(this is long, opinionated, and all computer jargon--hit delete now)
This is a follow up on Les Schaffer's post on the Linux community and the various struggles going on between the GUI camps.
This summer FreeBSD decided to develop its own branch of the XF86 based X-Window system, keeping it compatible with all the currently existing versions, and of course keeping it free of charge under the GNU license. Their newsletter on this subject sounded more or less resigned to going it alone. They were not originally that involved with the X-Window system and had relied on others. So, it is very good news that OpenLook changed their mind and returned to the GNU model.
In any case, what I assume is going on is that plenty of people realize they are within reach of blowing Microsoft out of the water and they want that so bad they can taste it. Of course technically they already do run circles around MS. What I mean is the system is almost ready for what I would call the informed user level. I am not sure how to characterize this group--people who have used PCs and Macs awhile and are fed up with spending hundreds of dollars every six months, and who are willing to re-learn how to use their computer. Even at my level I can sense how close this system is to overwhelming anything I've ever used from the MS world. The Mac world is now almost entirely devoted to the graphic design, and that is another potential target more or less begging to be blasted. But that is not likely for awhile, primarily because the graphic applications used in a Mac design shops are smooth, fast, easy, and configured to feed the service bureaus and production machines (Linotronic, Agfa, high end film plates). All of that including the servers to run such shops are ripe for something like Unix. These people are especially pissed at having to spend thousands every year just to keep compatible with the latest crap. If the print industry ever switched OS platforms that would create a ripple effect up the line to the design shops, and with that, back to the consumer level of Adobe based software (Photoshop and Illustrator). Not that Adobe is any hero in capitalist pig software, but if they offered a unix version of their product lines, that would signal a serious alternative to the entire print media world. I suspect (besides collusion with their enemy Microsuck) the reason there is no unix version has to do with a capitalist aversion of 'free' anything.
When I say blowing MS out of the water, what I mean is that technically, there is no question. At my mundane user level, this shows up as making my low-end machine work faster and smoother than it does in DOS or Win95. The command line and graphic interface are essentially crash proof, which means I almost never lose anything I am working on. But, it is no where near ready to hit the straight CompUSA consumer market. It is just too tough to learn. Enrique Diaz-Alvarez mentioned this problem indirectly by referring to the installation. Installation at the moment is almost as easy as Winblows. The real problem is the huge variety of hardware available and its almost complete lack of standardization. This means an OS set-up script has to probe the system and then configure itself from a database of available drivers and options.
But. And this is a big but. In order to really start in on a serious desktop war with the commercial world, the free Unix world has to get that first level, ADD (attention deficit disorder) user named Ed, started with a turn key, point and click system. The biggest problem is with so many different hardware configurations out there that it is almost impossible keep up and have it all automatically installed up to a finished running state without any input from the user. That self-configuration script is key to the whole business. At the moment the main FreeBSD kernel does this for the command line. You can use it out of the wrapper, almost without any effort (You walk through a script of multiple choice selections). But you are still stuck with the command line and no GUI. Probably the best intermediate solution (IMHO) is a set-up script that begins with an initially installed and basic command line system. Then by calling the script, the system could be logged onto the Internet into a configuration and testing site, so the hardware GUI resources can be interactive probed and configured from a live running system. Given some basic information, the on-line system could probe and configure the various parts to a complete desktop environment. The reason for running on-line is to keep the new user system running, even if it wants to crash on some mistake, bad input, incompatible hardware, or outright hardware failure. This kind of an on-line configuration set-up would also make it possible for the local hardware vendor to assemble turn-key Unix systems out of the box, getting that first desktop to new users. Such a set-up would also make upgrades a more automated process.
At the moment, there is contest going in one of the camps (I forget which) to write a configuration script that puts together the best looking and most functional desktop. My own taste in these matters is for an extremely bare, very plane looking desktop. So, I use the TWM or 'terminal window manager'--this is the base X-window configuration. The actual appearance is simply a small green box in the upper left corner with labeled bars with a dark gray weave background. Click a bar and a window pops up. The bar labeled 'xfm' is the Xterm file manager and is a window with all the application icons. Click an icon and start an application. Here is the current list:
1. Xterm--a blank window for command line shells (Bourne and C-shell) 2. Xclipboard--a cut and paste clipboard utility 3. Xfmail--the graphic version of MH mail program 4. Graphics -- a subcatagory of graphic applications
a. Ghostview--an ascii to postscript viewing and printing utility
b. Xbmbrowers--a bitmap icon design program
c. Acroread--Adobe's Acrobat pdf file read, view, and print program
d. Xhtml--an html editor, composer, viewer and printing program
e. Xpdf--a generic pdf file program like Acrobat--less fussy
f. Gimp--a Photoshop-like program for scanned photos and art work
g. Xcoloredit--a system color editor and color configuration utility
h. Xfig--an Illustrator like program, font/layout/graphic design
i. Xv--a screen and frame capture, edit, manipulate, save program 5. TeXview--a TeX file viewer and printer utility 6. GnuEmacs--text editor/e-mail/news/browser/programming environment 7. Xemacs--same as above, different GUI (headed for de-install) 8. StarOffice--an office suite package 9. Netscape--the latest 'Communicator Gold' version for FreeBSD 10.Toolbox--a subcategory of file and program manipulation tools
a. Exe--a program and script execution utility
b. Xxgdb--the debug stepped version of the above
c. Make--the system compiler/linker
d. Gzip--compression utility
e. Tar cfv--a compression script used for system back up/archiving
f. Zip--the Unix version of Pkzip
g. Uuencode--an en/decoding utility
h. Grep--a system process utility
i. Xtar--a compressed file/archive viewer/extractor tool
j. Xcorral--a C++ programming environment/editor/debugger 11. Hosts--a subcategory of Internet hosts/tools
a. Tsoft--an rlogin script to my ISP shell account (also FreeBSD)
b. Nature--a telnet script to login to an old UCB account
b. Ftptool--obviously an ftp program
c. Lynx--a text based Internet browser/down loader 12. QMS--postscript printer and spooler.
