For one, I have fallen to the darkside: qt5 and KDE have won me, after spending a bit of time tweaking a KDE install I can't get over that the ideology underlying all the eyecandy is what I'm after. I am still hesitant by the stupid reliance on having their own libraries for everything, but in recent years the KDE camp seems to be getting more inclusive, so I guess now is the time to jump on that bandwagon. I know that Plasma Active and Plasma Workspaces is the future, even if one needs maturity and the other desperately needs optimizing.
But there are other realities to the Linux desktop that are coalescing - and I think we are in the home stretch of the final maturity of the platform, at least when Wayland hits the ground running. All the old and ill thought out technologies of the 90s are mostly gone, and as we plateau the efficiency of the classic computing paradigm, the requisite technologies to support that reality are finally emerging. Here I want to talk about what they are, and why I feel that way.
- Linux Kernel: For its monolithic, toss everything in kernel space, write it in Assembly, and make it the most illegible mess of a massive project ever, it does work, and now that pretty much every device and server exists in some elevated kernel-daemon unsolicited love affair, it is fast and stable. Be it the DRM and DRI for video, ALSA for audio, the IP stack and IP tables for networking, the file system implementations, or the core CPU scheduling / memory management, hardware is finally coming under the control of the kernel for the first time. The only real great leap I still see on this front is the implementation of openCL pervasively throughout the kernel and support infrastructure to utilize graphics hardware on consumer products appropriately. We still run all this stuff cpu side, and a lot of it can see some gpgpu optimization. This is still a few years out, and it will require the usage of gallium throughout the underlying system as an emulation layer on server and ancient hardware without openCL capable gpu hardware, but a slight memory overhead and constant instruction cost across the board will absolutely be worth taking advantage of the most pervasive modern hardware inclusion - a large collection of weak, high latency, high bandwidth parallel compute units, that are becoming increasingly generic for purpose.
- Comprehensive user space daemon collection: This is a meta topic. I Think the Linux space is finally stabilizing on a collection of portable servers to intermediate the kernel hardware control that are sufficiently feature dense to support any use case. Their continued active development means they are much more likely to adapt to new technology faster than having KDE / Gnome / XFCE / LXDE / Openbox / etc try to do everything their way and have no portability.
- Wayland: Once X dies and Wayland takes over, video on Linux becomes "complete". Video drivers then just need to implement the various dialects of openGL and CL, and not worry about integrating with a rendering technology from the 80s. The simplification of visuals will be the greatest boon since completely fair scheduling. I absolutely want to get involved on this front - I see a cohesive, beautiful and simplistic delegation of responsibility emerging that can and probably will prove revolutionary, especially as gaming comes to the platform in force. I hope Valve motivates the adoption of Wayland quickly as a consequence.
- Pulseaudio: It might be latency heavy, but that can be optmized. Having a central audio manager though is essential, and the generic nature of Pulse means it is pretty much an unstoppable force in audio at this point. As long as it continues to let audio nuts stick Jack in (maybe they could even cohabitate the space better, letting certain applications get Pulse passthrough to Jack, or supporting Jack as an independent audio sink).
- Systemd: Old init styles are out, and systemd does a lot right by being significantly based in file manipulation. To enable and disable services, you just add or break file system links. Systemd might be a kitchen sink, but considering it sits on top of a kitchen sink kernel, it seems appropriate. Systemd is rapidly becoming the user space kernel, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. However, the configuration and speed is superior to the competition.
- Dbus: The last two used dbus as its IPC channel. KDE has adopted it, Gnome made it, it is here to stay as the main protocol for IPC. Message passing is the way to go, and dbus can optmize itself enough internally to make it perfectly reasonable in 99.999% of use cases. It might not be that generic socket layer I liked in my earlier postings, but a lot of about Linux isn't pure, but it still works.
I think KDE has the right ideas. It might be slow, the default theme might be ugly as hell, but it is so freaking configurable in a really intuitive way that I can't fault it. XFCE, LXDE, and any other project that aims at "simplicity" I feel is really copping out nowadays. Simple can't mean "doesn't provide a complete package" but it is being used as an excuse. Simple is when you have good defaults, and multiple layers of configuration (in XFCE's defense, it nails this - you have the defaults, you can tweak the panels by context menus, you can then go into a system settings gui tree, then you can enter a gconf database editor and tweak even deeper, there are 3 layers of configurability, each incrementally more fine grained, larger, and less comprehensive, but it nails the format).
KDE is not golden - I have avoided it for a long time. They depend a lot on eyecandy but the optimizations just aren't there. But the ideology is in the right place, having targeted generic computing and mobile computing as completely different use cases, having configurability as a top priority, and having reasonable defaults. Except for the dumb desktop Cashew, I have no idea why that isn't just a removable panel, and it is concerning that the devs care to keep it so badly when it has strong community backlash. But it is the right direction to go in. I don't think the Ubuntu model is going to peter out much longer on the fumes it runs on - the end game just isn't there. Ubuntu TV might get good when it lands, so maybe it can take a niche as a DVR OS that also functions as a powerful desktop, but it won't make it in the mobile space, and it alienates its core users by stuffing ideology down ones throat. Also, Linux's strength is in a collaborative platform like KDE or XFCE, not in some principled elite council delegation platform like Gnome or Unity.
So I'm going to put my OSS contributions towards the KDE stack in the future. I prefer C++, so qt is a natural fit. razorQT is a neat fork, but ultimately it is too similar to the kde platform to compete. I feel anyone who would migrate over to razor would be better suited just optimizing KDE to make it run better than to try to start over from scratch again.
If KDE becomes the first comprehensive desktop with Wayland support, that will be the final nail in the Gnome coffin. The future of the Linux desktop is pretty much here, and it isn't a distribution, it is a software suite.
I don't really like how much effort KDE puts into competing in the application space though. In the end, the desktop is there to frame applications, not permeate them, and while Calibre is a great book management framework, I think the KDE project spreads itself too thin trying to provide the desktop and the user experience front. So while I may be running a KDE desktop, I'll be using Thunderbird, Firefox, Deluge, Skype, Clementine (which is a fork of Amarok... heh) and Libre Office rather than the underdeveloped KDE alternatives, because theose other projects have focus on one product that makes it all the better. That is what makes FOSS best - people congregate around projects with clear objectives and goals, and make them happen, not nebulous archives of thousands of projects trying to reproduce the work of another million developers in other projects. So if I end up getting a KDE development setup going, it will be working on the core. Though Dolphin seems to be a pretty good file manager.
Also, GTK applications in a kde dark theme look like ass. I'm going to have to blog about fixing that.
No comments:
Post a Comment