instead of looking at the problem freshly, and from a revolutionary perspective,
> the application developers are spending far too much time trying to emulate the
> look and feel of MS products. The resulting outcomes are almost predictable. A
> long list of "Free Software Developers" and administrators forever complain that
> the desktop is not "Mature" enough for their use, since our spreadsheets don't
> act like excel, and our word processors don't act like MS Word.
>
> The solution is to start to through out old ideas of desktop usabilty, mostly
> prejudgiced by years of experience with MAC and Windows usage, and to break new
> ground altogether by creating a new class of completely networked X widgets and
> applications. Your example of a desktop link to run a program through X
> remotely is a small example of what can be done. The entire concept of
> remote mounted partitions should just be stopped. Mounting remotely a
> partition is a huge strain on the network and the kernel. Instead, applications
> themselves need to built to be shared all the time, and to be used remotely.
>
> A desktop, for example, might have a configuration file which lists for each
> user a directory service of remote applications which are to be displayed on
> the desktop, controllable by the sysadmin, and automatically set with permisions
> to run them remotely from the desktop.
>
> In terms of a spread sheet, the single biggest thing that can happen with it
> is that it should leverage the Free aspect of the software, and run it directly
> off of a database. This hasn't been done the desktop world because of the
> expense of databases, and the troubles of networking. But in a Free System,
> this should be just built in by default, and a spread sheet widget, network
> aware, should be available in GTK.
>
>
>
> THAT would unlock the power of Free Software for business.
>
>
>
>
>
____________________________
New Yorker Linux Users Scene
Fair Use -
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