Desktop Linux cannot be taken seriouslyKey developer quitsBy Nick Farrell: Wednesday 25 July 2007, 08:02A KEY DEVELOPER of the Linux kernel quit because he thought the operating system had been hijacked by corporate developers.Con Kolivas has gotten around to telling his story to APCMag.com. He was one of the few developers who wanted to improve the kernel for desktop performance.He worked on the basis that the desktop PC wa so bloated and slowed down in all the things that matter. He thought that if he had complete control over all the software on a Linux desktop PC he could speed things up. But what he found was that all the Linux kernel hackers were working "stuffing the kernel with enterprise crap" that a desktop does not care about.Kolivas said that the corporate developers were killing performance on the desktop so that Linux could run 1024 CPUs and 1000 hard drives.Faults were being found in desktop machines which could not be duplicated on these huge Linux arrays.Kolivas started writing some code which helped and people did pay attention, at first. However little of the actual code itself ended up in the mainline kernel. However he felt that the emerging challenges for the Linux kernel on the desktop never seem to get whole-heartedly tackled by any full time developer.Kolivas quit because it stopped being fun and he fell out with some of the key players in the Linux game.He thinks that the result is desktop users are complaining that their machines are going slower while corporate problems are patched really fast.
Linux users are as evangelical about desktop environments, the all-encompassing graphical user interface software responsible for providing everything from taskbars to office suites, as they are about operating systems. It shouldn't come as any surprise, then, that the first major release in over five years of the most popular desktop environment available is causing quite a stir. Due to be released on December 11th, KDE 4.0 is bringing exhilarating graphical, usability, and functionality improvements to the Unix-like systems it is designed for—and Windows users will get a taste, too.KDE4click on image for full viewFree software desktop environments evolved from simple window managers that controlled little beyond the placement and decoration of application windows to facilitate multi-tasking. They slowly accumulated features, utilities, services, and applications until they achieved a dominant position in the user's computing experience.If you use a modern Linux distribution, almost everything you see on the screen will probably be a component of KDE or its foremost rival, GNOME. Desktop wallpaper, icons, widgets, panels (flexible applet containers similar to the Windows taskbar), file managers, and configuration utilities are all supplied by the desktop environment—as well as, still, window decorations.The unification of all these packages into a single project serves a valuable purpose. Open source development is notorious for forks, fractures, and, generally, a smorgasbord of competition that, many believe, confuses users and detracts from the progress of individual projects. Desktop environments establish uniform development frameworks that provide a robust base that makes application development less a process of reinventing-the-wheel while also encouraging consistency, integration, and quality assurance in the applications built on top of them.For most desktop environments, this framework consists chiefly of a standardized GUI toolkit (the building blocks of interfaces), themed formats, multimedia infrastructure, reasonably rigid interface guidelines, and an integrated development environment (IDE).By supplying these frameworks, desktop environments become platforms that attract third-party development in the same way alternatives like Microsoft Windows do. KDE has spawned an impressive range of applications, including lots of multimedia and graphics software, text editors, web browsers, instant messengers, a comprehensive office suite, and more. Unlike on Microsoft's platform, however, these applications usually get amalgamated with the KDE project itself and end up being distributed (free of charge, of course) alongside the desktop environment.While Linux users rarely remain exclusive to the programs included in their desktop environment of choice, and most Linux distributions do not even install the full range of those applications by default, it is convenient to have a harmonized base of packages where, for instance, users know that every program can print in PDF format or assign global keyboard shortcuts to any function. Let's look at KDE 4, including its range of freely available applications that take advantage of its new development framework and the latest version of the Qt GUI toolkit.
