Moving Toward a Single Linux UI? 441
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.
UI maturity (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFA ... page/slide 8 ... (Score:1, Insightful)
Vista-like effects? Somebody PLEASE show me how Vista does the multi-faceted 3D cube, the wobbly windows, the multitude of enhancements and customizations to the UI, etc.
I yearn for the day when IT reviewers in supposedly "mainstream" publications stop sucking on the teat of MS marketing shills and actually do some friggin research
Re:UI maturity (Score:3, Insightful)
Why hamper the performance of a decent Linux based system with a processor hogging gui?
vim+gcc is a powerful combination, and doesn't benefit from a gui one jot, or even 0.5 of a jot.
Re:Precisly the missing part of Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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)
Re:Not one - just a default one (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
Convergence (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:mod me down, but picking just one would be grea (Score:3, Insightful)
Various pieces are often turned into libraries which are intended to work on both. Wrappers are often written so that you don't have to think about it -- I can check one little checkbox and all my gtk apps will use a qt theme, so if I wasn't a tech, I wouldn't even know Firefox wasn't a KDE app.
In order to do this, though, you have to understand just what it is you want to standardize.
Tell me one thing: Which problem are you trying to solve?
Are you trying to solve the problem of apps working on one system or the other? Completely solved. I use KDE, but I often use Firefox, and occasionally VLC -- both use gtk+, and were likely written for GNOME.
Seriously, I can type "sudo apt-get install foo", and I'll get an entry "foo" somewhere in my launch menu. Hell, even Wine can do that now -- I can double-click on an EXE and Wine will run the installer, drop menus in my Launch Menu under "Wine", and place shortcuts on the desktop. Yes, the desktop -- a folder called (surprise!) "Desktop", and shared between GNOME and KDE.
Are you trying to solve the problem of users having to choose at install time? (Oh no, a choice! Woe is me!) That's easy, too -- give them Ubuntu. It makes the choice for them -- they get GNOME. Those who later learn enough to care might switch to Kubuntu and KDE -- that doesn't even require a reinstall.
Are you trying to solve the problem of wasted effort within the projects? Don't bother. The GNOME people aren't ever going to provide as much configurability as KDE (I can choose what happens when I middle-click on a title bar!). But GNOME is the default choice for Ubuntu, so it gets a lot of polish -- it won't ever completely die.
Besides, competition is good. Each project does things the other won't. Each project is often improved in an effort to compete with the other.
And again, the big, important stuff often ends up being shared.
Are you trying to solve the problem of RAM usage? If that's a problem, in a day when often the minimum you'll get is 2 gigs, you've got bigger problems. And if you really do have those bigger problems, you can probably use a slimmed-down KDE or XFCE -- you'll probably be choosing apps specifically for low RAM usage (ruling out Firefox, maybe?) so all this means is you have to consider toolkit, also.
Or you just install Xubuntu and be done with it.
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.
It is a necessity to have a common GUI (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Precisly the missing part of Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:twm for me (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:UI maturity (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:mod me down, but picking just one would be grea (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree that standards and interoperability between DEs are important, but I think that trying to corral people into the DE of someone-or-other's choice is self-defeating, trying as it does to work directly against human nature. I favour the encouragement of collaboration between the DEs seen in projects like freedesktop.org. Nobody can make this desktop divide go away, so instead of undertaking mad social engineering projects I think that we should embrace diversity in a pragmatic way, trying to smooth over the bumps where possible but also reap the benefits (and there are some!) where we can.
Using shoes for gloves would be 'standard' (Score:2, Insightful)
Having standards is good when implemented well. They should not limit what people want to do with stuff an any way, and should only serve to help interoperability.
Standards should also not discourage development of non-standard ways of doing things. For instance. Standard keyboard layout is good. Forcing every interface to a computer to be the exact same, and a keyboard... bad.
Standard method of fixing a windows box being to switch to Linux, good. Forcing all XP users to move to Vista... bad.
Common method of selecting which interface to use... good. Forcing the use of only one user interface onto many computers with huge variety of purposes and priorities.... BAD.
Re:They already have a common UI. (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.
XFCE (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:They already have a common UI. (Score:3, Insightful)
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).
Re:The one feature common to all now - bloat and s (Score:2, Insightful)
The good side of all the cruft is that with the large community there are a lot of tools (Eclipse, Netbeans,
Re:It is a necessity to have a common GUI (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The one feature common to all now - bloat and s (Score:3, Insightful)
Look at something lighter like Puppy or Damn Small Linux.
Re:The one feature common to all now - bloat and s (Score:3, Insightful)
Well there you have it - you *cannot* have a quick, streamlined system that also has a modern, good looking desktop. That means no matter what you do, todays modern Linux distribution won't work as it was meant to work on a Pentium II.
Contrary to what early Linux supporters were bragging about, once you add the bling that makes the system easy to use and attractive to new users (and you *have* to add it to attract new and novice users so there's no escaping it), all that work invested in having a top-notch kernel just melts aways, and it all comes down to drivers and user interface.
Consider that Windows XP is now a *very* old operating system, but whose GUI is still the golden standard, and you'll see why geeking out on consoles with ridiculous number of columns and rows is so childish.
