Tired of The Good Old Desktop

It seems like people are getting tired of the good ol' "desktop" user interface we've all grown accustomed to within our window managers. A generation that has grown up with Windows, MacOS and X11 has seen the desktop metaphor used and abused over the past fourty years, and it seems like developers and user experience engineers are bent on shifting the dominant paradigm. Traditional users have grown accustomed and comfortable however, making the user experience shifting without a clutch. Instead, the desktop OS is forcing the change instead of building concensus.

Last year John Cook had a great blog post about why forcing users to change against there will may actually be a good thing for everyone. John cites a fantastic example - Microsoft's infamous "ribbon" toolbar. Microsoft Office introduced a new user experience element where menu and tool bars changed based on the document's context, causing elements to magically appear and disappear based on what Office thought they were going to do given the user's previous actions. This was a disruptive change that made many long-time users (including myself) particularly incensed. The resulting usability metrics have proven Microsoft correct however - especially given that prior to the ribbon "90% of the feature requests the Office team received were for features that Office already supported." After the ribbon was forced upon users they began using over four times as many features as they did pre-ribbon. The new user experience helped users discover features that they never knew existed.

This is happening on a more global level now that designers are bucking against the Xerox PARC GUI of old and abandoning the desktop metaphor. Apple's iOS and OS X could be considered the first shot across the bow to re-do the personal computer's user interface, although this wasn't so much forcing users into a new paradigm as it was creating a whole new product line. The first "forced" modern redesign might be considered KDE 4 - and people indeed got maaaaaaaaaaaaad. As soon as 2008 hit KDE 4 was released early, even though the development team publicly admitted that it might still be a bit immature. However the desktop concepts had radically changed and dependent applications needed to be re-written... and it seemed like the best way to get this to happen was to discontinue 3.5 development entirely and publicly release 4.0. The Plasma Desktop and the new widget-based design was something that caused major hiccups with hardware support, driver bugs and subordinant applications. History seems to have justified this change however, and now KDE 4 is a fantastic desktop interface.

Gnome 3 has made radical changes as well and is seeing similar community push-back, just as KDE 4 received upon release. They will likely have the same path however, and gradual acceptance and re-thinking the desktop interface will eventually take root and help users become more productive. I recently installed Ubuntu's take on Gnome 3 with Unity and was disappointed to see a number of features unceremoniously dropped. Even choosing a screensaver doesn't exist as an option. However - despite my own personal bias - the UI worked astonishingly well for a grade-schooler's laptop. I've tried openSUSE a number of times and kids just don't like it... but Unity was a hit. It was organized just as their minds expected it, especially with regards to instant messaging and e-mail.

Many people are now decrying Windows 8's Metro user experience, with its touch-based gridbag layout and full-on contextual menus. I'm guessing Metro will eventually win similar acceptance, although it will cheese off a fantastic number of users in the process.

I've been pretty psyched about KDE 4 and openSUSE as of late but I do have to admit... things are starting to get a lil' shakey. Bear in mind I HAVE NO RIGHT TO COMPLAIN since I haven't debugged a thing or filed a single bug report, but it feels like the gears are getting stripped a bit. Evolution has started to freak out with Exchange servers (and even IMAP), and calendar events don't sync across platforms. KDE 4 is starting to hit odd mutex hiccups where nothing happens (e.g. no applications launch) and suddenly they all launch at once. Sometimes it seems like kio is smacking the entire desktop around. All in all I do love working within Linux and KDE 4 - it has made me far more productive of an engineer. Issues with package building and distribution, however, are cause for concern that the platform can remain nimble enough. This issue considered alongside Attachmate's acquisition of the SuSE platform gives one pause.

Recently, and for the first time ever, I bought a Mac. Never before have I owned or operated an Apple desktop/laptop but I needed to legitimately develop within xcode, which requires OS X, which of course requires Apple hardware. I'm not a fan of paying an "Apple tax" to write software, but when my time to purchase coincided with Apple's refresh of the MacBook Pro line I decided that if I was ever entertaining trying the Mac platform, now was the time. Well, at least until the next refresh.

Whenever I jump around platforms I try to force myself to use it exclusively to do productive work. No jumping back and forth based on the task... force yourself to really work around those odd 10% problems that often plague your user experience. See how well edge cases are handled. Try to bend your mind around the nuances of the user experience. When the MacBook Pro arrived I tried to switch all of my work from openSUSE 12.1 to OS X Lion and move all my correspondance and communication as well. I am going to force myself to bend my brain around a new way of doing stuff... and hopefully I'll march past my frustration and objectively see if I'm more productive or not.

Passwordless Login Haters

Password-less logins via an X11 login manager has always been a misunderstood topic. Just search for "passwordless xdm" and you'll see tons of flamewars started by someone innocently asking how to allow a user to login to KDE or Gnome without having to remember a password. Without fail, a number of people will decry the very thought and deem those in question complete idiots who subvert the very laws of nature, security and well-being. I was involved in such a discussion a while back on a newsgroup, and the result was pretty typical. Instead of saying "I don't know" the poster derided my efforts and said this was the biggest security hole ever invented since... the hole... or something. After explaining what a kiosk was the thread devolved into my posting etiquette. Point and match, sir.

