Trying to see the big picture

Posted May 3, 2012 19:45 UTC (Thu) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164)
In reply to: Trying to see the big picture by jmorris42
Parent article: The plumbing layer as the new kernel

I think what's going on here is that there's a difference between Red Hat the company and Red Hat the employees. The modular approach of Linux, with different, independent teams, fits less with the ideas of some influential RH people than the BSD model - 'we design everything'. And almost all of the die-hard desktop people in RH are quite passionate about GNOME when it comes to the desktop so that's what should work, the rest - some even dislike the fact non-GNOME apps 'leach off their work'.

This creates some tension - but they're (part of) the 1000 pound gorilla so though luck.

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Trying to see the big picture

Posted May 3, 2012 19:47 UTC (Thu) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

BTW I'm not saying any of this is bad - the focus leads to good things. I personally like the cleanup and standardization that systemd brings to us and the work on gtk+ object introspection, allowing desktop apps to directly interact with system-level stuff no matter the language they use and all that seems like a good idea. I still believe having higher-level interfaces is a good idea as it lowers the amount of work and hackiness needed for the apps - but that's more of a feeling than fact.