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Random FOSS desktop thoughts
!!I am always wishing for some things to happen to the FOSS desktop. I thought I'd share some ideas here, in hope someone might read it. Some of the ideas might seem wacky, or plain nuts. It's my blog and I am free to ramble :)
!!!1 Network Manager
;:Network manager usage can be improved. Lots of programs are using its dbus interface to track the status of the network. However it's behaviour is not perfect.
;:If I am using wireless and i plug in a cross over cable to my friend's laptop it stops wireless first, tries to get address from wire, fails and sets a private address on eth0, and doesn't reactivate wireless that plain sucks.
;:It should leave the current connection, and probe the other one in the background. Then decide which one to use as default route.
;:I can't tell it to create an access point with my wireless card ( atheros using madwifi driver supports that ). I have to do it using command line. I am ok with that, but newbies will complain.
;:It should provide a nice interface to configure an access point. I might be brave enough to create a mockup of such an interface.
;:I can either tell it to disable wireless or all networking but I can't disable wired only. It should be more flexible.
;:It doesn't use dialup when a modem is configured. Sometimes I want to use dialup !
!!!2 Single Signon
;:Multiple password entry points suck. Single signon is a reality and should be configured by default. I spent lots of effort to get it working with the gnome stack. pam , pam_keyring , gnome-keyring , ssh-agent , seahorse-agent, and gnome-keyring aware applications.
I will explain how to get it to work in a different post, once I work out all the kinks.
!!!3 Startup time
;:Slow system startup is boring. Initng is great, but it suffers from inconsistent behavior and performance. It even has a GTK configuration interface. Dunno about ubuntu's "startup". Multithreaded pci and usb probes also help a lot, now available in -mm kernels, soon in a vanilla kernel near you.
!!!4 Power management
;:High power consumption on battery operated devices. I mentioned some solutions before. Refer to this http://phaeronix.net/node/168
!!!5 Instant messaging
;:LAN messaging. I wrote about avahi and bonjour support in gaim before. It needs more work to stabilise and get functional file transfer. Ekiga advertises A/V on the lan using avahi, and launches a call just great. Imagine integration with gaim.
;:Recently gajim got local jabber messaging support http://www.gnomefiles.org/app.php/Gajim
;:Also I read on planet.gnome.org how the guys at collabora got OLPC to do video conferencing http://blog.printf.net/articles/2006/12/19/olpc-videoconferencing
;:Gossip also got video communication; YET ANOTHER JABBER BASED SOLUTION... http://raphael.slinckx.net/blog/2006-12-24/my-christmas-present-gossip-a...
!!!6 A/V
;:Why the hell is it taking so long to get MSN compatible A/V in gaim or tapioca ? I know SIP is cool and all, but if aMSN can do it using tcl/tk how hard can it be ? There are rumors that ekiga can converse with Windows Messenger 5 which is supposed to be using SIP. But no one uses Windows Messenger, because all the cool kids get the latest .NET^H^H^H^H LIVE messenger.
;:Gtalk works since it is a jabber based protocol, somewhat but I didn't test it recently. Yahoo! is a lost cause, unless someone cleans up the mess called gyache.
!!!7 P2P
;:P2P programs are in a state of disarray. Some are good and some are bad. Deluge should soon replace azureus on my system. Nicotine+ is doing a good job. None of the other clients have impressed me.
!!!8 RSS
;:liferea is WONDERFUL but needs RSS categories support.
!!!9 Random
;:There are some individual efforts that should soon become essential in our desktop. Labyrinth mind mapping is cool but needs the help of hand writing recognition.
!!!10 Sticky notes
;:notecase note manager could do with a wiki like core, and it could replace tomboy.
!!!11 Panel applets
;:Some applets would be great to have by default. For example gospy-applet, timer-applet, the enhanced netspeed applet, music applet, contact-lookup applet.
!!!12 Connectivity
;:Bluetooth and IR should be treated as core. The state of their application is pathetic. I imagine a central app that deals with them , and integrates with network manager. It would be cool to have instant dialup through your mobile's GPRS modem, for example. Or use your IR / Bluetooth device as remote.
!!!13 Syncing
;:Opensync framework is shaping up and there are some reports of success syncing devices. it should replace or integrate with the age old palm conduits in gnome to leverage already existing infrastructure.
!!!14 Administration
;:Gnome-system tools needs to be fixed for gentoo :(
!!!15 Browsers
;:Firefox 3.0 is coming soon and is based on xulrunner and gecko 1.9.. I don't use firefox anymore, I use epiphany, but I have firefox because it provides the gecko engine. xulrunner should remove that need.
