Pinderkent

Today I read yet another criticism of the GTK+ file selector dialog. And I must say, the criticism is completely valid, but nothing new. The GTK+ file dialog has always been one of the shames of the open source world.

Anyone reading this who doesn't agree and hasn't yet looked at the screenshot included in the article linked to above, please go check it out. There is no way that the appearance and layout of that dialog can be justified. It goes beyond a minor bug or annoyance, to the point of the dialog being unusable.

The poor state of the GTK+ file chooser dialog has been noted by a number of other people in the past. This artice, from 2007, goes step-by-step through the pains one must endure to just save a file using the GTK+ file selector dialog. There is an Ubuntu Brainstorm idea from 2008 that is calling for improvements to the GTK+ file dialog. There is a forum post from early 2005 pointing out the various UI design flaws of the GTK+ file selector dialog, plus a screenshot comparison to the much better KDE file dialog. Even regular GNOME users feel it is confusing and needs improvements, and it is also inefficient to use.

In fact, we can go all the way back to this archived screenshot from the GTK+ Web site, apparently taken before the end of January 1999. As we can see, there has been little real improvement over the past decade. While the file selector dialogs of other UI toolkits and environments have evolved and improved over time, the GTK+ file dialog started out lousy, and has remained that way for years. And I don't think it can be salvaged. What's there now needs to be trashed, and re-implemented properly, drawing from the more usable file selector dialogs of Qt, FOX Toolkit, and even Microsoft Windows.

Kubuntu 7.10 RC was announced as available several days ago. I installed it immediately, and I have to say, I'm very impressed! Although it's still just a release candidate, it has all of the necessary ingredients: stability, responsiveness, innovation and coherency.

While other articles will no doubt focus on the many benefits that Kubuntu 7.10 will bring, I'd like to look forward into the future. Namely, this is because of the upcoming release of KDE 4, which is currently planned for December 11, 2007.

Kubuntu 7.10 RC includes KDE 3.5.7. This is the latest in a long line of KDE 3 releases. The initial KDE 3.0 release was over half a decade ago, on April 3, 2002. Even the KDE 3.5 branch initially dates from November 29, 2005. But during this timeframe we've seen much work done on KDE 4.

It's without doubt that KDE 4 will be a major revolution within the open source desktop environment world. The benefits we will see will be enormous:

• Qt 4: An already-responsive desktop environment gets even faster!
• HIG: Greater UI consistency.
• Oxygen: SVG-based icons and visuals.
• Plasma: Combining the desktop, panel and more.
• Phonon: A modern multimedia framework.
• Solid: Better network and portable devices support.
• Decibel: Communication protocols galore.
• Kross: Easier scripting integration.
• Dolphin: A new file manager.
• Sonnet: Spellchecking with automatic language detection.

What's more, we haven't seen comparable innovation from the GNOME developers. When the final release of KDE 4.0 comes around, I don't think that GNOME will really be able to compete any more. It will likely take years for them to catch up, at which time KDE will likely have gotten even further ahead, in terms of quality, capability and usability.

So we may be at a turning point. If the next release of Kubuntu is based around KDE 4, a shift may start away from GNOME-centric Ubuntu, towards KDE-centric Kubuntu. Were Ubuntu to move away from GNOME towards the more capable KDE 4, that would put the Kubuntu project in an awkward position. In essence, they would make themselves irrelevant due to the very act of basing their offering on the best product available.

However, it would also signify a major accomplishment within the open source community, with regards to maturity. KDE 4 will really become a platform that can compete with the likes of Windows Vista and Mac OS X. While desktop environments like GNOME and XFCE would always have their niche, KDE 4 has the potential to become the first open source desktop environment to see a far more widespread usage. This is a very important milestone for the entire community, and also the industry as a whole.

Regardless of what actually happens, the next six months will be very exciting times within the open source desktop environment arena. The impact of KDE 4 will no doubt also be felt by many of the other Linux distributions, as well as the broader BSD and Solaris communities. These sort of widely-felt changes are rare, usually limited to the likes of X.org and GCC. Interesting times lay ahead, my friends!

About a month ago, I considered the factors that were holding back one open source project with much potential, Parrot. Today I will do the same for another open source project: .

Anyone who has used NeXTSTEP, OPENSTEP or Mac OS X knows the inherent power and quality of this API. It was designed extremely well, successfully taking into account OO principles long before other mainstream platforms got around to it. Even now, many years after it originally appeared on the scene, it has very few rivals.

What's more surprising is how little the core API has changed. A NeXTSTEP developer straight from the early 1990s would feel right at home developing software for a recent release of Mac OS X. And as we've seen with Mac OS X, it's a framework that allows for some truly remarkable applications to be developed with relative ease.

So one would think that GNUstep, an open source implementation of such a framework for Linux, *BSD, Windows and other systems, would be quite popular. But that apparently isn't what has happened.

Some people might blame the relative obscurity of Objective-C for this lack of widespread popularity. I'm skeptical of this claim. Objective-C is part of the reason that the framework can be so inherently powerful. Furthermore, Objective-C is just not a difficult language to learn. Most developers these days have some OO knowledge, whether they're coming from C++, Java, C#, Python, Ruby, Perl or even PHP. They should be able to readily pick up Objective-C, likely within a week. So I don't think Objective-C is the problem.

I also don't think it's a problem with the GNUstep implementation. There are some very talented people working on it, and they've done a great job. New releases are made rather frequently. And unlike Parrot, where we see lots of change but very little forward progress, each new GNUstep release does bring actual improvements.

