Comments on: GNOME and the Cloud

By: bluebirch

bluebirch — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 23:30:16 +0000

Are you thinking of the GNOME OnlineDesktop?

http://live.gnome.org/OnlineDesktop

By: assente

assente — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 21:57:32 +0000

You are right. The data should be shareble while the toolkit must remain local.

By: Daeng Bo

Daeng Bo — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 10:35:02 +0000

I would like to see About Me become actually useful and help to integrate Gnome with online services (whether “cloud” or not). If I tell Gnome my email addresses, IM logins, and calendar location in About Me, there’s no reason this information shouldn’t be used by Evolution and Empathy.

It would be nice to use About Me as a single dialog for the easy setup of common online services like Google. I don’t know of any other comprehensive services off the top of my head, but Gnome should definitely have the option to use any service APIs just by telling Gnome the username and not having to configure individual apps. Telling About Me to use my Google (or Zoho or whatever) login should be sufficient to have whatever out-of-browser functionality the service offers.

Oh, and a pony, too.

By: Jonathan Lozinski

Jonathan Lozinski — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 09:57:23 +0000

Isn’t it more likely that our desktop gets compromised if it’s tighly integrated into the web. The web is a nasty place these days, I’d rather know that my app was speaking http, and who to, than the desktop doing so and getting owned.

By: Howard Chu

Howard Chu — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 04:12:56 +0000

It sounds very much like you’re asking the old question “why don’t I have roaming profiles for other apps besides my browser?” Netscape did a decent job of things ‘way back when with LDAP-based profiles. The current DBUS/DCOP/whatever is somewhat pointed in the same direction, just using much more bloated protocols to get there.

As an aside, handwaving all the real problems away with “that’s an implementation detail” isn’t going to help. Despite what telcos ads’ may say, high speed connectivity is not ubiquitous or pervasive, let alone cheap. It might be the Way of the Future but it is definitely NOT the way of the Present. For now, it’s more reliable to just carry your data with you, on a USB flash stick or whatever. (Also, unless we discover an ultra-cheap/ultra-efficient new energy source and energy storage device, you’re just not going to see ubiquitous disconnected service in the near future either. It takes too much juice to keep little transceivers active all over the place.)

Distributed access to user configs/profiles/whatever was a solved problem back in 1996. There just wasn’t enough Internet yet to warrant it…

By: otte

otte — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 17:15:55 +0000

Asking if GNOME should be in the cloud is a question I do not care about. The answer is “yes”. Everybody arguing that we should keep his stuff separate from it, needs to be way more convincing than “I don’t like it” or “it’s a security risk”. Those are implementation details. And of course, you’ll always have the option of checking “disable networking” on nm-applet.

And what do I mean with “the cloud”? I mean that I don’t have to care what device I’m using, all my settings, programs and files are already there. No more “oh crap, that text file is elsewhere”. The only example I have for where this works now is GMail. When I delete an email on my desktop, it’s gone on my laptop, too.

And for integrating with webservices, I don’t care. In the worst case, we can build our own webservices. Even if those are just forwarders to other services. It’d allow us to keep the interfaces up-to-date.

By: Simon

Simon — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 09:43:09 +0000

@Craig
Yes, that’s a thought that’s occurred to me too – some sort of decentralised social networking. Post whatever you want to your own site (or to some 3rd-party service, if you don’t want to run your own), and rely on some magical piece of software to gather up all the information provided in the same way by your friends.

There are already scattered technologies that go partway – RSS/Atom feeds of blogs, web calendaring, etc – but right now, they’re all unstructured. And that sort of takes us back to the standardisation problem – how to find a photo album on Flickr vs Picasa vs Facebook vs some random person’s website.

By: Robert Smol

Robert Smol — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 23:19:47 +0000

How about to start with something much more simple.

Please allow user to fill its accounts in ‘About Me’ dialog. First time user can benefit in following ways:
* gnome can automatically start Piding, Emphaty or other IM if user has pre-configured at least one account. Info then will not have be entered multiple times in various applications.
* other applications can pull for this information (Ekiga, DropBox, Firefox Plugins?, Banshee-Last.Fm) and use it whenever appropriate.

I am not GNOME hacker but is this feasible?
I guess store it in the gnome-keyring and write DBUS service Accounts? What do you think?

By: Craig

Craig — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 21:11:41 +0000

Interesting comments about moving gnome to the cloud… and coincidentally I was thinking the other day about something similar to the other comments…
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Why should I post my data to flickr, google docs/mail, facebook, etc., for it to be accessible to my friends? Why can’t some peer-to-peer style blog app be created so that my friends can easily see my latest thoughts and photos, without me “selling my information” to any of these online services (having it archived forever out on the interwebs). Certainly with computers being available 24/7 (or at least the home media server), there is no need for me to use a hosted data store.
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I can appreciate there is value in online communities, and tracking the conversation, but the majority of my information is private, and only of use to my friends, and I have no interest in it being indexed and stored forever out on the web for some marketer to profile me with. What has value on the web should be on the web… and what has value locally should stay local. [at the bare minimum, some temporary signed caching within my trusted group of peers could take care of times when my PC wouldn't be available]
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[btw... then I would pay for my bandwidth, rather than the selling of my information pay for the servers out on the web]

By: shmook

shmook — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 16:41:29 +0000

I’m a KDE user. But I always liked GNOME’s look and feel better than KDE’s. What keeps me from switching to GNOME as my main desktop (apart from that I can type Alt+F2″konsole” much quicker than Alt+F2″gnome-terminal”) is that I can have konqueror tabs with local dirs, remote dirs (via ssh, ftp, smb, anything) and web pages all side by side. Even better, I can efficiently switch between them through keyboard shortcuts.

Being used to that concept, the separation between web pages and directories feels awkward. Funny that so many commenters are afraid of that…

And having the ability to store your setup on a remote computer (without being forced to do so) is a very attractive idea. If you don’t have your own secure server, you can still store everything locally.