Mr Carlson On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 10:07 PM, Chris Carlson <cwcarlson@xxxxxxx> wrote: > Mr. Smith, > > I sure hope what you say isn't true. It may seem like it, but from what A few months back the Fedora project officially announced it was bowing out of the Desktop development game :( I was saddened but not surprised and that seemed to be the general concencus in all the blogs I read about the announcement. > I've seen comparing Fedora 9 to RH7.3 (where I used to be), the desktop has I bought RH5 and actually got useful work done on it. By RH 6.x I was switched entirely to LInux and using RH both at work and at home. I agree the desktop has improved by light years since then. There was no way I was converting a novice computer user to Linux using the RH 7.x desktop. By FC3 I was not only converting novice computer users, I was helping out and answering questions from people to whom the words TCP/IP sounded like a jet aircraft LOL. I met a 12 yr old kid who installed Fedora without any help from anybody. Only needed help with a few things, mostly being pointed to the right repositories for example. Fedora has greatly advanced the Linux desktop and for years was the leader in Desktop innovation for the desktop. > improved considerably. Also, since this project is a collaborative effort, > it requires people to focus on the important issues. If you feel that the > desktop is the top issue, then I'd like to suggest you help make it so. > Based on what I've been seeing on the fedora-list, there are gobs and gobs > of bugs that need to be fixed that have nothing to do with the desktop (your > issues with sound are an example). Ah but sound is part of the desktop. There are lots of fundemental pieces of work that need to be done. A better example is the ability to change monitors without reinstalling the OS. That has to be one of the biggest annoynances, especially for single computer owners. No way to SSH in and fix things if you have no other machine to SSH in from and to be honest it's probably easier to reinstall than to get X to recognize a new monitor. Sound on laptops is especially flaky under Fedora. Scanners are poorly supported on Fedora as well and from what I've read Myth TV can be a bear to get working properly under Fedora. Jack audio and Fedora just plain do not get along. The list is long on those areas. I think we have divergent deffinitions of desktop. The general use is an overall desktop experience, not the Gnome vrs KDE vrs any other window manager. Key things I personally feel would be a big help in Linux adoption. Compatability with Windoze specific formats - Here huge progress has been made. Open Office has especially brought the Linux desktop up to speed on this aspect but lots of other projects have helped a great deal as well. Software installation - Here the RPM and deb GUI package managers have turned this from a liability into a major positive for most instlalations. Tarballs scare novice users. Dependency hell that can often accompany a tarball installation scare even long time Linux users LOL. The RPM repositories are still the largest but the .deb repositories are catching up. What is disturbing is how many packages exist only on one or the other and how many are woefully antique on one or the other. Wesnoth for example. No way you install Wesnoth on Fedora from an RPM if you want anything close to the current game or even a working version of Wesnoth. Yet Wesnoth is probably the most advanced and stable game freely availible for Linux. The .deb version is current and installs a full featured and stable version. In both cases the GUI package managers make Windoze installations seem primitive and a pain, where as a few short years ago installations was one of the biggest negatives I got back from new Linux users. > Could it be that individuals are focusing on their pet projects rather than > the desktop? My guess is the average individual working on Fedora is > Linux-savvy and doesn't care about the desktop for themselves, so they put > their efforts into the bugs or features that interest them. Difficult to ask somebody to work on something that does not interest them, especially somebody doing the work for free. It's more an issue of focus and culture. Fedora is populated by old school Nix people, many of whom never really ran windoze for a primary environment. Look back at the tools thread in this group and a surprising number of VI and Emacs users popped up. Few windoze converts would ever touch VI or Emacs. Not since much more user friendly editors have appeared. Though an easy to use console based text editor with standard keyboard shortcuts would be a huge help for Linux adoption. Where I lose many people is trying to walk them through a VI session if something goes wrong with X and they have to edit configuration files or SSH in to a machine which doesn't have X installed. They love the idea of remote administration but VI sends them screaming into the night. The learning