It's All About Choice

by Eric Foster-Johnson

August 28, 2002 —

Linux has always been about choice. You are free to choose a non-Windows
operating system, such as Linux; you are free to choose which
applications to run; you are free to choose a particular window
manager; you are even free to choose which type of desktop environment,
if any, you want to run.

Sometimes too many choices makes for problems, especially if you only
have a number of half-done packages to choose from. On Linux, though,
choice -- and competition -- has only made Linux software better.

The choices are not always exclusive. For example, I prefer the GNOME
desktop but run a variety of KDE applications. Everything seems to work
together just fine. After a few fits and starts, that type of
cooperation has been the rule for Linux applications.

Having survived the UNIX desktop wars, in which users could not copy and
paste between applications unless they were written with the same
programming toolkit, the cooperation between the GNOME and KDE
developers has proven very helpful to Linux users. While they certainly
don't always agree, by following standards such as XDnd (short for X
Window drag and drop), the GNOME and KDE desktops make life much better
for Linux users.

An organization called freedesktop.org aims to take that cooperation
even further. Led by Havoc Pennington, freedesktop.org promotes and
develops standards for greater desktop consistency. The ultimate goal is
to share configuration files, share file formats, and store all desktop
configurations in a common directory structure.

Formed in March of 2000, freedesktop.org includes links to quite a few
standards at http://www.freedesktop.org/standards. These include
proposals for adding applications to a system tray (using the Microsoft
terminology), support for icon themes, and a common format for storing
application settings. I especially liked the documentation that explains
the X clipboard, http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/clipboards.txt.
The X clipboard, along with the ideas of the primary selection are
powerful, but quite difficult areas to understand, let alone program.

Efforts like this only help the Linux desktops evolve in ways that make
for the best experience for the user.

ITworld