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Moving Toward a Single Linux UI?
Posted by
timothy
on Thu May 15, 2008 05:17 PM
from the everything-that-rises dept.
from the everything-that-rises dept.
Anonymous writes "With the releases of Fedora 9, Hardy Heron and OpenSuSE 11 so close together, it's looking more than ever like an evolution to a common interface for major Linux distributions. Here's a compilation of screen shots and descriptions that make it appear to be the case. Would this be a good thing or a bad thing?" There are plenty of other options out there, of course, even considering only Linux distros that are based on Gnome and KDE, and plenty of wilder (or at least less common) desktops to choose from besides.
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Submission: Moving to a Single, Linux UI? by Anonymous Coward
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They already have a common UI. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:They already have a common UI. (Score:5, Funny)
If I wasn't such a geek, I would have interpreted in such the wrong way. :P
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Re:They already have a common UI. (Score:5, Funny)
If I wasn't such a geek, I would have interpreted in such the wrong way. :P
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Re:They already have a common UI. (Score:5, Informative)
Add this to your boot prompt in grub on the
vga=775 and get some good 160x60 loving 1280x1024.
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Re:They already have a common UI. (Score:5, Funny)
(Whenever someone walks in my office I just go "hmmm......" and act like I'm seeing something interesting, then they leave and I go back to sipping my drink and daydreaming)
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Re:They already have a common UI. (Score:5, Funny)
And haven't rebooted it once.
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Re:They already have a common UI. (Score:5, Interesting)
I prefer black on white, and I always have terminals beyond 80x25, but aside from colors and window sized, I think that the cli is _the_ UI for Linux, and it is better than any other *NIX out there in that department. Most other *NIX's have died out, but the cli for Solaris makes me type date and make sure that it really is 2008. I'm not knocking Solaris in terms of its kernel and Sun's hardware can be good (sometimes it sucks). But in 2008 if I do vi
A little more on topic, I think that it will really take a commercial company to make a GUI for any *NIX that is worthwhile. It just seems too big of a project for open source to come together and do. The best that we have to date are two windows ripoffs with the groovy option to have wiggly windows and stuff.
My rank orderings of GUIs are:
1) OS X
2) Windows
3) other
Hint. I don't use windows, and I don't see that happening for another 5-10 years. I'm a Linux/UNIX fan. I like what is under the hood, and to me it just "makes sense". For me, windows does not, under the hood nor the shiny exterior. Today, OS X is UNIX with a good GUI thrown on top. Sure, its not perfect, but I'm at home and looking at my nice OS X GUI after looking at my Gnome desktop all day at work makes my eyes feel better. I also find it ironic that of all the terminal apps I've used, OS X has the best Terminal app out there. Its also nice to have the hard stuff in Linux taken care of by the GUI in OS X.
Now the BIG difference here, is that I would not want to run OS X on all of the servers that I manage under Solaris and Linux. Why? Like Windows, the GUI is the OS.
This is really tough, but there needs to be a GUI that works with Linux that can help novices with the basics, but those GUIs can't break if a "power user" comes in and modifies the config file in a text editor and now the GUI is either broken or it screws up the config file. This is _NOT_ a trivial task to accomplish, and this is one of the reasons that a good GUI has not come to surface for Linux.
In fact, I think that the GUI experience was better like 10 years ago under Linux with things like AfterStep and WindowMaker, and Enlightenment. I even know some older *NIX folks that still use FVWM, and I liked that back in the day too. So, I dunno, maybe 2009 is the year of Linux on the desktop. However, unless an excellent GUI comes out for it, I don't think this will be the year.
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Re:They already have a common UI. (Score:5, Funny)
GREEN on black, you infidel!!!
(in a pinch, 'amber' will do instead of green, but never WHITE!)
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Re:They already have a common UI. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:They already have a common UI. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:They already have a common UI. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:There goes my karma (Score:5, Funny)
* ducks *
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Re:There goes my karma (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:There goes my karma (Score:5, Funny)
There, I said it.
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Re:There goes my karma (Score:5, Funny)
for (int i = 0; i < depth; i++) printf("| ");
printf("What's funny about this?\n");
karmakiller(depth+1);
}
int main() {
karmakiller(0);
}
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Re:They already have a common UI. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:They already have a common UI. (Score:5, Funny)
Oh crap. We're forked.