curve was too steep for me to ever mess with it. One of the reasons I love Linux is that I spend very little time doing sys admin tasks and almost all my time doing stuff WITH not TOO my computer. No defragging, no virus scanning, no constant roll backs, no registry hacking. I install it, I do updates, every once in a while I add or change something. I run occasional rootkit checks and if my machine behaves oddly in any way I am going through the logs with a fine tooth comb. Windoze is constant work to keep running. Learning VI and or Emacs is memorization of tons of keyboard shortcuts. Sure it might be handy to have but when even the most basic functions are so different than the CDE shortcuts I've used for years it just doesn't make the time expenditure all that worthwhile. The VI/C++ old school nix culture who is quite happy with primitive interfaces and who long ago spent the many hours learning and memorizing the many exotic and often complex user interfaces of Unix is the core culture of Fedora. You see it here in the docs project as my efforts to go into many areas were thwarted as they were considered "extra" when to a novice user, especially a windoze convert these areas are core functionality. Remember most computer users wouldn't know a primary partition from a whole in the ground and have been conditioned by years of M$ propoganda into thinking they shouldn't have too. So the languages supported, the documentation written are old school nix. Joe is probably as close to an easy console text editor you'll find and the UI for Joe is horrible for even someone like me who have used dozens of DOS and Linux text based editors. I wind up limping through enough VI to make simple changes or SSHing the file over to a machine with X for any major changes rather than deal with extended VI sessions. The lack of an easy to use, intuitive fast console based text editor is a weakness of the Linux desktop. Many windoze converts are scared enough of the console. Inflicting VI on them is a great way to send them back to windoze. Lots on this list are comfortable with VI and love it. Nothing wrong with that. It's the lack of empathy for those who are not which best demonstrates the culture that can write off desktop development as secondary. In my opinion it is crucial to the survival of Linux period. More so leaving it purely to Ubuntu is a big mistake. For years Fedora shouldered the main work in desktop development and other distros benefited from this work. Unlike competitors in commercial markets Fedora and Ubuntu can and should work closely together to augment their desktop and other areas of development. Right now I see little to no direct sharing between most distros. Especially the Debian world which seems an island all too itself. To yank out VI would gall many on this list as much as I and others have been galled by the lack of empathy for those who are comfortable with CDE and UIs that are close to CDE. I had to learn almost nothing to use Kedit or Gambas or a host of other Linux apps. This meant I spent my time doing stuff with the apps instead of spending time learning how to use them. A VB/QB drop in can still be a huge conversion tool and Gambas is perfect for that. The language wars have lingered on since the FIDO days. There is no room for such arrogance if we want to further Linux. Support both. Add Gambas to the standard install, hype it. Even add better VB/QB conversion utils. Think about the billions of lines of VB code out there that would convert to Gambas far easier than to .net and you have a very compelling arguement for many companies to switch to Linux. Each year that arguement wanes as more and more .net code is deployed. Still for the hobby programmer Basic remains the language of choice and Gambas can do for Linux what QB did for DOS. Basic made DOS really. The compatability helped but it could have easily been replaced by a competing OS but so many users had written so much code with Basic that they did not want to swtich. Even today you find large and enthusiastic QB clubs despite the difficutlties in getting QB to run under modern windoze OS's. QB and Rekall type utils create the ability for people to quickly and easily learn how to program and do useful work. Multi-media - Face it this is the biggest and most important issue. The poor Flash support is something that is hard to do anything about right now short of writing an open source replacement for Flash. Musicians find almost a total lack of support. Even long time Linux users like myself have to keep a windoze box around to record on. Rhapsody, Apple, and most other Music distributors have little or no support for Linux. Even Amazon's Linux app failed on my FC7 machine. Wine is nice but it's a mighty slow way of looking at the world. Propriatory formats suck but they are reality. Replacing mp3 with Ogg is a worthy cause on any platform and Linux can lead the way but there is still a real need to much better support multi-media on the Linux desktop. Eye