Packaging Companies? (Score:1, Insightful)
- Upstart vs Sysvinit
- LVM vs not
- ext3(4?) vs. ???
- network device handling (/etc/sysconfig/network/ vs. ???)
- third party stuff in
- the battle each "packaging company" (yes, that would be valid) would face in maintaining that commonality, and the inability for the cats to be herded...
Diversity is good and healthy, and it's not too much of a stretch to say that "Good health is Diversity".
UI contracts go far deeper than visual guidelines. (Score:4, Insightful)
But a number of important things stay the same. For example, in any document-based application, Alt,F,S and Ctrl-S both give you Save. Always. Everywhere. Now, I've never used IE7 (I'm currently using Opera on Ubuntu...), and from your screenshot it doesn't seem to have a menubar. I don't know whether it just doesn't have a menubar, or whether it's hidden by default. But somehow I can be pretty certain that, whichever the answer is, pressing Alt,F,S will still give me save.
To be fair, Gnome now does this just as well as Windows. All the standard Gnome apps conform to the same guidelines. So let's look at a related area: well-defined boundaries in keyboard shortcuts. For example: in Evolution, check mail is F9; but Compiz uses F9 for its widget-gadget-dashboard thing by default. Problem: if you turn on 'extra effects' in Compiz, every time you check mail, you get your screen taken over by a moded widget overly
Now, why does this happen? F9 is check mail in Evolution because that's what Windows uses; and F9 is Dashboard in Compiz because that's what Mac OS uses. In Windows, F? keys on their own are per-application shortcuts. On a mac, F? keys on their own are system-wide shortcuts. On Linux, there is no one dictated standard, so everyone picks whichever convention they prefer, and you get conflicts.
Having well-defined app/system keyboard chord boundaries is a lot less sexy that mandating the colour of all applications toolbars, to be sure. But, as a UI contract, it's the more important of the two.
Re:There goes my karma (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:They already have a common UI. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Convergence (Score:3, Insightful)
Instead of sexual reproduction/mutation enabling variation among different competing codes, you have programmers of various abilities intelligently designing what they imagine to be improvements. Well, it works enough that most people eventually upgrade whatever it is they are using more than using an older version. And this has the advantage over the biological analogue in that the process is both faster and has the possibility of bypassing local maxima in favor of shooting for absolute max (the code rewrite).
Since those are the main differences, you are going to see a lot of the same phenomena as with evolution of species. This is what you allude to, i.e. "most distros don't need to exist". In the biological world, this plays out in either extinction or niche differentiation. Once you get something that works, it dominates, at least for a while.
The danger of this is that once a large niche is dominated, especially by something that is very complex and would require an immense amount of time to fully rewrite, stagnation can set in. In a lot of ways, organisms shape the environment to suit and entrench themselves (with software, it's "mindshare"). If you look at FOSS as a way of obtaining something good and cheap (at the expense of fast), that seems to be a problem. However, a decadent FOSS distro has a much larger chance of being successfully outcompeted than the closed source alternative, since closed source never has to compete with a fork.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interspecific_competition [wikipedia.org]
Re:They already have a common UI. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:They already have a common UI. (Score:1, Insightful)
Having a standard setup can be good... (Score:2, Insightful)
I've noticed that a lot of Slashdotters seem to think that everyone should be able to do all the techie things they do if they just sat down and tried, but if you've ever spent 45 minutes on the phone with some old woman crying on the other end that this is far too complicated for her, and why can't we just send someone out there to do this for her, and you're still on "Step 1: Plug in telephone line to wall jack." (I am NOT exageratting) then you'll probably realize that it's a good thing if these people's UIs are laid out in roughly the same manner.
If you feel comfortable doing so, then you should be free to tweak and customize all you want, but a lot of people can only handle step by step instructions.
A certain amount of consistency out of the box is a good thing if you want Linux to have mass appeal. Although personally, I'd want to be able to maintain the same amount of variety and customability. I just think that making it so that there's a default UI that is consistant between distros.
Dumb idea (Score:4, Insightful)
You're going to have a hard time convincing those working on FVWM, XFCE, Fluxbox, and all the other non-KDE/GNOME desktop environments that a universal paint color has been decided upon and that they should all just roll over and accept it.
just give me a single file manager (Score:2, Insightful)
opening up for every application I run -
no consistency whatsoever - browser,
print screen saver, general file manager,
etc. all bring up different applications
with different saved state
there needs to be a common file manager
with common saved state (most recent
folders visited, default folder, favorites,
etc. etc. etc.)
I spend my time redrilling down from top
level folders everytime I want to save-as
or open or create new files.
it's a joke
gKDE (Score:4, Insightful)
Epic Battle: Apples VS Oranges (Score:2, Insightful)
There's no need to throw all the DEs into a melting pot and try to make one thing, people have their own preferences. All that's really getting done at that point is another DE is being made for people to argue over about which is better.
Maybe it's better that way, though... I just feel like a lot of 'uncool kids who just don't get it' jump into the scene and start arguments that don't need to be there.