Improving the User Experience for Desktop Sysadmins - Sabayon

While I am rant and raving, I'll extend the same criticism to Hula. There is already egroupaware, which works today. It has a beautiful web interface, lots of users and support, a public open source XMLRPC API for syncing and work-in-progress plugins for Kontact and Outlook. Add one for evolution and you are done.

You can't force open source developers to code what you like and now you think you can tell companies (Novell) what they should do? Please note that OSS is not just about peace and friendship anymore, there's bills to be paid.

Good luck!

Sabayon seems very much independant from gconf and the like, so I don't see how it shouldn't be possible for Sabayon and Kiosk to complement each other. It should be understandable though, that they start with GNOME/OOo/Firefox support.

As for Hula, I doubt that egroupware is as focused (on mail/calender) and elegant as they want Hula to be and they didn't start from scratch, so what's the problem. Often a fresh take on a product can lead to innovation and better results.

As stated elsewhere on this thread, Sabayon is a project that Seth is reporting on as being a Red Hat initiated project. It's not something he's maintaining. (Daniel and Mark are the maintainers). Also, there is already code for Sabayon that does useful stuff (even if it's very much an alpha version); they've had a 0.12 release.

I'm not sure what happened to Storage, though it does seem clear that either other projects took priority or the specific implementation he had in mind didn't look feasible/fun/worthwhile, or something similar to one of these...

As far as "those in similar positions", I'm not quite one of those but I have watched several instances of where it has happened. Here are a few examples: (1) Luis got a whole bunch of Novell managerial responsiblities that seriously cut into his time to run the bugsquad. But he had already trained a bunch of others to be able to handle things, and Andrew, Alex, I and others were able to help out (especially with getting other old-timers, such as Kjartan, to help out a little bit with permissions and such). The team is continuing to expand, too, with Vincent (Noel), Olav, and Sebastien doing lots of awesome work. (2) Havoc has way too much on his plate in terms of projects. But other people had started helping with other projects allowing him to take more of an advisory and technical review role. Metacity (which Rob and I have helped with) and Libwnck (which has now been split into four maintainers--Havoc, Mark, Vincent (Untz), and I). (3) Mark has an incredible number of projects to maintain as well, but Vincent (Untz) was doing so much good work that he became a co-maintainer, allowing Mark to devote more time to other projects while still helping on gnome-panel as time permits. (lots of others) Similar exmaples: gtk+ with Owen and others, in particular Matthias. I believe Evolution has undergone a couple changes of lead maintainers, though they have several full time people working on it so I don't think it's ever a significant problem. Nautilus with Dave & Alex bringing on Martin as a new co-maintainer. Yelp with Mikael and Shaun (though this was a total change of control as opposed to just bringing another person on). I'm sure there's many other examples as well...

I must say I fully agree with the parent. Considered the recent interest in advanced, metadata-rich filesystems and search engines for desktop environments, I would have said that Storage has greater priority than desktop admins needs ...

rehdon

OK, but Seth Nickell shorts down to S. Nickell, which sounds a lot like "snikkel", which is Dutch slang for "dick".

Then again, there are people named Dick by their own mother, so I guess it's not so bad agian.

Hahaha! You make some good points on the naming issue!

Well, if they don't change the project's name it's not the end of the world. I just wanted to note the potential for amusement in the Sabayon name, but I see these matches between names are around everywhere.

After all, Sabayon will hopefully save some keystrokes to us sysadmins, so our hands will become more prone to chilblains in winter :-)

Personally I think it is very dissapointing that some of the core GNOME developpers like Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman never mentions KDE at all if they are talking about desktops.

I'm wondering how much important KDE people are mentioning GNOME when they report about new exciting KDE stuff.

- Rob

Well I really must say that in this instance I very much agree with the parent poster.

Personally I cannot vouch for his comments re how good certain KDE apps are, (as I don't use KDE), although I do use K3b.

Nor can I comment on whether Miguel and Nat "ignore KDE", when making anouncements, perhaps the "important" KDE people do "ignore GNOME".

I ask the question, do we as Gnome users need to do the same? Rise above the pettiness GNOMErs, if it is a valid point and there is something in the comment that could benefit GNOME then why not acknowledge it, and take it onboard objectively?

I find it hard to accept that whenever someone posts a positive comment regarding KDE, on this forum that they are quite often shot down. Perhaps KDE users do the same on their forum, but two wrongs do not make a right.

Having said that, if a comment regarding KDE, or anything posted by a troll is unconstructive comment, (which the parent post is not), don't bite thats what they want, moderate the comment or somehow get rid of it.

Firstly I do understand that this is a GNOME forum, and therefore not for the promotion of KDE. Furthermore I do not believe that anyone would be interested in discussing KDE on this forum.

As for and I quote, "accusing people of playing "Petty politics"", I did no such thing. Not only that I did not use the phrase "petty politics".

If you read my post 'carefully', I merely meant when anybody mentioned "KDE" they were shot down in flames, and noted that likewise would occur on a KDE forum should anyone mentioned GNOME.

As for people who post on this forum for that matter, once again if you read carefully, you'll note that I made no 'accusations about "petty politics", mereley 'pettiness' ie petty comments and flaming, which does occur.

I believe that it is possible to have objective discussion regarding comparative technologies from GNOME and KDE, and that some good could come out of it. Which is the point the poster was making. Perhaps another forum could be set up for this if one does not already exist.

Put simply all I was trying to say is, petty bickering and flaming achieves nothing. If there Trolling, why not ignore it, (they'll soon get bored and go away.

Furthermore, I am not posting my comments anonymously.

Cheers.

"I believe that it is possible to have objective discussion regarding comparative technologies from GNOME and KDE, and that some good could come out of it. Which is the point the poster was making."

Well, I think it's slowly not possible to track anymore, which poster you are talking about. :P But I don't think that anyone has been flamed yet for suggesting objective and constructive discussion of comparative technologies. It is happening a lot on many levels, but it's silly to complain everytime a KDE technology isn't mentioned while GNOME devs talk about a new GNOME technology.

storage and the init replacement were personal projects, Sabayon and X rendering are seth reporting on Red Hat stuff.

The ability to lock down some features has been in GNOME for a year or so now. It's just not easy to administer, because there's no special UI to control these gconf keys.

With Sabayon you won't need a separate UI, plus it looks like it'll deal with non-gconf stuff too.