On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 12:03 AM, Duncan <1i5t5.dun...@cox.net> wrote:
> It may be that this is already sorted on the gnome side, or that all this > talk of gnome-os is simply hot-air, but like I said, I'm a kde user, so I > wouldn't know, tho I'm concerned about its implications for the rest of > us (including kde, since it might well end up with similar > requirements). And I've not yet seen it mentioned in the gentoo > implications context, so I'm compelled to ask. > > I too am a bit concerned with some of the trends here. I recently installed Ubuntu to see how it handles suspend-to-disk and compare Gentoo's support (believe it or not it worked more reliably on my Gentoo install!). However, what struck me is messages like my VM didn't meet the requirements for unity so it was falling back to classic gnome, and that got me thinking. I'm seeing a bit of a trend in the linux world towards major distros and desktop environments building these huge highly integrated platforms. Instead of having core modules that everybody shares and clear interfaces, everybody wants to build their own SysVInit replacement, their own audio system, their own window managers, their own web browsers, and so on. With Wayland on the horizon we're talking about having multiple X11 implementations/replacements possibly. Granted, KDE/Gnome have been doing this sort of thing for a while with arts/etc. However, if arts wasn't working right it didn't really keep you from getting stuff done (unless you are mixing audio for a living). I'm a bit concerned that the future of linux on the desktop is going to be one where your choices are things like Android, ChromeOS, Ubuntu, Gnome OS, or a "KDE OS." Each one would have its own package managers, repositories, distros, APIs, etc. Clearly there is some benefit from the vertical integration (Android and ChromeOS have a very high level of polish, and Ubuntu is approaching this often by just writing their own stuff). Instead of working to influence other projects (which can be frustrating), big distros are looking to just eliminate dependencies outside of themselves. This will be a big challenge for a smaller distro like Gentoo. Obviously we can't just go write our own Wayland replacement, even if we did essentially make our own "systemd" of sorts. Rich