candy can win many hearts. Educating people about Flac and Ogg formats is important. Yes there are lots of bugs to fis. Always will be. Lots of server issues to deal with, always will be. Linux by being both a great server, desktop and specialty OS will always see great demand. Windoze is a desktop first and foremost, even their server versions are desktops with server functionality added. Widnoze however is a commercial effort and limited by that. Linux has the ability to transcend those limits. That is where I come into odds with the old school Nix crowd who control Fedora. The interest is not there. Many of my potential and attempted contributions exceeded the defined boundries of that umwelt of what Linux is. I am not alone in that. This in turn discourages advancements in those areas. There are of course practical limits. Because of lawsuits the MP3 format cannot be officially supported but even if it was possible the culture is that because it is propriatary it is unclean. Few Linux users like propriatory software but the idealogical vrs the practical when you look at the wider scheme of things, it just makes sense to do what you can to enable users even if they choose to use propriatory formats. You can't force what's good for people down their throats. You win them over then introduce them to mature alternates. A great example of this was when I wanted to document the Yum GUIs. I was told that was out of scope in no uncertain terms. The vastly inferior default Yum GUI being the only one which was officially supported by Fedora and that would be documented. It took all the wind out of my sails for writing any documentation. The default is pretty lame. Yum Extendor, Kyum and Gnome-Yum all very good products which novice users would find invaluable. All products you have to pretty much discover by accident or be refered too by a friend. Use of a Yum GUI alone would help adoption tremendously. That is one of the strengths of Fedora. The ease of installation and the world of applications that open up before you with those products. Command line Yum with it's poor fuzzy search support and nearly unworkable search facilities is all but useless. Without a Yum GUI users are forced back to the windoze days of browsing websites and individually installing apps. That is an example of Fedora dropping desktop support before the official announcement ever came out. An example of the culture that I feel is committing distrocide. > I also believe that the desktop is extremely important. For Linux to be > accepted in place of M$, it *must* be idiot-proof. Unfortunately, the > underpinnings seem to be changing so rapidly, things that used to work don't > anymore, and no one wants to go back and fix them (or at least very few > do). So, the system gets lots of features, but the desktop drifts. M$ is far from idiot proof LOL. Folks mangle it pretty bad just installing and uninstalling software. My first encounter with windoze I kept seeing this HUGE file eating up people's disk space. So I'd delete it after looking at it in a hex editor and seeing it was just random junk. Turned out it was the windoze swap file LOL. What Windoze power user can avoid registry hacks? What registry hacker hasn't killed their system? I remember once being tasked with support of an Windoze web server. I followed the hardening guideline from M$. It hardened all right. So much so I had to wipe and load to even log in to the machine. I should have known better than to trust M$ documentation but I hadn't admin'd a windoze box in a few years and had a mental lapse. > I myself want to work on the desktop (presuming I have the time). > Unfortunately, it seems that this has become an ominous task as I now have > to learn yet another language (gnome script or kde script), and that isn't Dunno about that. With the collapse of Open GL that leaves .qt as the best portable graphics lib out there. Why not write in .QT instead? If not .QT, then GTK is supported under all major desktops. Or you can avoid the low level and write in Gambas or use some of the C++ GUIs and do RAD development. I am about to undertake writing a writer's editor in Gambas. My first big project in it. Still playing with different functionality to try to get off too the right start instead of having to re-write core funcitonality. Most of the functionality is abstracted away, so really aside from minor quicks you are lib independent with most of the code. > on the top of my priority list right now. Working with X, Xt and Motif was > so much easier 10 years ago. I could develop a Motif window much like > Gnome's or KDEs, but it seems that the world had abandoned Motif. By the > time I get Gnome understood, there'll be yet another window manager that > will be the favorite. :-) I had to support some Motif based apps and the lesstiff vrs Motif and what was the third Motif based set of libs? Anyway it was a mess. Some apps ran great on Lesstif, others HAD to have a specific set of libs, all 3 of which did not work and