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Monday October 18, 2004

The Best Unix Desktop

I don't always agree with what Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has to say, but in this article about the best Unix desktop, I think he's right on the money. I'd like to try to formulate why this is and what we can do to try to change this.
As a Sun user for over 20 years, I've seen us provide our customers with several choices. There has been Suntools, SunView, NeWS and X11 applications running with some form of window manager. Then for desktops, there have been OpenWindows, CDE, OpenStep and now GNOME (with KDE on the Solaris companion CD). We've seen various graphical toolkits including SunView, XView, OLIT, tNt, Motif, AppKit, Gtk+ and Qt.
This has resulted in several different look & feels for our users and all of these changes have also not made it easy for our developers. We are now standardizing on a GNOME-based desktop called JDS.

Why is the Aqua desktop the best UNIX desktop? As Steven points out, it's had years and years of HCI work put into it by people who care about ease of use with a passion. How to do things are obvious and intuitive. No surprises. It's also been an iterative process, with Apple taking their previous work and improving on it. But I think another of the reasons for Apples success on the desktop is that they retain control over what they do.

So how do you stand a chance of providing the best UNIX desktop, when it's open source and didn't originate from programmers in your company?

By taking control and providing your own version of that desktop that goes above and beyond what the community version does. This is what we are doing with JDS and involves having our own internal version of the source code and adding in the extra code that is needed in order to make it run seamlessly with our operating environment. And doing this in the most efficient manner possible.
By working with the owners of that code to make sure that our changes get integrated back into the community code, so we don't have to keep maintaining all these extra changes.
By making sure that we provide a complete set of applications that the user would want to see on their desktop, and making it easy for the user to get to them. No clutter. When we want to provide extra functionality, it is organised in a way that doesn't interfere with common tasks, but can still be found and used by more experienced users.
By working with the community and the owners of the desktop software, to make sure that it all has the same consistent look and feel, is easy to use, has good online help and provides the required functionality. This is difficult because not all the developers have the same goals as we do. Sometimes we simply have to retain a separate set of changes that we have to apply for the software on our platform.
By listening to what our customers want and making sure we provide those features, changes or bug fixes in a future version.
By innovating on the desktop, past the community offering. The Looking Glass project is such an example.

One of the hurdles we have to overcome is making sure that there are standards in place in the open source world for how all this functionality is done. This is where the work of freedesktop.org comes in. To quote their webpage:

freedesktop.org is a free software project to work on interoperability and shared technology for desktop environments for the X Window System. The most famous X desktops are GNOME and KDE but any developers working on Linux/UNIX GUI technology are welcome to participate.
freedesktop.org wants to build a base platform for desktop software on Linux and UNIX.

What has this got to do with the picture above? Back in 1998, People magazine ran a competition on the Web asking for votes to determine who the most beautiful people were. They didn't realize what they had unleashed. The Hank prank started, the votes came in, and Hank, the angry drunken dwarf won first place.

This goes to show that you need to know exactly what it is you are trying to achieve and that you have control over what you do, in order to make it happen.

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