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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I have been reading this Interview and partially agree with Havoc here. The 1st part of the Interview contains this paragraph:
"One theme of these releases are to make GTK+ cover all the GUI functionality provided historically by libgnomeui. So there will be a single clear GUI API, rather than "plain GTK+" and "GNOME libs" - at that point being a "GNOME application" is really just a matter of whether you follow the GNOME user interface guidelines, rather than an issue of which libs you link to. This cuts down on bloat and developer confusion."
He is absolutely right with that but sadly only he knows what to use and not to be confused. I see a lot of people showing up in the channels not exactly knowing wether they should use a GTK-App GNOME-App or BONOBO-App window for their stuff, they all slightly differ while the last named ones inherit BonoboUI components. But they do differ from technically point of how things are being done. This can really be a complicated thing and even experienced programmers trap themselves because they don't exactly know what happens next. They once started their project decided to use the BonoboUI component for writing their applications and now they see that a new Toolbar and Menu code (and more stuff) show up in GTK+ and right now it's unclear wether the developer needs to switch back on using a GTK-App rather than the other 2 named ones. These are technically huge changes in the code. I once as told that libgnomeui and libbonoboui will use wrappers to point to the new GTK architecture but again wrappers are NO longtime solutions.
It would be pretty nice from Havoc Pennington (or anyone else who claim responsibility for GNOME's roadmap (by ignoring the fact that it's communitywork, but that's a different topic) to write a summary about good practices and bad practices, what to avoid to use and what not. So we get NOW the chance to switch our applications to the right track rather than waiting until we hit the wall and then need weeks or months to change the apps to work the new roadmap (I'm not refering to API consistency here).
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Another thing is the X11 issue which I do agree with myself. I was playing with DirectFB (Framebuffer) for quite some weeks myself and managed to get other people interested in that stuff as well (even from GNOME) and I think that the best way for Desktop users would be to make usage of DirectFB. I know on one side the X11 Network layer will disappear but on the otherhand you benefit from a lot of things.
a) you get rid of X11 (~150mb) of complicated and ancient stuff (as HP somehow said himself)
b) using DirectFB (GTK already supports it in it's GDK layer) you somehow get rid from the CONSOLE and X11 layer and your system become one e.g. you boot your Linux kernel and find yourself on your Desktop GNOME in NO TIME. You can use your framebuffer, do not waste much memory for X11 loading and switching from one FrameBuffer is easy. E.g. maybe you know the old Amiga System where there was no console, you operated on one concept where you had your desktop and windows.
The benefits are so much:
- No loading of X
- getting rid of ~150mb in favor to 200kb FrameBuffer
- DirectFB supports AA fonts (because GTK uses Pango)
- you safe a lot of Memory because you boot linux straight in the framebuffer and have still all your memory left for applications rather than having it suck up by the X server
- speed through direct hardware communication.
- native transparency and shadow support and all the nice effects that Havoc has dreamt of.
And many more. You can read my comments about that on the DirectFB Mailinglist.
http://directfb.org/mailinglists/directfb-dev/2003/06-2003/msg00000...
Please refer to the 2 links inside it as well. I know DirectFB is in it's beginning but it's heavily developed and I belive that this approach is a better one for the long term rather than hacking around in old X11 code that 'no one really understands'.
I am refering here to DirectFB on the framebuffer layer not the X11 drivers. And think about that that many other systems already offer FrameBuffer support some of them already longer than Linux.