Nat Friedman: Evolution *does* build and work on OS X with little or no fuss,
especially if you have fink going; there are half a dozen tiBooks at
Ximian HQ all of which run Evolution. Apple is cool. We like Apple.
But we're not going to spend a lot of time porting and supporting our
stuff on Mac OS X. Someone ran a poll a while ago to try to drum up
support for a Ximian-supported OS X Connector, and the demand just
isn't there.
Why isn't the demand there? Because Mac OS X isn't a free platform, and it runs on expensive hardware. It is not a plausible Windows alternative for our desktop customers, who are mainly large government organizations displacing Windows desktops and big enterprise corporations replacing Solaris workstations. That is where the action is today for Linux clients. It is not in the consumer space, which is where Mac OS X plays.
I'm personally working on converting about 250,000 different Windows machines to Linux desktops, primarily in European government. These are groups of machines which are in various stages of adopting Linux: some early, some very advanced (we have a couple big deployments that I hope we can talk about soon), but all with a lot of pro-Linux momentum.
A lot of that momentum comes from the fact that Linux is free (something not true of Mac OS X, whatever they've gotten you to believe) and the procurement costs for Linux desktops are low (something definitely not true for Apple, which has a policy of pricing slightly above the PC -- a la Bosendorfer or Harley-Davidson). You can't tell a compelling story about cost savings or vendor independence to European or South American governments and also peddle OS X.
I have a G4 at home. They're great machines for individual users, and I even know a few core Linux hackers who are having a lot of fun with them. But if you want to move the needle on the non-Microsoft desktop, you've got to look elsewhere.
Google Zeitgeist has consistently reported Linux user-agents at 1% of their total searches for the last year. I'd like to bump that number and cause some shivers in Redmond. That's what we're focused on, and the way to do that is to target the userbase segments where a Linux desktop can succeed on a large scale.
4. Red Carpet has made inroads in many corporations for software deployment and management. Would you ever consider expanding it to become a front end for apt-get as well, serving as a more elegant synaptic/gselect?
Nat Friedman: Red Carpet has a nice package abstraction layer that allows us to support RPMs and DEBs transparently. You can use the Red Carpet end-user client (GUI or CLI) or our centralized Red Carpet Enterprise product to manage Debian machines just fine. Red Carpet has supported Debian since its introduction.
One of the things that people like about apt-get is having an easy-to-use software catalog at their fingertips, so if you want to install some missing software on your machine, you can do it with a quick command.
Red Carpet gives you this too, and on non-Debian systems, with a commandline and a nice GUI. With Red Carpet, you can type:
rc in <package name>
to install new software from a channel. And you can do this on any Red Carpet-enabled system, be it Debian or SuSE or Red Hat. (Other tricks: with the GUI you can bundle a whole transaction of installs, removals, upgrades, etc and run it all at once; also, try 'rc mount <directory>' to map a directory to a channel).
5. What do you think about the evolution of Gnome in regards of usability and looks when compared to KDE, OS X and the latest Windows? Does the development pace satisfies you? What do you think about the lack of integration between all X11 DEs and the underneath OS system?
Nat Friedman: GNOME is aiming for simplicity and consistency; we're the first open source desktop project to have a documented set of human interface guidelines.
KDE has way more options (the clock properties dialog has five tabs!) and Windows migrants frequently find this confusing, especially people who work in offices. Also, KDE sort of "looks" like Windows, which people frequently find confusing, since it implies that it will act exactly like Windows, which it doesn't (we have partners who have done UI studies that confirm this).
OS X is sweet: it's simple and intuitive, and I think GNOME shares a lot of values with it.
Freedesktop.org has done a lot to improve integration between the desktop environments. Send love over there if you want to improve things. :-)
- "Nat Friedman, Part 1"
- "Nat Friedman, Part 2"
- "Nat Friedman, Part 3"
- "Nat Friedman, Part 4"