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Re:They already have a common UI. (Score:5, Funny)
BLACK on black. For us paranoid security guys.
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Slackware? (Score:5, Informative)
Probably a bit of both (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess that if we're keen on getting more people into Linux, then some commonality across the major distros might be a good thing. On the other hand, it's not so great for the smaller distros if we get a kind of monolithic Linux which dominates the market and means that people are less willing to try something different.
Still, there'll always be enough of us who want to use things because they're different - and because they are better at doing exactly what we want rather than being more generic, suit-everyone tools.
Re:Probably a bit of both (Score:5, Interesting)
I hardly think it would stifle innovation (open licenses are so important in all of this). But it might make people think a little more carefully before innovating. That is, there will be yet greater emphasis on integration and interoperability with the other available applications.
And if anything, the need for lightweight desktops and specialized linux distributions is growing with the accumulation of older computers and the advance of the second and third worlds to the computer age.
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Multiple UI is probably a good thing. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm convinced that 'competition' between KDE and Gnome has only help to improve the quality of both interfaces. Furthermore, having Xfce, KDE, Gnome, etc, gives the user choices not just in the colour, but in the actual design and philosophy behind the UI. In other words, there is plenty of room to try out new and exiting idea that would be difficult would there be a single, monopolistic desktop UI.
My $0.02 CAD.
Re:Multiple UI is probably a good thing. (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, I agree with you that Gnome vs. KDE probably has improved both a lot. But there is no denying that it also holds back some types of application development. I don't know the answer, but just try to enjoy the ride.
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The UIs are not the problem (Score:5, Interesting)
What matters far more is standardising the way the distros handle other things so that HowTos, installation scripts/instructions for printers etc can be written once without a whole lot of "On Ubuntu do this, on Fedora do that" stuff. Things that would help a lot:
*Pick one printer handling mechanism.
*Pick one package manager.
*Standardise one one usb/udev/pam.
*Pick one wireless management policy. Hide madwifi/ndiswrapper etc.
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Re:The UIs are not the problem (Score:5, Informative)
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UI maturity (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:UI maturity (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:UI choice (Score:5, Insightful)
Ever heard of XCB (replaces Xlib and is asynchronous to make multithreading easier, and provides an xlib implementation on top of XCB to ease porting), Gallium3D (a new graphics stack that'll be easier to port and work much more like modern video cards, includes software fallbacks for everything), Composite (which should make it easy to make a panning window manager), XRandR 1.2 (greatly improved the hotplug-ability of X), Glucose (experiment to attempt to accelerate X rendering operations using X11, haven't heard much from this one lately), and several other projects?
Basically there is work going on in Xorg that you're wanting, it just takes time (thanks to the state of massive bitrot it'd developed into during the age of XFree). Many of the projects (like Composite, XCB, XRandR, and AIGLX) are just becoming mature (look at all the craze over compiz/beryl/compizfusion thanks to Composite+AIGLX), but the more fundamental changes need more time (like Gallium3D and the TTM Memeory Manager for video cards) before people can really see the fruits of their labor, and for others no one will really notice the new abilities until some crafty developer finds some way to do something nifty with them (like XCB).
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"wilder" desktops to choose from (Score:4, Funny)
When this happens... (Score:4, Funny)
Lets face it, linux users love choice. And since they're more likely than not to be fanboys (c'mon, everyone knows a linux convert is preachy about his newfound OS), then they're probably also fanboys about UI.
Mandriva & Slackware (Score:4, Informative)
In any case, let's place bets if the thread degenerates into KDE vs. Gnome... ug!
twm for me (Score:5, Insightful)
I would not recommend my environment for anyone but myself. I've been with my wife since 1996 and she has NEVER been able to figure out how to do anything when sitting down at my Linux desktop. If I open a mozilla window for her she can just stay in there and be fine. But anything else, forget it.
The first thing I do when I install a modern Linux distribution is turn off all of the services that support Gnome and KDE programs. D-Bus, avahi, etc, etc, there are tons of them and they all just choke up the system when you are not running Gnome or KDE (and even if you do, but at that point they are a necessary evil). It's getting harder and harder to install new Linux distributions and manage to clean out all of the desktop related stuff that they install and run. All I want is X11, twm, mozilla/firefox, emacs, xterm, and a few other odds and ends. It annoys me when I install programs like ImageMagick and they require libgnome. Why? I don't run Gnome, why should the program require it? But I am being pretty curmudgeonly here. Aside from the minor annoyance of having to have libraries on my system that I "shouldn't need" (to continue to live in the early 1990's), there's really no harm in it.
