I’ve been reading about Nat Friedman for a while, and reading his
blog. He’s a good presenter, and a really smart person. He
is doing the presentation so far, and has been showing examples
of the evolution of the desktop on Linux. Starting in 1992,
he showed just how crude things were … and then moving forward to
1995, 1997, and then to today. He feels that Netscape on Linux
was one of the biggest things to drive the adoption and usability of
Linux.
2001 brought Mozilla, OpenOffice, Evolution, and GNOME/KDE. These
first releases were used and the feedback was absorbed through
2002. 2003 the next real iterations arrived of all of these
projects. 2004 is bringing all sorts of new efforts and
contributions to the desktop.
He commented on one of the largest installations of Linux
desktops … in Spain. 400,000 Linux desktops installed in
Extramadura and Andalucia. He commented on the classic issue of
new installs vs. migrations … new installs are so much easier.
He also pointed to the Google Zeitgeist
page where stats show that Linux is still at ~1% of the machines
querying Google … he wanted to now what the rounding is … does the
1% really mean .8% or 1.4% … what’s the real number? 😉
Nat then showed a Linux Desktop Scorecard where he rated various
aspects with A+, A, A-, B+, etc. The worst aspect (rated a D) is
“Application Availability” … he stated that Linux still doesn’t have
all of the apps to do your job. Not in all cases, but many.
Related to that is the Application Interoperability issues. You
might open a Excel spreadsheet in OpenOffice and it doesn’t work.
They outlined the “Linux Desktop” as being:
- Groupware – Evolution
- Web Browser – Mozilla
- Office Suite – OpenOffice
- Other Components – iPrint, iFolder, and more
He commented on a number of books … one in particular called “The
design of everyday objects”. He was joking about the “Apply”
button in Windows … and that in the Linux desktop they chose to just
have things occur when you select options. He demonstrated
what appears to be a MVC architecture behind the desktop configuration
settings … showing that when settings are altered in one interface,
they are reflected elsewhere.
He commented on Novell’s Open Source efforts, and the “Unification” of
the GNOME and KDE desktops. They also emphasized their efforts to
contribute to Open Source development based on their own internal pain
… for example contributing to Mozilla to make it more IE compatible.
Beating Longhorn to the punch … they are working on Desktop search
(iFolder/Simias), Rich widget toolkits (Avalon/XAML, Cairo, XUL,
Mozilla, Gtk), and High-level multilanguage runtime (Mono/OSS Java).
Talking with Nat after the presentation, I asked him about kernel
dependencies … he indicated that he could not see where there would
be any kernel specific code introduced. So (per the GNOME
homepage) it will remain that “GNOME is a Unix and Linux desktop suite
and development platform.” More UNIX-compatible software …