The future of development on the Linux desktop is being debated and deliberated on the weblogs of key developers this week.
If you are interested in computing platform decisions and open source software, then you may be interested in the debate. However, even if you are not at all interested in these things, it may be interesting in a more abstract sense.
On a campus in Redmond, Washington, smart and talented people are deciding what your computer is going to be like in the next decade. Here, in a parallel universe of sorts, smart and talented people are debating an alternative future for desktop computing — and you can read every word it.
Havoc Pennington, a Gnome hacker from RedHat, Miguel de Icaza, a founder of the Gnome project and Ximian, Robert Love, a kernel hacker with Ximian, and many others are batting around the posible platform options for linux desktop development. It’s strangely empowering to witness.
The debate and dialog continues and can be followed on Planet Gnome, an aggregated weblog of Gnome developer weblogs.
Mailing lists have generally been the primary communication method of open source developers. While mailing lists are still the core of the communication, weblogs have started to play an interesting role. They are especially effective for high-profile debate and dialog like this. Unlike a public mailing list, the signal-to-noise ratio is high.
Here’s a small corner of the desktop that is taking shape right now: Miguel de Icaza has demonstrated an unobtrusive notification mechanism here and here.
Although it’s a demo right now, it could easily become a standard gnome panel applet in the future. What features should such a notification mechanism have? Miguel suggests a history feature for browsing previous messages. How should apps use the notifications? What’s good about similiar notfication mechanisms in other desktops and what would you change if you could?
A larger related topic, also suggested by Miguel, is adding a section on notification patterns to the
Gnome HIG.
Ah! Very nice, just added those developer blog’s to favorites. Getting out of control! 🙂
I think the title of this article should have been ‘The Future of Gnome Desktop Development.’ Desktop Linux is certainly not defined by a single window manager, which to me is a major factor in why it hasn’t become more widely adopted.
The reality is I don’t see anyone pushing qt-sharp or qt-java as acceptable toolkits for KDE-base. But when gnome/gtk+-sharp or gnome-java are deemed acceptable for gnome core and become production ready, all of a sudden Linux looks more enticing on the corporate desktop. See iFolder and Novell for an example of what’s to come. I loved KDE for years, I think it’s a wonderful, elegant environment, but it’s going be left behind soon.
The Gnome + JIT revolution will make Linux in the workplace.
The last post is such bull. KDE left behind? By what? Something that you say “will” about? Show me results.