Well, I've been telling for years now that we were better off with one desktop
that has the flexibility to adapt to everyone's needs.
Be lightweight without graphical mumbo jumbo if desired, be all the visual
monster with tons of effects, be as simple as a task bar and systray, be a
full blown cornucopia of gadgets if somebody prefer that.
Make it configurable from simply to rocket science, from 486 to i7 but have
ONE API. Offer developers a safe base.
The goal of side projects or underdogs like Trinity or others should be an
inspiration to the bigheads, but instead they push their own ideas for the
sake of making a name. When I started linux ages ago I was told the power of
open src was that you do not have to reinvent the wheel over and over again
as you can take code from other projects and start on that.
Desktop Environment developers reinvent the wheel over and over again.
My favorite picture viewer is GThumb. It's GTK so it looks a wee bit different
from qt/kde no matter how much I adapt themes and engines.
It's gui bahviour is gtk and I can't do much about it.
I do *not* have a choice if I want to stick with that program. (Unless I port
it to qt myself. Some choice.)
By now the KDE people should have grasped there is a reason there is Trinity,
there is a reason SuSE has official KDE3 packages again, there is a reason
Gentoo users maintain a KDE3 branch.
KDE4 has tried to overthrow a GUI paradigma that has come to its final form
ages ago and has been like all the WinXP clones for a reason: it's good to
work with.
What we don't need is NOT a more powerful desktop, what we need are more
powerful *programs*.
If I am looking for an old email I use filter fields and whatnot and fancy
keyboard shortcuts. The keyboard itself should be replaces with something
dynamic that offers intelligent macro tasks. Computers as we know them have
gone from 1MHz 8bit with 640k RAM to multicore teraflop 8GB+ powerhouses and
STILL we need to feed them in mostly the same way we did in the 90s.
Where's my Star Trek?
It's partially in my smartphone, actually. I can actually *tell* the nav soft
where I want to go and it recognises that surprisingly well.
But there is no semantic interface, there is no brain power.
I cannot tell it to bypass this and that path, when I do that I have a
limitied set of buttons I have to press (and all the Star Trek air vanishes
instantaneously), where *I* have to do the task's abstraction again. It
doesn' t do that for me, I cannot have it ponder options and relate data to
the situation.
Everything is broken down to running this algo faster and having a new button
there.
What we need is not a better desktop, that's like saying we need a better
hammer.
There is nothing to improve about hammers. The one I get in a hardware shop
has been perfected to its purpose. To say it should have a video camera and a
light so I can better aim at the nail is not how we think. If we need better
aiming at the nail we need glasses and a head mounted lamp.
And there we are again at Desktop Environments: the gnome people develop their
index system, the kde people develop theirs. Neither made anyone write home
about it.
There's the cloud idea, think "Siri". Then again there's trust issues while
the hive mind intelligence *does* lie in the hive, not in the node.
(I don't trust Apple the slightest bit.)
It's time to start making an open source cloud that allows specialised task
bots to have some degree of autonomy granted plus the capability to interact.
Think | .
Leave the desktops alone. All we need to organize our programs is a taskbar,
launchers and a systray. If at all.
Am Saturday 21 July 2012 23:58:03 schrieb Lisi:
> I was at a local LUG meeting today and was very distressed that the above
> view should be expressed, and forcefully. I found it distressing because
> that is quite some allegation - that we and Mate users and Cinnamon users
> etc., (all splinter groups) are actually damaging Linux, doing it harm.
>
> The fact that we are free to digress and disagree is why I like open source
> so much. Take away that freedom and we might as well all use Windows. It
> seemed to me a quite extraordinary allegation. And as I say, I found it
> personally upsetting.
>
> Since Linux without its freedom would not be Linux, nothing would seem to
> me more terminally harmful to Linux than to destroy that freedom.
>
> I am a congenital maverick. I claim the right to remain a maverick and to
> swim against the tide as much as I like!
>
> Lisi
>
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