play well together. Motiff's cracking down on patents though is what really killed Motif programming. Caused many apps to get away from Motiff completely. Shrug I haven't done much C coding since Win95 came out. I never felt comfortable with C++'s syntax, never and got paid well to switch to VB around that time. Found with VB I was worried mostly about actual programming not about libs and system level aspects, as such got more done faster with less frustration. Too bad the executable was so bloated and relied on buggy dlls. Matter of preferences. Some folks like ;s at the end of their line. OThers like me find them annoying beyond belief. The way it should be is the language you write it in shouldn't matter much. It all compiles down to the same machine code eventually. The language should only be a matter of what works best for an individual. Unfortunately that's not the case. The C/C++ only syntax of Linux development languages has kept me from contributing as a programmer to Linux. Wasn't until I stumbled upon Gambas that I found a language that wasn't C/C++ based syntax with a decent IDE which I could quickly jump into without getting tangled up in the Motif/OpenGL/GTK/QT/whatever else dependency hell thing. As you said it's just too mcuh work and too much re-learning to mess with. IT is also a weak point on all platforms right now. M$ does a good job of abstracting you away from that mess but it changes the language without warning and drops support for your language without warning. That's how I got into the DBA and Sys Admin racket. I was tired of re-learning M$ languages. By the time I became an expert in them they changed on me. I don't mean improved, I mean the entire language went away. Masm and Quick C gave way to QB. QB gave way to Foxpro which gave way to VB which was replaced by .net. Pointless change. Instead of creating new languages why not fix the old ones? Grre. Anyway, Linux would do well to adopt better abstraction to improve programming output and efficiency. Let the desktop and compiler authors worry about the widgets. App level developers have enough to do dealing with features and functionality. No point inflicting the M$ re-learning curve either. Abstract it away, maybe give the app level programmer the ability to specify the back end libs but don't make us interface with them. I want to work on the program not spend %90 of the time learning lib APIs only to see them change a couple years later and have to rewrite my app. Right now there are 3 biggies, but I'd love for some window manager to come out and blow my personal favorite KDE out of the water. Until then I remain a KDE fan. The underpinnings are for the window manager group to worry about in my opinion. When I talk desktop I'm talking about apps that are happy on any window manager. Core idea is to abstract away from the details on desktop development. After all isn't that what the Window manager is supposed to be about in the first place? OS calls and use of system utilities should be universal. One of my frustrations with distros is that they do not install both KDE and Gnome libs by default. To be honest both have much to offer. Both KDE and Gnome have undertaken a promise of better compatability between each other. Having libs from both present allow you to use the best of breed even if your app winds up running on a minimalistic window manager. Having the libs present allow users to pick and choose. They can run Gthumb AND K3b on the same desktop and suffer no penalties. An app can leverage both K3b and Gthumb and HTML libs to create a static slide show CD with minimal coding and not care what window manager a user is running as long as they didn't uninstall KDE or Gnome libs/apps. Not much point re-inventing the wheel and the more wheels you have to choose from the better. The more wheels the more likely you are to find the one that fits your needs the best. That is also what I mean by desktop. Give a windoze convert the default Fedora desktop and they are lost. Big time lost. Half of the apps they would instantly gravitate too are not there because KDE is not installed. So apps like K3b are not there. Gnome finally has something close to K3b in functionality but I'd still rate K3b way better. KDE based distros again do the same thing. Lots of Gnome apps are really best of breed. Lots of apps are window manager independent. Just by creating a default install which doesn't entail writing a single line of code but that does a better job of streamlining the user interface and shortening the learning curve you are doing work on the desktop. Best of breed discovery and inclusion is another important part of desktop work. Documentation is a crucial aspect of desktop work. It is our documentation the user first see's. Many users do or don't explore Linux based on the distro's default documentation and thier ability to do the things they did under Windoze or the Mac by that documentation. Any time we do not point out best of breed and show alternates