Call to arms! A new GUI for Linux

[Austin]

On Sun, 2004-10-17 at 00:01 -0400, Aaron Vegh wrote:
> The apps are here, but they work
> together poorly. Especially now, we have a two-year window while
> Microsoft futzes with Longhorn and people are realizing that there are
> other options out there for their choice of operating system. Right
> now if they attempt to use Linux they'll be sorely dissapointed. Why
> don't we have something that provides something "different" and
> "better"? It should at least have the hallmarks of a system that is
> well thought-out, organized and consistent. None of these features
> exist in Linux today.

Withing the magical two-year window, we are almost surely NOT going to
see:
- unification of QT and GTK
- unification of KDE and GNOME
- an XFree/Xorg interface that is uniform across all applications

We're certainly not going to see the major non-Windows'y stuff disappear
either: motif, windowmaker, tk/tcl, etc.  And we're probably not going
to see a new window system, unless Y Windows gets a load of new
developers, or the FreeDesktop.org server gets more popular, and more
hardware support.

That's all fine and good, as most linux developers are hobbyists or
volunteers, and linux certainly is about choice.

What really would help the "home" desktop, or the "enterprise" desktop
now though, is more dedication to interface standards.  Not silly LSB...
things move too fast and linux is too flexible for LSB... but GUI
standards.  To me, *the* biggest pissoff in linux is that the
Help/OK/Cancel buttons are not standardized.  We spend half of our lives
clicking OK or Cancel, usually without reading the text.  This is
something mostly hard-coded into the app or the toolkit, so people who
want their application to be taken seriously should start paying
attention to the standardization of the "enterprise linux" GUI.  Things
like:
- coding in wxWindows (Audacity looks great in KDE, Gnome, or Windows)
- the Gnome HID (see Gnome 2.8, a good start)
- all things FreeDesktop (many underused great features)
- a rock solid, universal clipboard (still hoping)
- universal themeing (KDE should adopt GTK theme/font, and GNOME the QT
theme/font)

It's important to remember that many of the things we love and value are
part of "hobby linux" or "geek linux" which is great, but "home linux"
and "enterprise linux" is where the big bucks are, and where the future
of the platform is, and unlike the Amiga or BeOS or something, I think
"hobby linux" and "enterprise linux" can coexist quite happily, as long
as they acknowledge each others validity.

Austin

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