Enjoying Walled Gardens

For the fourteen years prior prior to last June I had consistently used some variation of a Dell laptop with Linux - initially RedHat but quickly switching over to SuSE. Occasionally I would dual-boot into Windows to do some gaming, but all of my work and development was done within KDE. I really had no desire to change, even when I was lugging a 12-pound behemoth Precision laptop with openSUSE and Windows 7. Muscle strain aside, I was content with the setup.

The next job I moved to was going to be a switch from my conventional Java development to .NET, so I decided to take the opportunity to change up my workstation as well. I moved away from Wintendo/Linux and moved wholesale into OS X, since my new position delightfully coincided with the release of the latest MacBook Pro’s. Gone was my comfortable NetBeans environment, and instead I had to use VisualStudio within Parallels. No more Linux... and at the time I was confident I would hate OS X and re-build the laptop with KDE 4.

That was eight months ago.

The .NET ecosystem hasn't been fantastic... immersion has not worked in its favor there. The move to OS X has been considerably more pleasant. By and large OS X is still *nix at its heart and ports abound. Even my favorite photo management / digital darkrooom Digikam works within OS X. I haven't really been missing any apps as of yet other than Pidgin. Yeah, there's Adium... but... meh.

The ease of use is much greater as well. The application-based firewall works well, instant messaging integration works (albeit without OTR support), calendaring and mail integration works without issue. By and large things work without any futzing. This is doubly true with the rest of the family; while my attempts to get the household at large on openSUSE + KDE 4 failed miserably, the hand-me-down OS X workstations we've been reusing have been adopted with great enthusiasm. All walks of life have been happy to use 4+ year old iMacs with Snow Leopard, no complaints.

Apple's lustre has been slowly seeping away with the stylish kids of today, but it's hard to deny they've built a solid platform. Yes, it does this by sacrificing your freedom of choice and reducing your hardware upgrade paths. But for now... the walled garden is a damn nice place to just chill out and get some work done.

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.

NVIDIA's Linux Fate

Just like everyone else on the globe, I heard/read/watched Linus telling NVIDIA, in absolutely no uncertain terms, that they were bad Linux citizens. At first I thought Linus was telling them that they were "number one!!!" but sadly this turned out not to be the case.

The topic came up from someone in the audience who was trying to get NVIDIA's Optimus tech working on a Linux notebook. This is a bit of a different bird than NVIDIA's usual discrete GPU market, as this requires co-operation between onboard (or on-die) video adapters, the discrete graphics card and the northbridge to turn off the accelerated GPU when not in use. To my knowledge only Windows 7 drivers can accomplish this, and Linux doesn't quite understand the management architecture to leverage it. The open-source Bumblebee Project appears to be doing a great job of trying to set ACPI & BIOS flags to accomplish the same thing, but the entire effort could be greatly accelerated with NVIDIA's help. While NVIDIA has more-or-less sanctioned the Bumblebee project by releasing installers that work with Bumblebee, they haven't contributed to it directly.

Linux called NVIDIA's lack of Linux support the "exception rather than the rule," and extended that comment to mention that "NVIDIA been one of the worst trouble spots" in kernel support and the "single worst company we've ever dealt with." This of course was punctuated with the infamous line: "so NVIDIA, f**k you." He didn't actually speak in astrisks, I'm just experimenting with censorship.

Linus, of course, just "like[s] being outrageous at times... [because] people who get offended should be offended." It was probably meant to be a thrown gauntlet more than a haymaker, and I can definitely see why. I've been a big advocate of NVIDIA, even with their proprietary stance on GPU drivers and increasingly as the nouveau driver has increased its feature parity. These kind of ACPI hacks however are not the same as keeping tight control over intellectual property tied to their GPU hardware. Given how good drivers are the true value behind discrete graphics cards, I understand not wanting to open-source them to competitors ("Hey AMD! Here's how we did tessalation!"). Controlling power management within the OS kernel is a different matter however - and everyone benefits (including NVIDIA) with broader support. What's the barrier to entry of AMD creating something similar that idled the discrete GPU when no accelerated calls were being made? For that matter, what's to stop Microsoft from coming up with a vendor-agnostic solution that does the same thing? It seems not unlike what OS X Lion is doing right now...

NVIDIA's response basically focused on the fact that they permit Bumblebee to co-exist, their proprietary GPU drivers still offer fantastic performance and support (which they do) and they are one of the largest contributors to Linux on ARM. In short: they don't feel like Optimus Linux support is worth doing right now. However there are signs that even this isn't working well - NVIDIA just lost a quarter million dollar GPU deal due to poor MIPS support.

NVIDIA, this is a great time to step up and contribute the solution to the Linux kernel. Show your competitive edge continues to be broad platform support, otherwise people may meander elsewhere.