One of the main reasons for its lack of popularity is that it never really meshed well with the other, more popular, open source desktop systems. In some ways, that is understandable. GNUstep has its own paradigm, and its concepts are sometimes at odds with what other desktops, like GNOME and KDE, offer. Somebody wishing to make use of GNUstep applications within the context of their KDE or GNOME installation will face a near-complete lack of integration. The problem is even more pronounced on Windows. Since GNUstep-based replacements aren't yet available for most major types of software, such as web browsers and office suites, at least some integration with existing desktops would be necessary.

The default appearance of GNUstep is an interesting issue to consider. It clearly draws quite heavily from NeXTSTEP. On one hand, this brings a lot of power. The NeXTSTEP-style vertical menus, for instance, prove to be quite efficient. The sizing and layout of toolbar buttons is another area where the NeXTSTEP way brings efficiency. Unfortunately, such things also differ quite significantly from how other desktops work. So on one hand, you want to keep the features inspired by NeXTSTEP, because they do bring many advantages. But they also bring disadvantages, namely because they mesh quite poorly with non-GNUstep X applications. Although there is theming support available, it may not be well-known or accessible to new GNUstep users.

Another major reason for GNUstep's relative obscurity is the lack of any coherent system specifically built around and upon it. That's not to say that there haven't been efforts towards putting together such a system. One notable example of this was Simply GNUstep. It even managed to get some publicity. But in the end, it faltered. I suspect this happened due to a lack of resources, namely in terms of manpower.

GNUstep and GNUstep-related packages are readily available for a variety of Linux distributions and the *BSD projects. So unlike in the past, it should be far easier for a typical user to get GNUstep, and GNUstep-based applications, installed and running on their systems. And we do see interesting work being built upon GNUstep. One example of this is the ��toil�� project. Time will tell if this greater accessibility and innovation leads to more widespread usage of GNUstep.

I'd like to remain hopeful that GNUstep will bloom into an effective desktop environment, capable of competing with KDE, GNOME, XFCE, Windows and Mac OS X. At this point, it may just be a matter of getting more people aware of GNUstep, the advantages it does bring, and the ways around some of its minor problems. If a supportive community could be built up, similar to what happened with Ubuntu, GNUstep could really take off, and provide us with an excellent open source alternative to the currently-popular desktop systems.

We have all no doubt heard by now of SCO Group Inc. filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. This news made me think back to what might be considered the "Golden Age" of SCO. Now, I'm talking of the company formerly known as Santa Cruz Operation, not today's SCO Group. Nevertheless, much of the same software is involved, and that is where my focus will be.

Around 1991 or so, I was at a company that had started using SCO Open Desktop. I have to admit, it was actually quite a pleasure to use. Although I had used Sun workstations for quite a while, seeing that sort of quality begin to appear on x86 PCs was really something.

We have to keep in mind the state of PC-based UNIX systems in those days. Linux was still in its infancy at that point. It wasn't until some time later that it would be suitable for enterprise-grade usage. There was MINIX, but it was clearly not a suitable OS for business use, for a variety of reasons. One of the other options was Coherent, although the companies I worked for never really used it.

Several years later, in about 1996 or so, I again was working for another company that used SCO products. This time, however, we were using UnixWare. Again, I have to say that it was quite a good system at the time. From what I recall of it, it was well-integrated, and offered fairly good hardware support. Even into the early 2000s, when hardware drivers were still offered on bundled 3.5" floppy disks, it was quite common to find UnixWare drivers.

But by 1996, Linux had really started to gain momentum. In the BSD world, FreeBSD was really starting to become a contender. As those systems, along with others like BSD/OS and NetBSD, really started to mature, the need for systems like SCO OpenServer and SCO UnixWare apparently diminished quite a bit. In the years since then, I've rarely seen such systems in use.

Today I was reading about the "Reduced Functionality" capability of Windows Vista. According to that article, Microsoft has now enabled this capability, which renders a "nongenuine" copy of Windows essentially unusable.

Frankly, I just can't see why anybody would want to use Windows Vista. I'm sure the questionable nature of this sort of functionality is quite obvious to most. And it's also pretty obvious how the misidentification of an installation as being "nongenuine" could be quite disasterous. A completely legitimate installation of Vista locking up accidentally because of such functionality could cost an individual or business a great deal of time and money.

Beyond that, we have readily-available, high-quality alternative operating systems that don't bother with such nonsense. These days, Ubuntu provides a very usable desktop or workstation OS. There are other Linux distributions that are more suited for server-oriented tasks. FreeBSD is another alternative for desktop/workstation and server usage. Of course, there are also NetBSD, OpenBSD, and DragonFly BSD. And we can't forget OpenSolaris.

Using such systems is just the safest thing to do. First of all, you get access to virtually all of the software used on such a system. Even if you have no interest in modifying or redistributing it, having the code available allows for inspection, should that be necessary.

The redistribution of such software is usually allowed, and often encouraged. With ISO images typically available for (free) download from the distribution or project itself, one has to worry little about accidentally obtaining pirated software.

And in terms of functionality, the essentials are all there. For many people, the transition would be quite easy. Those who use software like Firefox and OpenOffice.org on Windows could immediately use those same products on Linux, BSD or OpenSolaris.

The hardware support Linux offers today is excellent. For the past few years, I've encountered far more hardware supported out-of-the-box by Linux than I have with the Windows installations I have performed. The need for installing a separate driver is often nil.

So when it comes down to it, it really just doesn't make much sense why any person or organization would subject themselves to Windows Vista. The benefits just aren't there, and the dangers appear to be many. And what's more, there are free alternatives out there that can perform the same tasks just as well, if not better. It's really a no-brainer: Linux, OpenSolaris and/or BSD is the way to go!