Re: FW: Nautilus and Setup Tools

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

On Tue, 2001-10-30 at 05:47, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu> writes: 
> > Definitely. GNOME needs to functioning and/or thinking of itself as an
> > operating system rather than a thin graphical shell over the "real
> > operating system".
> 
> Neither of those. GNOME might think of itself as a component designed
> to drop in to an operating system and function seamlessly as part of a
> usable OS. Remember most users will _not_ be downloading GNOME from
> gnome.org, they will be getting it from OS vendors.

Maybe we are using a somewhat different definition of operating system.
When users install MacOS/X, from a technical standpoint one could argue
that they are installing the BSD operating system with the Aqua
graphical shell. Of course, very few people think of it this way because
unless you start digging the entire user experience is Aqua aka MacOS/X.

I prefer the Solaris term "operating environment" because it focuses
less on the technical aspect. With *nix its quite possible to give 4
users exactly the same system configuration and have 4 different
operating environments. When my friend Patrick Perry sits down at a
GNOME desktop, its a program launcher and a window manager for
terminals. Patrick's operating environment is the *nix commandline
interface with windows, a graphical shell. In contrast, when my father
sits down at a GNOME desktop (I should preface this by saying that he's
fairly familiar with the Unix commandline and Linux in particular), its
just that. His operating environment for the most part *is* a GNOME
desktop. Now sometimes he uses the commandline to copy files from an NFS
server, figure out why a particular program is crashing, or when he
wants to change hardware configuration, but most of his work is done
within the GNOME environment (well, that and Java applications).

To be honest, other than the times he has to drop into the commandline
to fix things or when vendors play with GNOME in ways he doesn't like, I
don't think he really gives a damn whether he uses RedHat Linux or
Solaris or Debian or FreeBSD or Mandrake. In terms of his actual user
experience, RH is not his operating system/environment (though
technically it is). The distribution is only visible when (in my
opinion) it messes up - when it doesn't handle something transparently
or provide a way to perform an operation from GNOME. He would much much
rather learn how to configure his system through GNOME than to have to
fool with the underlying distribution.  In this sense, he probably
represents the majority of computer users in the world with one notable
exception - he has the *option* of dropping back to the commandline. For
most computer users once they have failed to do something from within
the graphical interface, they have failed to do it at all. Period.

> One bit of braindamage in thinking GNOME is an OS is that we start
> reinventing lots of wheels at the wrong place in the dependency chain,
> because we get the delusion that all apps that matter will use GNOME
> stuff. And that's just not true - it's hubris plain and simple.

A great number of users, particularly current users, do have lots of
"apps that matter" that aren't GNOME/KDE stuff, so of *course* we have
to make sure that GNOME plays nice as a graphical shell. Sysadmins,
current *nix users, developers, scientists used to big iron unix etc etc
will all have this need. But for the majority of what I hope to be
GNOME's next major audience (advanced Windows users) its not hubris.
Many of these people will not be interested in migrating to GNOME unless
they can do almost all their system interaction with GNOME/KDE
applications, and probably almost all of them would prefer everything to
be do-able from within GNOME. Sure, this isn't hapenning tomorrow, but I
would like GNOME to have moved toward this in the not-so-distant future.
The most important difference between distributions to my father are:

1) how much they stay out of his way and just do/setup things right

2) what they have done right / fucked up in terms of changes to the
GNOME desktop (for the most part these are changes that GNOME either
needs to make itself or the distributor shouldn't have made in the first
place)

> At some point, a decent user experience simply requires a lot of
> OS-specific integration work. I don't think there's much way around
> it. And certain kinds of progress are going to require new OS
> features, such as file change notification, and removable media
> handling, and USB/hotplug device handling, and PCMCIA handling, and so
> on. Replacing the kernel with gnome-kernel or the PCMCIA scripts with
> GNOME-pcmcia is just not a solution.

I never suggested this. What we need to provide, and XST does to a large
extent, is a standard *interface* into which to plug this integration
work whenever the system needs interaction with the user. Distributions
will probably always add some of their configuration and such, if only
to establish branding, but there are SOOOOOO many common tasks across
all distributions from changing the screen resolution to adding a new
hard disk. 

GNOME as operating environment doesn't mean that there's not integration
work that has to be done to make GNOME run on the "real" operating
system. What matters is that the *USER* doesn't *have* to care that they
are running on RedHat or Debian or even Solaris to be able to configure
basic things about their system. Because for the most part caring about
what they are running on means they had to use the commandline to get
something done. Hopefully writing XST backends will be easier than
writing their own interface, and will hence encourage distributions to
provide broader coverage of various configuration tasks then they
otherwise would have.

> One of the pesky things about OS integration work is that it has to be
> done _before_ the OS is released. Which is pretty tricky for the GNOME
> project to do.

So we provide XST as a part of GNOME and hope distributors choose to
write XST backends before release rather than re-inventing their own
interface crack for everything.

-seth

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