Post script: If you're interested in getting a sense of how crazy GPU/graphics driver development is on Linux, read Jasper St. Pierre's post on The Linux Graphics Stack. Terrific outline on the steps a polygon goes through to get to your monitor.

Let Cooler Heads Prevail with Security

A long while back I wrote about my attempts with passwordless logins and how, instead of people trying to understand the use case, they attacked me under the auspices of security. This is by no means a new argument... the same brand of venom is spewed on behalf of X11's olde tyme conventions, SysV initialization or LSB compliance. Bear in mind the distribution maintainers themselves actually understand these use cases, but often well-intentioned users assume that the same profiles that work for a server installation should also apply to a kid's laptop.

And then they woke papa bear.

I noticed in my Google+ stream that Linus Torvalds had a similar rant, this time also around network & printer administration. Not only that but the focus of his ire was aimed at openSUSE, the same distribution I alternate ranting and raving about. His arguments were not unlike my own - not everything needs to be locked behind a root password (or even a password for that matter). True, you can circumvent or correct this behavior by changing access levels and permissions, but that can be a hairy proposition. By the time your kids / wife / sales people run across this issue, they're already frustrated and you've lost 'em.

Of course there was backlash... and Linus' parting shot didn't quite help things either. The Register even carried a story about the "tantrum" and interviewed openSUSE director Andreas Jaeger, who admitted Linus' had a valid use case but that ultimately "there are bugs but it's not as simple as [Linus] states."

It kinda is and kinda isn't "as simple." User-level access to print queues should be a doable thing. I believe time zone changes can happen just fine - I tested in KDE and while the system timezone did not change, the time displayed on the desktop switched to US Central just fine. NetworkManager no longer needs administrative access (unless you want it to) and yes, passwordless logins have been working for some time now.

In the end, I understand Linus' frustration but have to say that Ubuntu and Fedora are just as bad. Yes, it would be nice to have CUPS admin normal users as admins, definitely. I can't help but wonder if this angst is due to the Linux desktop being so close, and yet so far away. There are still rough edges to iron out, but for an internationalized effort of distributed engineers coming together to make an open-source desktop OS for the love of the game, things are looking pretty damn peachy.

openSUSE 12.1 - Good Enough to Blog About

I've been away from the blogging scene for over eight months now. My language skills have languished likewise. It seems only fitting that my return to posting is launched on the same topic I departed with.

For too long it seems like openSUSE has been stuck within an odd, "uncanny valley" of user experience and desktop usability. It did so much well that the stuff that worked poorly really stuck out like a sore thumb. I've never really had the problems with YaST that others of my kin seem to decry ("Omigosh, you use SuSE? Ugh, is YaST any better?"), but other issues like poor integration points (e.g. Eclipse) and the banishment of SCPM and SaX2 were frustrating.

openSUSE 11.4 ended up looking okay however had issues with wireless, the noveau driver wasn't ready for prime time and LibreOffice ended up being crashtastic. Luckily (I guess?) I had a hard drive crash right before openSUSE 12.1 launch and was able to start clean when the mirrors sync'd on November 16th. As soon as openSUSE 12.1 launched I grabbed an ISO and began installing on my ThinkPad W510.

Man, what a difference.

First off, the noveau driver is still a bit buggy but has nearly reached parity with the proprietary NVIDIA driver on desktop compositing and UI effects like wobbly windows. I can't tell you how jazzed I was about this lil' facet. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely adore NVIDIA and the work they've done to bring driver support to the Linux desktop. Still, an OSS solution that has native integration into XOrg provides a seamless experience - especially with xrandr and KDE 4. Now KDE (and to a lesser extent, the bootloader) can natively manage resolution, orientation and multiple desktops. I was a bit apprehensive given I frequently switch between projectors, dual-screen setups with larger monitors and road-warrior setups with just the laptop display however noveau and KDE 4 are able to switch between these environments without so much as a mouse click. Plug in a VGA cable and boom - I'm broadcasting a second desktop over the monitor. Sweet.

LibreOffice is much more stable. No huge features I've been able to discern, but then again I'd likely not even notice them given my superficial use of any office suite. Evolution seems a bit smoother and more responsive - hopefully someday soon my office can switch to Exchange 2008 so I can leverage its new SOAP API via Evolution. That should make a big difference over the webdav connectors currently being used.

I've been trying out new features such as brtfs on alternate workstations, since encrypted brtfs partitions are not supported yet. So far it has been quite nice having snapshot capability and b-tree balancing to a file system, especially given how many crazy files I generate or move around.

Still very happy with Digikam; it has become my mainstay for post-production of RAW photos. It somewhat softens the harsh reality that my wife's iPhone 4S take better photos than my Canon DSLR.

All in all, a major tip o' the hat to the openSUSE team on all fronts. Very happy with the usability of the latest release.

Amazing openSUSE 11.4

First of all, I'll admit that I've waxed gloom-and-doom when talking about openSUSE lately. I'm now saying not only that my worries turned out completely wrong, but openSUSE 11.4 is probably the most amazing OS I've run so far.

