Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

There is a lot of noise going about these news:

The Foreign Ministry is migrating all of its 11.000 desktops to GNU/Linux and other Open source applications.

That’s good.  Both the noise and the news.  But it’s not the first time that we hear about this or that government office moving to Linux desktops.  It happened before.  What I am more interested in hearing is the “after” life.  Something along the lines of “Look, we moved to Linux desktops one year ago and we are doing better than ever.  We are happier and we also spend less money”.  How many of those moved roll back to what they had before?  Why did they roll back? How many stay?  How many of those who stay are more satisfied?  How much cheaper it is for them?

That’s what I’d like to hear.

Here is the story about openSUSE 11 with KDE 4.0.4 in KDE.news.  Do you want to know what I thought was so special about it?  I’ll tell you.  It features screenshots of the KDE desktop with some icons.  Yes, this is the first bunch of KDE 4 screenshots with desktop icons that I saw.

Sounds surprising?  Well… imagine how surprised I was, when after seeing dozens upon dozens of KDE 4 screen shots and then trying it out myself I realized that one part of it that was totally unusable was the desktop and its icons.  After I tried it, I was trying to remember any screenshots that had icons on the desktop, and I could not.  There was everything from the “amazing” new menu and lighter file browser to configuration tools and updated tools.  But there were no desktop icons.  And now they are there.  So, I guess, there is still hope for KDE 4.

There is an interesting post at The Open Source Advocate blog - “Win the desktop, and you will win the server“.  Tristan Rhodes, the author of the blog, suggests that in order for an operating system to conquer the server market, it should first conquer (or fight reasonable well for) the desktop market.

I have to admit that when I just read the article, I felt almost like agreeing.  But something kept buzzing me from the inside, so I kept that tab open for a few days.  Now that the post was processed at the back of my brain, I have to say that I don’t agree with that point.

There is, of course, a correlation.  Once sysadmins start using something they like on the desktop, it’s pretty soon that they try to see how well that thing handles server tasks.  So, of course, people using Windows on the desktop were checking out how to make a server out of it.

But.  I don’t think that conquering the desktop is the only way to the server.  Not at all. There are more ways, I somehow feel that those other ways are actually simpler.  For one thing, Linux has never been particularly good with desktops.  However, only the stubbornest and the most ignorant of sysadmins will argue against Linux server superpowers.

Furthermore, real sysadmins (which are, of course, in the minority) clearly understand the differences between a desktop computer and a server.  What’s good for one might not be so good for the other.

And then there is this whole “enterprise” issue.  Big companies (aka “enterprises”) aren’t about desktops.  They are about support services, customizations, and having someone to blame.  If there is someone on the other end of the twisted phone cord, they’ll grab him with both hands.

The historical examples in the Open Source Advocate’s blog post might be related or they might not.  The times were different anyway.  But even if these examples are related, they aren’t as heavy as they seem.  There are many factors to consider (prices, distrubution, documentation, hardware requirements, etc).

What do you guys think?

Accidentally, I stumbled upon a thought provoking post with the following words:

If you’re really using your computer, your desktop should almost never be visible. Your screen should be covered with information, with whatever data you’re working on. I can’t imagine why you’d willingly stare at a static background image– or even a background image covered with a sea of icons. Unless you consider your computer a really expensive digital picture frame, I suppose.

Well said!

I haven’t thought much about this before, but suddenly I realized that I can strongly relate to the above statement.  My desktop is never visible.  And it was always a bit awkward for me to pick a background image (I know use slide show, which cycles through all images in my Pictures/ directory) or a set of icons (I have a few in the corners of my desktop, but I never click on them, cause I never see them) to place on my desktop.

I’m going to set it to a solid color right now.  And I’m going to remove the useless icons too.

What about your desktop?  Does it look something like this?

I’ve got an idea for an application. If you have nothing to do or looking for an idea to practice your mad programming skills, feel free to use this one.

Flickr is an excellent source of images. Better even, all images are tagged and most are available in different sizes. It would be very nice to have a tool that could use Flickr images as desktop backgrounds (wallpapers). Ideally, I would just specify the tags that I am interested in, such as sports, nature, or landscape, and this tool would get the list of images from Flickr that are available in the resolution that I am using. Images could be random or sorted by some criteria, such as posted date or number of comments. If there would be a preview and an easy way to change to the next image (maybe even automatically based on time period) I’d be totally happy.

I don’t see myself programming this anytime soon as I don’t care much for desktop candy. But if one was available there is a chance that I would use it. I also know of a few people who would simply love something like this.