Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Mon 15th Sep 2003 20:37 UTC
Today we feature a very interesting interview with Havoc Pennington. Havoc works for Red Hat, he is heading the desktop team, while he is well known also for his major contributions to GNOME, his GTK+ programming book, plus the freedesktop.org initiative which aims to standardize the X11 desktop environments. In the following interview we discuss about the changes inside Red Hat, Xouvert, freedesktop.org and Gnome's future, and how Linux, in general, is doing in the desktop market.
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Seriously, The movement to 3D has already started. Linux does not have to go through the motions that every other OS has gone through. Some things can be skipped, or priorities reorganised. When Windows releases Longhorn, or whatever it will be called, it wil probably have a 3D compositing engine to draw the desktop like OSX. And will Linux be trying to get the 5% 2D stuff right before we move on. I think people need to start to 'care less' for people with 386's as a development target for Desktop products. A Geforce4 MX can now be had for what, $40. And the prices are only coming down, or the hardware is getting better.
The other big problem is that there is no 'one way to do it'. The reason 2D and 3D support is iffy is because there are no nice standardised and fairly high level interfaces for it. As long as each driver manufacturer tries to implement their own features, then stagnation is all that will happen. Look at DirectX on MS. Every card worth speaking about provides drivers that work with it.
We need to start looking forward. The number of people with Old computers get smaller by the day. And the number buying new higher end systems gets bigger. I think it is now pretty much impossible to buy a less than 1.2 GHz processor, as an example. Soon, you will only be able to buy a 2GHz processor, and we will still be providing Pentium 400 MHz era graphics.