McGrath: Proposal for a new Fedora project [LWN.net]

McGrath: Proposal for a new Fedora project

Posted Oct 1, 2010 18:48 UTC (Fri) by DiegoCG (subscriber, #9198)
Parent article: McGrath: Proposal for a new Fedora project

I don't mean to be offensive, but my first though reading this was: "OK, someone just drunk the Web 2.0/Ajax/HTML5/GoogleOS kool-aid"

First of all, it's not like these ideas need to be evangelized anymore. Every geek on this planet already knows that HTML5 is "the future". In fact, the future is already here. Studies say that people spends 50% of their time using the web browser. A web browser is most of what Joe User needs these days. In one conference, Google said there hasn't been any killer desktop application for Windows since Gmail was released, and it's true. All the new things are being developed for the web.

We have seen all this in the past. In fact, Unix was developed with the "cloud" mindset. Unix shells were the 80-90's "web services". And clients didn't going away. Yes, there were "dumb terminals", but then Linux appeared and it became fun to run a unix client on a PC. The history's wheel isn't stopping on HTML5 and Google.

The client isn't becoming irrelevant. The browser is slowly becoming the most used app development toolkit, a substitute for QT/GTK, yes, but that's not bad. Instead of QT, I suppose will use the Webkit toolkit (plus javascript libraries). But client's aren't going away. iPhone is succesful largely because it's a great _client_. Native desktop apps are becoming cool again thanks to iphone. While everybody was blogging about how the desktop was dead, Apple asked developers to write desktop. There are hundreds of thousand of mobile apps - but before iPhone's announcement everybody was swearing that the web was the only future possible. These days, the success of a mobile platform these days is not measured by how well it runs the internet (all platforms do well in that front) but by the number of native desktop apps that are developed for it. In the next years a mobile phone won't be worthwhile because of its HTML5 implementation (all them are similar). Running HTML5 will be the boring standard, it will be the _client_ side what makes a mobile phone different.

The problem for Fedora/Gnome isn't HTML5, it's Android. Android has become Google's desktop, development platform and distro. Where is my Gnome Mobile? Where is my KDE Mobile? Where is my Gnome Mobile App Store? Where is my Fedora Mobile distro for HTC devices? Yes, Gnome/KDE/Fedora are becoming irrelevant for end users, but only because end users are going mobile and there is not a KDE/Gnome/Fedora for mobile devices, only Android. That's what it needs to be fixed.

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McGrath: Proposal for a new Fedora project

Posted Oct 3, 2010 11:23 UTC (Sun) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

More phones will come after phones.

There are a few major things people want from computers (in no particular order):

1. Get work done.
2. Play games.
3. Communicate.

PCs are only good at communicating when your at your home. Tablets have the same problem. Netbooks and laptops are more mobile, but awkward.

Essentially if there is anything 'beyond phones' it's going to be nearly disposable tablet-like terminals. Pick it up, login, use it, then leave it for the next guy. After that implants into your eyeballs or something like that.

The Linux desktop is behind the eight-ball because of the technical problems and fragmentation that people refuse to address and instead try to patch over with package management systems. The web is good for Linux desktop because it takes the distribution of applications out of the hands of the distributions. It eliminates the middle man.