;:Gecko 1.9 is based on totally new cairo canvas widget. CAIRO ! == PANGO ! Could it be the end of our Arabic and tashkil nightmares ?
!!!16 Desktop indexing / search
;:Tracker. I blogged about it before. It is so worth mentioning it again.
!!!17 IDE
;:Anjuta should get their act together, now that glade is MDI. And they should be more python friendly :)
!!!18 Multimedia
;:Elisa , Jokosher , Pitivi... GSTREAMER ! Yet totem is still lackluster. gst-ffmpeg is not enough, we need libmplayer and gst-mplayer :)
;:Totem still has no interface to load subtitles for the poor souls who need it..
;:Mplayerplug-in is still so much better than totem's plugin...
;:And isn't it freaking time we get a 10-band equalizer in rhythmbox ? I mean the gst plugin is there and we have ladspa .. What are they waiting for ?
;: Tvtime could provide libtvitime, and/or wrapped in a gst plugin, and integrated into elisa. Zapping gnome was a good video capture program, but it is dead.. can it be resurrected and salvaged into elisa ? DVB scanning and tuning would be cool too. A libmplayer would help with these things too.
!!!19 Firewall
;:Firestarter where art thou ? We have so much power in iproute and l7filter and iptables extensions. Yet only the elite can deal with them.
!! That's all I can come up with right now. There's more definitely. Eventually I hope I have a hand in making even on of these come true.
Comments
wow, that's a major sum-up
wow, that's a major sum-up of many stuff you had in mind lately, i think you should do a similar one about arabic linux too.
and since most of that stuff is about GNOME i think you should have some gnome-dev look at them... seriously.
I'll comment on some notes:
#6: i'm sure people have reasons for not doing that, but i guess at that point in the age of the linux desktop, A/V in gaim is becoming a must...
#7: umm, i wouldn't really say that... Azureus is still the prime for torrents (although i don't use it). Nicotine+ is prety good ... there are also more commandline approaches like Mucous (a slsk daemon), that might prove useful... Limewire standard is available for linux, giFT for fasttrack people and amule for overnet(ed2k)...
#12: I think KDE have a much better state for that stuff than GNOME...
#15: or maybe the beginning...?
#17: Agreed!
#18: i personally believe gstreamer is pretty much a lost cause... it adds nothing to the user the way i see it, and is simply a multimedia layer for GNOME. Maybe it will mature one day into something, but that won't happen until it gets wider adoption (no more aRts and KDE adopts it... yea right :P).
late reply
Sorry for the late reply, I was quite busy.
Msameer and I, did start on a list like this for Arabic, but it got lost somehow. Might revive it depending on the outcome of the possible arabic distros merger.
I don't know how to get a gnome-dev to look at it, do you ? :)
How hard can it be to make a plugin to launch ekiga for gaim buddies when possible. Another plugin to provide A/V for msn using farsight's stuff. It might be legally thorny, but being a plugin means it's an opt in.
Deluge will soon have most of azureus's features, with a lighter GUI and memory footprint. Limewire gets the same argument as azureus, as do all java based apps. The rest of the programs are plagued with the same problems. Either they are written in some obscure language that pulls in a shitload of deps, or their interface is mutilated beyond usability.
For basic functionality, KDE and gnome are almost the same. KDE might provide some extra advanced features, but they are too awkward for usage ( last time I used it's bluetooth manager I got lost. )
As to the arabic state in gecko, that cairo canvas will build upon pango, so the situation should get better not worsen. Keep your fingers ready though.
I beg to differ about gstreamer. It is a generic streaming framework. One application is multimedia, and even if it is not mature now, it is already adopted by a lot of applications. It doesn't have gnome deps, and amarok has a gstreamer backend.
gaim plugins: i dunno, but
* gaim plugins: i dunno, but i'm sure it's slightly difficult. I'd have taken a shot at it if i was more experienced with programming.
* sure deluge would be better than azureus... but on Azureus and LimeWire... all the clients are in java, hence all are slow. (unless java stuff is inherently slower on linux which would be another problem). I realize that the amount of azureus alternatives is higher on windows (utorrent, bitcomet). So i wouldn't say the situation "sucks" as in worse than other OSes
* I haven't used KDE in years, so i can't argue.
*i hope it gets better :) with gnome translation complete now which is very good news.
* I guess my comment about gstreamer was completly ignorant. The way i usually see linux audio is either playing stuff - which we know mplayer does better than gstreamer - or making music - for which gstreamer plays no role whatsoever -. However, there are tons of other roles that gstreamer serve (media layer for serpentine and sound juicer, totem, and rhythmbox. all these great apps on only one dependency for multimedia)
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