Sun’s Throw Away Desktop

November 2, 2005 12:22 am General

This story was interesting, if a little on the bitter side. While I’ll always have a fond memory of our time developing a Linux based product, despite being fraught with difficulty, especially when your base distribution vendor gets bought by another company – do the math. Doing the ‘Ximian Desktop’ thing is hard, and without any decent control over the platform you’re stuck in a world of ‘will not fix’, hacks and workarounds. It’s not pleasant from an engineering point of view, and from a business point of view, I can appreciate the decisions being made too. Tom seemed to unfortunately get caught up in that frustration.

The good news is that the code is available for most of the core components of the desktop [GNOME 2.10 currently, GNOME 2.12 to follow real soon]. With our build environment as it is, there’s a collection of RPM spec files for you to build any packages that you need to. The rest of the components will all be available in due course as announced last week.

However, we’re following all the same engineering principles that we had on JDS Linux with our OpenSolaris work, to create an easy-to-use desktop, and I personally think we owe it to ourselves to see if this gig works for a while. I for one welcome our new evil overlords – at least there’s a better chance of being able to work with them and get the right projects started from a desktop point of view. I sure as hell haven’t seen the ‘holy war’ fanatics that are mentioned – everyone have been nothing but hugely helpful towards the desktop team. Don’t judge a project based on one or two people – dealing with Linux should have taught you that by now.

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