I keep telling myself that someday I will have to suck it up and start using Gnome or KDE. But that day never seems to come because I don't *need* those things, and they never work seamlessly enough anyway to make them worth my while. I know that eventually I will *have to* because no Linux distribution will support my ancient way of working someday. But until that time comes I am unlikely to change.
Re:twm for me (Score:5, Funny)
Your 35 and you haven't lived at all~
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Re:twm for me (Score:5, Insightful)
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Does it matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're using Ubuntu, Fedora or Suse, then there's a possibility that you're an average Joe and you use your computer for general things like web surfing, email, word processing, perhaps even movies or managing your music collection. Or, you use it at work and only care about its general productivity applications. If you're this person, then a uniform interface across distros isn't a big deal. If you can point, click, and drag, then you probably won't ask for much more than that.
If you're a "power user" on any *nix distro (be it the three above or any others) and you like to customize every aspect of your kernel, desktop environment, and everything in between, then you'll already know which environment is your favorite and you're going to set it up the way you want it, anyway. So it doesn't really matter what the distro has by default.
So whatever a distro has by default really shouldn't matter, be it varied or vanilla.
What is this about anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
"Major" Linux dists is the key word (Score:5, Insightful)
A common UI for Linux would suck, because not everyone wants the same thing. If there's a common UI, then that means a bunch of people are going to lose something.
A common UI for "major Linux distributions" is probably a good thing, since even though not everyone wants the same thing, a vast majority are happy to settle for the same thing even if it doesn't fit them well (ever heard of "Windows"?). Those people are the most likely to use "major Linux distributions" and those same people are probably the ones you're most likely to end up having to talk to on the phone. "Click on the foot or gear icon, and then..." Talking grandma through an UI that you know (because you're used to talking people through that one, even if you don't use it daily yourself) is easier than talking her through one of a hundred UIs that you vaguely remember having tried out for a couple days two years ago.
It's about time (Score:5, Insightful)
Unification of the UI throughout all apps and windows is a must. You just simply cannot hit a moving target. Get a solid base foundation built and then have at all of the niche and one-off app and distros you want.
My personal dream day is when a major distro finally comes out with one look, one of each type of app which is as polished and unified as possible, and one window manager. No more ridiculous things in the kernel like IBM PS2 micro channel controller drivers or similar outdated garbage (yes I know they are modularized but still). Give me streamlined, solid, stable, fast, and straightforward.
My only hope right now is that a company like ASUS will continue on their way and accomplish it that way. Which is something I never thought I would say. Lets stop playing games and stupid idealistic crap and make Linux a true contender. Right now as sad as it is to say OS X has matched my wishlist for Linux in a few years as apposed to the past 13 I've spent with Linux.
Re:Precisly the missing part of Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
Why should I learn Gnome or KDE if I already know Aqua, or vice versa?
The best solution would be an interface definition standard that lets you use KDE on Windows, Mac or Linux with no installation or configuration necessary - just download your profile from a server or USB key.
Oh, yeah, and I'd like a pony too, as long as I'm wishing on pipe dreams...
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Re:Precisly the missing part of Linux (Score:4, Interesting)
But actually, we do have something like that -- it's called X. The problem is, of course, that Windows and OS X both threw away decades of work and started from scratch, so you can't just write an X window manager and expect it to work anywhere but Linux. (Or BSD. Or OpenDarwin. Or Plan9. Or Solaris. Or Cygwin. Or...)
Personally, I think the better solution would be a common runtime -- either high level (think Java, or the Web/AJAX) or low level (think x86_64 + Linux + X.org) -- so that I can customize my environment as much as I want, and then run the apps I want in that environment. Much more flexible when I can actually write brand-new window-managing software than try to create a common spec for configuring existing window managers.
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Re:Precisly the missing part of Linux (Score:5, Informative)
MS released the first version of Windows in 1986, and previews of NexStep (which is the foundation for OS X) began in 1986 too, so development work on both was pretty much concurrent with the original MIT version of X (1984, with X11 appearing in 1987). It's not therefore correct to say that either threw away decades of work.
