[Sussex] The Definitive Desktop Environment Comparison

[Geoffrey Teale]

On Tuesday 18 March 2003 6:44 pm, Mark Harrison wrote:
> John,
>
> Are you seriously contending that because a reviewer has rated a Microsoft
> product above a Linux one, it is evidence that they have been tainted or
> bribed? I'd say that _that_ represents a viewpoint more biased than the
> reviewer showed, albeit in the right direction :-)
<snip>

I have to say I agree with Mark here.  I think the reviewer was giving the 
opinion he honestly held.  John is right that it may not becompletely 
objective, but other than giving the machines to someone who has never used a 
GUI before you could never achieve that.

Now I have to say that I find the XP UI rather _worse_ than the Windows 2000 
UI, but it still isn't really a bad UI.   He also gave fair coverage to 
BeOSand rated it highly.

I would have to say that if he was purely Window orientated in his UI 
experience he would probably taken KDE over OS X any day - because it is a 
much closer experience for a Windows user.

Maybe what he's actually pointing out is this - his winners are all 
proprietary GUI's (Windows, Mac OSX, BeOS) - in all cases it is fair to say 
that they (and the applications that run on them) are more consistent than 
Open Source desktop solutions.  Why is this?  Well it's obvious really, 
because everyone had different ideas and they went of and implimented them.  

So whats the answer?  Well, again, it's easy - what is the common ground of 
UNIX desktops ? X Windows.  Why?  Because it standardised and was "chosen" by 
popularity.  In Linux we have two very popular desktops (GNOME and KDE) these 
two parties are now working with FreeDesktop.org and big companies (Sun, 
RedHat, SuSE, IBM) to work out standards that allow them to use standardised 
setup files and common themes, etc... etc.. when this is achieved (and we're 
talking this year -things are well on their way) the consistancy problems 
will be solved for any application developers who choose to follow the 
standards.

Standards are important.  LSB and free desktop.org standards would allow all 
RPM based systems to use the same install packages and have commonality of 
setup fro applications and environments.  Where does this leave Debian and 
Gentoo?  Well, they both are LSB compliant _except_ that they don't use RPM - 
this isn't an issue as they both use other (read as "_better_") package 
management systems, and on the Desktop standardisation front they'll benefit 
just as well as anyone else.

With (apparantly) 40% of all employed developers now developing for LINUX as 
their primary platform  at work (that's not just desktops, in fact probably 
hardly any of it is even Client/Server these days) these standards will be 
important.

Now something I would dispute was his use of  programming environments as part 
of his review - not because it isn't relevant - for businesses at least it 
is, but because he's talking out of his arse - I can here and now do the same 
thing as him - here's my take:

I've programmed GUI applications using BeOS devkits, Xlib, Gnome/Gtk+, Qt 2 & 
3, MFC, and a little Cocoa (I've also coded in QNX Photon, MOTIF and Java 
Swing.. but I'll skip them)... and in order of elegance they'd come as 
follows:

1. BeOS devkit
2. Qt 3
3. Cocoa
4. Xlib
5. MFC
6. Gtk+

In order of ease of learning they'd come:

1. Qt3
2. BeOS devkit
3. Cocoa
4. Gtk+
5. Xlib
6. MFC

... and finally in terms of "power" (very vague term that):

1. BeOS dev kit
2. Qt3
3. Cocoa
4. MFC
5. Xlib
6. Gtk+


... but before anyone gets excited - this is _not _ a fair comparison.  Those 
libraries vary greatly in scope.  Qt3 is a complete development environment 
above multiple operating systems and as a programming experience it has more 
in common with Java -  the BeOS dev kits are the _complete_ system libraries 
for BeOS, so their power is limited only by the power of the OS, they also 
happen to be very elegant.  XLib and Gtk+ pretty much just handle GUI things 
(though XLib and thus Gtk+ are particularly powerful as GUI libraries go).

All of this is pointless.  More important is this - Windows has VB and VB.Net 
and some seriously nice IDE's that make business focussed development look 
easy (note the word look) - businesses love that stuff.  The only decent 
LINUX IDE's are for C/C++ or Java.  Mac OSX has some seriously good 
integrated scripting.  In  each case there is a "default" choice for 
development.  We have plenty of decent scripting languages, with decent 
support - but very little in the way of decent IDE's for them - and more 
importantly, even though there is a lot of library level support for these 
languages, there is a dirth of information available about it!

This is where we need to improve and it's where paid employees of big Linux 
vendors could really be doing some good.  What seem to be lacking for a lot 
of people is _decent_ documentation.  The howto's and the FAQ's and such like 
are all well and good, but most of them are out of date, imprecise, they 
suffer from only giving information for Red Hat 6.2 (or A.N.Other archaic 
system).   That is where open source is failing, it'sa boring job, and that's 
why someone will have to be _paid_ to do it. 

OK.. now _please_ I want some to tell me why all of this is wrong :-)

-- 
GJT
tealeg at member.fsf.org
Free Software Foundation