These are what I run in the X-window system. In addition, there is the standard Unix system and its utilities which are accessed through Xterm, the plain GUI windows.
It is a little hard to get this point across, but the possible system configuration and scale is vast. Not loaded are all the network programs, utilities, monitoring systems, servers, security, and support modules. There are none of the math and statistics applications and only C++ and Perl of the numerous languages and compilers-- and of course none of the various foreign language versions of all of the above--although the dictionaries are loaded (haven't figured out how to link them to StarOffice. I left all that on the CD set, since this is a stand alone system. Even so, df reports:
$ df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/wd1a 31775 17093 12140 58% / /dev/wd1s1f 2225742 1253736 793947 61% /usr /dev/wd1s1e 29727 4653 22696 17% /var procfs 4 4 0 100% /proc /dev/wd0s1 2060032 503680 1556352 24% /C /dev/wd2s1 107412 107380 32 100% /Syq $
The "/C" is the Win95 drive/directory system. You open this tree and pull the files off the Win95 drive, edit them and then save back--so much for MS's goal of 'interoperability"--its already here Bill--wake up. "/Syq" is a removable SyQuest drive with graphic archives on it. The "cdrom" is obviously the cdrom drive/directory. The physical box is an old AT case/power supply with a P55/133Mhz Intel processor, 64M RAM, and 4M VRAM video board. Currently modest to low-end stuff.
The look and feel of the system is ultimately not very much like either Windows or Mac, although there are desktop managers that look almost exactly like these systems. The differences are a little hard to characterize--except to say, that once you get used to them, you feel and act a whole lot more free. And, the entire system is much faster--like no delay or sluggishness in either the command line or X-Windows.
This is also a very forgiving system. You can crash the whole X-window system and the command line and just log into another virtual terminal as root and fix it while the main OS is still running. (You hit ctrl-alt-Fn, where n=1-12--the function keys)
So, there are two things that have to be done very well in order to get over this hump. The first is a turn-key installation/configuration process. And, the second is a completely native office suite with the same look and feel as all the commercial software. At the moment, only StarOffice fulfills this last goal. Unfortunately, they were always a commercial software developer and never made their source code open. They just opened a US division in Fremont, CA and will develop their software in a partnership with Sun. The idea is to have a complete suite run as a client on a workstation network under the Sun version of Unix. They make this suite available for free as a stand alone Linux application. Since FreeBSD loads all the Linux system libraries, this application suite will also run under FreeBSD in X-windows. But it is obvious that StarOffice is headed for commercial competition in the network and workstation market with Microsoft OfficeNT. BTW, the StarOffice interface looks very much like OfficeNT.
So, that leaves GnuEmacs as the native full featured text editor (ignoring iv). Once you get used to this application, you can do a tremendous amount, but there are no embedded objects (OLE) like spreadsheets, data tables, equations and so forth available 'on the fly'. You have to write in Emacs, do equations and custom layout in TeX (a loadable Emacs mode) and put the whole thing together the old fashioned way. On the positive side, many Emacs modes generate clean, uniform ascii, so the files will open in anything the reads and writes ascii. It will also generate any of the available alphabet character sets from Croatian and Cyrillic to several versions of Chinese and Japanese. The dictionaries currently available cover all the European languages. Since it is also a programming environment, you load the particular programming module (major mode) and all the punctuation and format conventions are automatically mapped to particular keyboard layouts.
But, no matter how powerful all that is, the one figg'n thing Emacs will not do is act like a regular office word processor. This has become a pitched war inside the larger OS war. The fact that Emacs probably could be configured as a regular word processor and even make you feel like you were in WordPerfect or MSWord, the fact is the Emacs group, absolutely refuses to write an Emacs mode that works like that. It is a matter of honor and that is that. (The original version of Emacs was written by Stallman, so his legacy is part of the problem). This silly intransigence has had a tremendously crippling effect and essentially made the everyday office worker refuse to deal with it--they simply demand a regular commercial word processor, or else! (Or else demand more pay to learn all this other stuff). One amusing note. I drove out to Walnut Creek CDROM (biggest ftp freeware site on the web) to see the place and buy the CD set for FreeBSD. While I was waiting around (they usually don't have a retail counter), I was talking to the receptionist. She was running MSWord on her computer! I laughingly mention this, and she said, "hey, I have to get my work done on something I can use!"
So, until the Unix world gets out of its purer-than-thou attitude about such mundane things as wordprocessors, spreadsheets and databases, embedding, and GUI page layout, it will continue to pursue ever more sophisticated and powerful applications, that all lay outside common office work tasks.
My own theory is this shunning of everyday office work is one of the primary reasons that Microsoft and other commercial vendors have been so successful. If a complete office suite had been available in some Unix flavor for the PC for free, we would have a very different computer world today.
Chuck Grimes,
PS. If anyone wants a look at various screen captures of what this system looks like, e-mail (cgrimes at tsoft.com) off list and I'll send you some as attachments (gif).