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Re:Precisly the missing part of Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Precisly the missing part of Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Precisly the missing part of Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
But what about X11? Well, these days, if you're using GNOME, or KDE, or Xfce, and applications written for those environments (which is to say most modern applications for X11 desktops) then you only have two toolkits, which can be themed so they render using the theme of the other (using either GTK-Qt theme, or QtGTK Style), and has consistent cut and paste that works across (and between) them all. Yes, you can get some Xlib applications if you hunt around, but then you can get ugly Tk applications on Windows if you hunt around (or X11 applications on the Mac). The reality is that, these days, the Linux desktop really isn't that much more inconsistent that Apple or Microsoft. Actually, I would go so far as to say that it is actually more consistent than what MS is currently producing.
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Re:Not one - just a default one (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:mod me down, but picking just one would be grea (Score:5, Insightful)
I know, choice is good. So is focusing your efforts on making one usable product that people can standardize on.
What you can do, however, is work on standards and interoperability of protocols that underly the environments. You know, like Freedesktop [freedesktop.org] do. That means common standards for inter-application communication (from cut and paste to DBUS), standards for how applications expose themselves to menus, standards for syustem trays, and so on. This effort is still ongoing, but the end result is that GNOME, KDE and Xfce can share application menus, system trays, clipboards, icon themes, and more. With other things like the GTK-Qt theme [kde-look.org] and the QtGTK Style [trolltech.com], we're steadily heading toward the point where applications will be able to slot in seamlessly competing desktops.
So in some sense what you want is being done, but it is not going to involve one desktop to rule them all. For that you need dictatorial control from on high to simply say what is "right". You won't get that in FOSS; it's just not how it works. If you want that you need something like Apple or Microsoft, and the consequences that come with such choices (although, to be honest, I'm not sure they offer models [bla.st] of perfect consistency [arstechnica.com] either).
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Re:mod me down, but picking just one would be grea (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Winners and losers (Score:5, Informative)
This is temporary, and is a common complaint about KDE 4.0. The idea with KDE 4.0 was to ship what they had to encourage further application development. There are lots of changes to KDE, including using a new version of QT (the underlying toolkit).
The basics are there, but customizeability, as you noted, is lacking. From what I understand, that flexibility (especially in terms of the main panel) will return with KDE 4.1, to be released this July.
KDE 4.0 isn't for everybody. After reading about some of these limitations, I decided to wait until KDE 4.1 before upgrading my Kubuntu laptop's KDE version. As I understand it, KDE 4.1 will bring applications like the PIM framework up to speed, and I should be able to make my desktop look and work like I'm used to with KDE 3.5 (a substantial alteration from the default).
KDE hasn't abandoned the philosophy of a very flexible user interface, it's just taking time to re-implement the features in the serious overhaul that is KDE 4. I can wait.
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Re:From TFA ... page/slide 8 ... (Score:5, Informative)
Rather than potentially BREAKING the GUI on a significant number of machines, the last SEVERAL releases of Mandriva have it ready to use and integrated with one click on "3-D desktop". Having it as the "default" isn't necessarily a good thing, nor does it make it the sole domain of Ubuntu.
Mandriva has been around before there was an Ubuntu. It is just as or more pretty, powerful, flexible, stable, easy to use, and polished. It was distributed on HP's and several other hardware vendors long before Ubuntu was offered on Dell. Unlike Ubuntu, a single Mandriva DVD can install a default KDE or Gnome or combined (or other) system... they don't seem to have the need to have separate Gnomedriva and KDEdriva distro versions. Of the people I know that use both (*untu and Mandriva) regularly, they all tend to like Mandriva better. That doesn't mean that Ubuntu isn't wildly popular nor deserving of praise. But people should not feed it credit and sole spotlight for things common to other if not many distros.
Every time I see ANY article/posting refering to something that applies to all Linux distros under a single distro name, it is almost always Ubuntu users who do it. It is tiring, arrogant, and insulting to users and developers of other distros.
Keep in mind that you are the one trying to turn this thread into an Ubuntu vs. Mandriva thread. My point was that you should not use the term "Ubuntu" instead of "Linux distros" when it is something that really refers to many, most, or all distros.
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Re:It is a necessity to have a common GUI (Score:5, Informative)
In the meantime GNOME and KDE both have Human Interface Guideline documents that spell out how applications should work to be consistent, and, oddly enough, most applications for the respective desktops hew to them rather well. You can certainly expect a more consistent environment than Windows apparently is these days (even if you stick to MS software)!
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