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.
We don't follow Windows' footsteps, we make ours. These new 3D technologies are redundant and resource hungry features that not useful on the desktop. The Desktop is going to be predominantly 2D for a good while.
> 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.
Why should we care less about other people to satisfy your desire? Other people are humans too, you know. I suppose the other people you are talking about are developing nations who can't afford to purchase 1Ghz machines, or individuals and other entities who see beyond IT/media hype.
Not everyone can afford to upgrade every year to play the upcoming version of DOOM or Half Life. Not everyone thinks it is necessary to upgrade to browse the internet, email, play chess or chat on IRC. When did Linux become the Operating System for the rich MAC user? When did Linux begin to force users to upgrade their hardware to use it?
> A Geforce4 MX can now be had for what, $40. And the prices are only coming down, or the hardware is getting better.
Some individuals make less than a month.
> 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.
I agree with you here. That and the fact Linux is yet to be acknowledged by a handful of hardware vendors.
> 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.
I don't know where you get your statistics from, but old computers are still used widely around the globe. Only those falling for media hype, or those who really need the extra CPU power, or enthusiasts like gamers are upgrading. Go to any developing nation and have look at the computers they are using. If you see more than 20 2Ghz computers in a building, I'll buy you a beer. Heck even NASA uses 486 based intel CPUs, talk less of your average poor student.