we remove one of Linux's big selling points. That is choice. That is the level of customization that comes quickly and easily with Linux. The ability to quckly and easily build a machine that works the way YOU want it too. I disagree users will be confused by choices. People really are not that dumb no matter how often M$ tells us they are. We fall trap to M$ propoganda when we disparage our own user base. We in turn feed that same propoganda. They might not know the difference between a gig and a terrabyte but they know what they want to do and only want to see how to do it. Offering different ways to try something long as it works only gives them more opportunity to customize and find a unique LInux experience that best suites them. > Anyway, I wouldn't say that the desktop is dead; it's just dormant while > other things are more pressing. The official release was that Fedora had stepped out of desktop development. The Linux world was not surprised at all at that announcement and the feeling is that Fedora has officially ceased such work for good. > Thanks for your view, though. It helps me to understand where efforts need > to be placed. Always happy to get on the soapbox :) M$ users absolutely hate me I suspect LOL. Here I have lots of positives to accent. When I get lured to a M$ blog by something I just plain cut them to pieces. Here I hope to point out a road that eases migrations. I do quite a bit of that as I often help people try and hopefully stay with Linux. A dozen or so every year at least. Every so often I get the chance to convert a school or business to Linux. Much of what I've written is just plain feedback from those efforts. Me personally, it's no big deal to add KDE to my installation. I customize my installations anyway. That's just a few more boxes to check. I customize my partitions as well, so changine the default partitions is not a big deal. I would NEVER set a new home user to use the default Fedora partitions. /home should NEVER EVER be on the same partition as /. I've had more users wipe their home dirs while trying different distros than I can count. They fill up the /home partition with .xsessionerror files or downloads or other junk and come a running telling me Linux crashed. They corrupt a partition and with /home on the / parition it makes recovery so much more difficult. I also preach the /data partition because of several reasons. Searching on /home means hitting those thousands of system files. Backups are bloated by things like Mozilla cache files and temp files and installation files. Again recovery is a pain. If your walking a disk and trying to reassmble files and have these zillion temp files to contend with, it makes life SO much more dificult. If on a /data every file is a real file it makes life much easier. Backups are easier. Most users really don't customize the desktop much, but thier data dir is very dynamic. Then there's security issues. Can't count how many times I've caught users making the /home public read write to share documents. I firmly believe cfg files should be seperated from user generated files. As such /home should be split into /home and /data. That is where my perspective is coming from. From front line work getting folks converted over to Linux. I don't know too many old school Nix users. Most LInux users I know are people I personally converted to Linux or people just trying it out who've come to me for help. When I write I write for that user. My suggestions to this and other Linux lists are for that user for the most part. Every so often I'll do a rant about something that annoys me personally but doesn't have a big impact on new Linux users. So my biggest exposure to old school nix is on lists like this. When I don't have time to read lists like this I often forget there are people who never ran windoze as a primary OS or who only did so recently mostly because they are stuck in old school Linux apps. I've met a couple folks who are comfortable with VI but who use Windoze now despite coming from a Nix background because Windoze is "easier". Well yeah if your using old UIs like VI LOL. Yet they are resistant to trying new Linux UIs which blow Windoze UIs away. It'd be hilarious if it wasn't tragic. Oh well. Life happens. It just boggles my mind to see somebody dealing with Notepad's primitive interface when Kedit provides the same ease of use but without the bugs and annoying limitations such as attempting to force an ext down your throat. If you do things old school yeah it's more work. That's the whole point of my soapbox rants about the desktop. I hope to see a better default desktop that will help in migrations. I spend far too much time helping users with basics and lose too many on that stage before I can really show them areas where Linux shines. A better desktop means we get right to the part where Linux shines and skip that ugly painful middle step. -- fedora-docs-list mailing list fedora-docs-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-docs-list
