On Mon, 27 Nov 2000, Antonio Campos wrote:
> The new MAC OS X can be a tremendously serious competitor for Linux/BSD,
> etc... It can very probably take a lot of the Linux terrain if nothing is
> done in respect to the graphics subsystem (and the sound subsystem, by the
> way).
Beleive it or not, I think you are the first person to mention this on this
list. You're right in a way -- the MACOS is going to draw off your "power
users", that is, people who don't program but consider it normal use to
have all sorts of multimedia blaring away at once. MACOS already has a
large portion of the serious DTP and audio processing market.
> Although all of this is known by many people (the GGI list, X list, and even
> kernel lists), believe me when I say that many more people believes X to be a
> marvellous graphics subsystem and doesn't need improvement. And this is what
> has to change. That's why I suggested the idea of promoting KGI in
> publications like Linux Journal and the like.
Let's be realistic here -- as far as end users are concerned, what will
get their attention is not GGI/KGI, but Berlin, as it is a true replacement
for X. GGI/KGI is only a back end; most people see the windowing system.
About GGI/KGI, the X people as a whole have been ambivalent-to-negative,
and the Berlin people have been pretty enthusiastic. This means the two
projects should look to deliver to Berlin everything that Berlin needs as
a top priority. That means feature/memory management, which means developing
a GGI feature/memory management API and hooking it on the back end to the
KGI intraface, in that Steffen is way ahead of LibGGI+extensions in this area.
> An example (yes, I know I'm repetitive): I have a lot of friends that know
> about and even use Linux, but neither of them know about the
> GGI/KGI projects. But they all know about X, Gnome, etc. So, I consider this
> to be a lack of promotion.
You are dead on that LibGGI/KGI need promotion -- but not to end users.
Promote Berlin to the users, when it is ready to take on X. LibGGI/KGI
need to be promoted to serious bare metal hackers and to creative and
resourceful software architects. We need to draw in more of the type of
people who aren't afraid to panic their kernel; who are serious enough to
set up a serial console so they can work while their screen is foobar;
who know how to use and actually have a sick affection for strace and
ksymoops; who know what all the flags on gcc and ld do; and yet, have the
patience to learn the team project rather than striking out on their own;
who understand and abide by good coding; and who aren't so burnt out
after work that they don't feel like blowing most of the weekend doing
what they probably do at work.
Such people are rare. We're very lucky to have the ones we have. Get more,
and don't let the grand wizards waste their talent on stuff like maintaining
the WWW pages -- that should be done by people who may not have the
background to complete LibGGI/KGI, but who know how important it is.
I tell anyone I get to know who I think has anything to offer about LibGGI,
and discuss why it is needed. I haven't scored us another wizard yet, or
even a webber, but I'll keep trying.
--
Brian
