"Nat Friedman has been one of the driving forces behind the development of the Linux desktop for a few year now. First with his own company Ximian, founded together with Mono chief architect Miguel de Icaza, after its acquisition now inside Novell. A few months ago he has been named 'Technologist of the Year' by the VarBusiness magazine for his work around the SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. Since then he has been promoted to Chief Technology and Strategy Officer for Open Source, besides the desktop he is also overseeing Novells server business now. During Novells Brainshare Andreas Proschofsky had the possibility to sit down with Friedman and talk about the Linux desktop, the consequences of the Microsoft agreement and the mistakes of the Hula project."
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Member since:2005-07-07
Member since:2007-04-04
You probably won't believe this, but I don't particularly care whether SUSE users choose GNOME or KDE or something altogether different. The big problems that early Linux desktop adopters face today are: interoperability with corporate systems and file formats, hardware support, and availability of applications for Linux. These things have nothing to do with what window manager, file manager, panel, and widget toolkit you use. I don't know the percentage, but most of the desktop work that we've done at Novell in the last 3 years has been in areas that have nothing to do with KDE or GNOME.
Member since:2005-07-07
True, I've seen that. Work on Evolution or OpenOffice, it has been noted for sure.
But if you want to solve these problems, you must realize you can't do it alone. Thus fostering a efficient development platform might even be more important than the actual work you do yourself - it allows others to chime in.
Imho Novell should be more ambitious. Now they focus on copying what the competition has (see OO.o, Gnome) instead of trying to innovate and do or facilitate much really new stuff. Ok, there are new things, sure, but how much innovation is there in OO.o? How much CAN you innovate with that codebase? It's larger than the whole of KDE + Koffice...
I think Novell is focused too much on the short run. How can we get this-and-that-feature on linux as fast as possible. Not - how can we gain a real, more permanent edge over the competition. I miss a longterm strategy here, you'll always be behind if you mostly focus on these big problems you mention.
They are important, sure, but again, where's the ambition? I simply miss that in the OO.o, Evolution and Gnome communities. And no wonder, they have such a huge cruft of code to maintain, they don't have the time to dream... It takes some guts to spend 2 years on laying the foundation for innovation, but I think KDE got it right. Compare Koffice to OO.o - the first might really offer something new, better - the latter will only ever be a MS clone, nothing to see here, move along.
Innovation is a hard thing, and it actually needs a vision, ambition. I'm not saying you guys aren't ambitious, but I think you're not ambitious enough. In terms of exploitation vs exploration, you focus to much on the first, which will lead to a competence trap in the long run. You'll find you've been left behind (yeah, I happen to know a little about this, doing research in the area of strategic innovation).
Love to talk about it, I might look you up on some show or event, once ;-)
Member since:2006-01-28
Enterprises do care about desktops. The proof is that Novell was force to reinstate KDE as a desktop choice in its enterprise distribution after it announced that it was no longer going to support it.
Do you think Suse made this decision out of the kindness of its sweet corporate heart?
KDE is what made Suse popular in Europe and KDE is what everyone runs over here.
Red Hat has no desktop presence and is largely irrelevant in that space. And SLED has at best an equal share of KDE/Gnome users, in spite of the fact that Gnome is the default desktop. Want numbers? Ask Miguel or Nat and if they are honest, they will tell you exactly what I am telling you.
Edited 2007-04-02 11:41
Member since:2005-07-06
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
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Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces."But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
"Android and iOS, the number one and number two ranked smartphone operating systems worldwide, combined for 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013 as Windows Phone crept past BlackBerry for 3rd place. According to the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Android smartphone vendors and Apple shipped a total of 199.5 million units worldwide during 1Q13, up 59.1% from the 125.4 million units shipped during 1Q12." Windows Phone doubles from a few to twice few, iOS loser market share as its growth is slower than that of the overall market. BlackBerry continues slide into irrelevance."According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies service, global Android smartphone profits reached US$5 billion in total during the first quarter of 2013. Samsung dominated and captured an impressive 95 percent share of all Android smartphone profits." Wow.
Member since:
2005-07-24
"""
Nowhere in the desktop projects does he mention KDE which has much more demand among enterprises than Gnome.
"""
Only in your fantasy world.
Enterprises don't roll out PCLinuxOS. They use enterprise distros. And all the enterprise distros I know of (SLED and RHEL Desktop) are Gnome based.
Enterprises don't really care about Gnome or KDE. They care about what their vendor supports.
So there is really no enterprise *demand* for either one.