I was disappointed today to hear that the release of KDE 4.0 will be delayed by two months. The delay is caused by the insertion of two extra betas.
But this isn’t a bad thing at all. In fact, I think it shows quite clearly how the KDE crew has a great grasp of the balance between releasing a product as soon as possible, but also releasing it with a reasonably high level of quality.
One computing myth we hear quite often is that of Microsoft Windows offering a “common UI”. That is, one toolkit or framework that is used by all applications, thus giving an experience that is well-integrated and shared. But anyone who has used Windows recently should know that this is clearly not the case.
I’ve met a lot of end users over the years. Some I have quite disliked, most I am indifferent about, but some I will remember forever. One such user I met today at an insurance company. His job was to perform some actuarial tasks for the company. The work he does is apparently quite computationally-intensive, so he had some pretty modern, high-end Sun and IBM workstations at his disposal.
Sun’s Solaris operating system has numerous useful features that really aren’t found in other OSes, including Linux. Every so often I hear a Linux user say, “I’d love to be able to use that feature of Solaris!” One example is in this Slashdot comment, where the poster wishes that there was a ZFS-like filesystem for Linux.
Every so often we hear of technologies being brought together in a way that will mean nothing but performance trouble. After reading an article about IronMonkey, I think we might just be witnessing such a situation.
The article describes the goal of the IronMonkey project as this: IronMonkey is setting out with the goal of mapping Microsoft’s Common Intermediate Language (CIL) to ActionScript Byte Code (ABC), allowing additional language implementations, such as IronPython and IronRuby, to run in the Tamarin Virtual Machine.
Today I noticed an article suggesting the use of Puppy Linux on older laptops. I know several people who have also had some success with Puppy Linux, so it may very well be a good Linux distribution to use on older hardware.
If you haven’t heard of it already, and you deal with the hosting of any sort of a website on a frequent basis, you may want to look into lighttpd. It is truly a remarkable HTTP server. And according to Netcraft’s data for the past few months, more and more people are beginning to realize the power that lighttpd holds.
Those who follow GNOME have probably read about the GNOME Online Desktop. After reading about this concept, I find myself very confused at what it is they’re actually trying to accomplish.
Take what is, at the time of writing, the second paragraph under the “Philosophy” section: Imagine an OS that keeps all its information online, so you can use a live CD as easily as a full installation. When you start up a newly-installed computer, or visit a friend’s house, your whole environment will be waiting for you, with no setup to redo. For the techies, think Stateless Linux Desktop; your files and settings are somewhere else.
I’m sure that most people who follow developments within the open source community have read about Mark Shuttleworth’s high-end, free-software-only laptop idea. While his focus appears to be more ideologically-driven, I think such a laptop would be useful for those of us with more pragmatic concerns.
Understandably, his writing about this topic focuses mainly on the use of Ubuntu-derived distributions on such a laptop. But I think it would also be very valuable for users of systems like FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris and even Haiku.
I’m very happy to see that Ubuntu has been a major force in bringing Linux to the masses. Those users get a better desktop experience that they would likely have gotten using a different operating system, while also benefitting from the low cost and the better security Linux offers. Unfortunately, I see a bothersome trend forming: Ubuntu users who seem to be under the impression that GNOME is the only desktop for Linux.