When it comes down to it people don't understand Linux' password authentication mechanism. The PAM subsystem allows for a number of profiles based on who is requesting authentication and authorization. SSH, FTP and yes KDE/Gnome login managers all have different authentication profiles that determine how and when a user is authenticated.

Allowing a two year old to just click on her face in the KDE login screen doesn't open unbridled access to everyone in the world. If you've disabled remote X11 logins, turned off X11 tunneling via SSH and bolted down remote access then only local users physically at the keyboard will able to login without a password. If that same username tried to SSH in to the box they would be greeted with a password, since the passwordless authentication only applies to KDE's login manager.

One could breech the KDE login manager for access by this user, but that's a whole other story. Ultimately what people don't understand is just because a username doesn't need a password to authenticate on a local desktop session that doesn't mean the username will never need a password to authenticate via any means available.

Enough of that tho. Ultimately I'm getting on this soapbox because I had to alter openSuSE 11.2 to properly allow me to have per-user passwordless logins via KDM. With a stock openSuSE 11.2 install you have two choices for their desktop managers: you either require passwords for everyone or you grant passwordless logins to everyone. In my kiosk I just need a couple of low-privilege users to be passwordless; the rest require logins.

Something SuSE has always loved to do is override configuration files with scripts that freshly parse settings from /etc/sysconfig every time they're used. In this instance SuSE runs the script /usr/share/kde4/apps/kdm/read_sysconfig.sh every time it starts the KDE desktop manager, wiping out old configurations and procedurally generating new ones. Even if you know what config file to change it doesn't do you much good - it will get wiped out when KDM starts. On top of that the default /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager value for passwordless logins (DISPLAYMANAGER_PASSWORD_LESS_LOGIN) is just true or false... you can't set an arbitrary user.

I modified /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager to accept more than just a yesno value... instead I told it to accept an arbitrary string. Next I modified /usr/share/kde4/apps/kdm/read_sysconfig.sh to see if the DISPLAYMANAGER_PASSWORD_LESS_LOGIN string was set to "no." If it was, don't enable passwordless logins at all. If it was not, enable passwordless logins and allocate the string to be the list of users that have password-less logins.

The modification was minor - it was just altering:

if [ "$DISPLAYMANAGER_PASSWORD_LESS_LOGIN" = "yes" ]; then
echo "NoPassEnable=true"
echo "NoPassAllUsers=true"
else
echo "NoPassEnable=false"
echo "NoPassAllUsers=false"
fi

to be:

if [ "$DISPLAYMANAGER_PASSWORD_LESS_LOGIN" = "no" ]; then
echo "NoPassEnable=false"
echo "NoPassAllUsers=false"
else
echo "NoPassEnable=true"
echo "NoPassUsers=$DISPLAYMANAGER_PASSWORD_LESS_LOGIN"
fi


in /usr/share/kde4/apps/kdm/read_sysconfig.sh.

Now I have passwordless logins and still retain security... despite what others may think.

KDE 4 Really Fast, Except When It's Really Slow

I've enjoyed openSUSE 11.0 not necessarily because it works flawlessly, but because it's the best working install of KDE 4. KDE 4 has a lot of great potential, but it's not fully realized until you hit KDE 4.1. Since 4.1 is the actual version of KDE 4 meant for widespread usage, I've been downloading the unstable builds from SuSE's build service.

Things have been working fine except for one extremely nagging thing - the initial draw of a konsole window takes 5-10 seconds. It's extremely obnoxious, especially when you need a terminal so often.

I found out this was due to NVIDIA's drivers on newer boards - as described in the KDE techbase and illustrated in the Ubuntu forums and How-To's. Luckily it was an easy fix - running nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2 -a GlyphCache=1 as root set the appropriate settings in the NVIDIA driver to allow windows to resize at the speed they should. But I don't necessarily blame NVIDIA - the blame deserves to be cast further.

The Linux Hater's Blog brings up a great point about Xorg not being about to allocate offscreen buffers - something that I didn't realize. Xorg lacks a memory manager, so all the stuff you need for full OpenGL support just can't be done. It simply can't be done with Xorg. All the points made in the rant are absolutely right - the memory management infrastructure for pbuffer and framebuffer objects have to be there, otherwise you're hosed.

The core issue that comes from this deficiency is that X11 in and of itself is inherently unable to support OpenGL. Lack of offscreen buffers means that all the great stuff you should be able to do directly in hardware can only be accomplished with a software renderer. Of course, this defeats NVIDIA's entire business model of making the GPU the most important part of your workstation. So they had to massively replace parts of X11; the NVIDIA Linux drivers must, by sheer necessity, replace huge chunks of the XOrg implementation.

After reading the Linux Hater's post a lot of other stuff made sense - why NVIDIA's drivers are so invasive, why you magically don't need to install Xgl to run Compiz Fusion if you are using the proprietary nvidia driver (because it already replaced Xorg for you, thanks), and why KDE's desktop effects had window resizing slowdowns.

NVIDIA didn't break things - they fixed things. They're just trying to live in our broken world.