I'm not claiming this assertion lightly, either. For the first time in the history of any OS I've ever installed hardware was detected and installed correctly the first time right away. 3D acceleration worked out of the box. My Intel/Broadcomm chipsets functioned immediately without me even having to edit a config file. I dual-boot with ease. All in all, an effortless installation.

Performance increases were immediately evident as well. Apps loaded swiftly, content panes refreshed immediately and window compositing worked fantastically. And in this sprint of performance I found that I didn't need a single drop of proprietary software. The open nouveau driver for NVIDIA GPUs now has sufficient 3D support to provide desktop effects such as transparency, and Broadcomm wireless chipsets are now supported within the latest kernel. No joke! Package management is many, MANY times faster now due to more simple and more concurrent HTTP operations. Updates and package installation is in a whole new league now, and wins hands-down over any other distro (including Windows).

But wait! There's more! openSUSE 11.4 also is the first distro with Firefox 4.0 and LibreOffice, giving me the freshest builds of two suites I use frequently. Evolution has been updated so that IMAP operations are non-blocking (oh thank the heavens) which makes it appear much faster as well.

Reading down the list of openSUSE 11.4 product highlights is like looking at my own personal want list for a Linux desktop. If the coming work week goes as smoothly as the past couple of days have, this will be the distro to beat all distros. I even find myself wanting to use openSUSE 11.4 over Windows 7 for random tasks at home, simply because the user interface is much more elegant and flexible.

I owe openSUSE 11.4 so much that I've finally given up on typing the distro as "OpenSuSE" in homage to the original distribution. SuSE has now grown up and is now truly a fantastic product of the open distro's team - and is now truly openSUSE in its own right.

Except a Gleam Across the Dreamer's Face

I'm a little late on this since I've been exhausting my mana ranting elsewhere, but rest assured I've been thinking about this a lot during the shower in the morning. I mean... wait... there's a less awkward way of saying that...

PC World has declared that the Linux desktop missed its opportunity to gain market share, and that opportunity has passed. To a point this is true... the Linux desktop was a viable alternative when Vista was rejected by the public at large. It didn't matter if users had even tried Vista in their lifetime - public opinion had spoken, and Vista wasn't invited to the consumer PC party. A huge market share vacuum was left behind and Linux tried to fill it as rapidly as possible, but it simply had too much ground to cover. By the time the Linux desktop caught up (and they did catch up in my opinion) it was simply too late for inclusion by OEMs into netbooks - the hardware platform that was absolutely made for Linux.

Gosling ends up agreeing but on a different premise: the economics of OSS don't work for desktop software that "just works" out of the box. This has some truth as well - a pay-per-support model cannot sustain an OSS desktop when the expectation is that the desktop should simply "work" without the need to call for support. By the time the user picks up the phone for help the desktop environment has already failed. Desktops must install and operate without a need for any hand-holding.

PC World did make one important point that shouldn't be glossed over - the traditional, monolithic desktop is dying off. I'm not saying that the desktop is going away by any measure... but people are returning to the time where they see desktops, laptops, mobile phones and TV's as "appliances" and no longer as "computers." Each serves a function of its own and is expected to work in concert with the rest of the electronic family.

I hope these blogs o' doom don't have a chilling effect on writing applications for the Linux desktop. Linux is only going to see greatly increasing deployments in the future, not diminishing ones. The desktop is not simply going to be defined as KDE 4 or Gnome, but instead is going to exist as Hulu Desktop and/or MythTV. The desktop creates and consumes content - the lines between OS' are starting to dissolve.

openSuSE 11.3 - And The Rage Returns

I really want to love openSuSE. I really, truly do. Things were going so well between us... I was very happy with openSuSE 11.2, so much so that I installed 11.3 the same day it dropped. Things looked even more polished - no missing icons, no segfaults, everything operated cleanly and worked well. I went to install my favorite SuSE applications... and they simply weren't there anymore.

First let's discuss SaX2. I love SaX2 and how it makes XOrg configuration so automagic. Yet SaX2 is no longer provided with SuSE distributions. The openSuSE team did announce that this was happening, supposedly because "automatic configuration and dynamic reconfiguration mechanisms have been developed such that today the tasks that SaX2 was able to do are done fully automatically on the fly and can be modified from within a desktop session." They might have a point... I do use nivida-settings more than SaX2 now. Oh well... I'm willing to let it go.

However one thing I wasn't able to let go of is SCPM. It went missing without so much as a trace and a profile management package can't be found in any repo for openSuSE 11.3. This was a major product differentiators for ALL SuSE distros, and for it to be missing is a huge shame. Now it is even harder for me to switch between configuration profiles for presentations/home/work, as they take wildly different network configurations, display configurations, peripheral configurations, printer configs, on and on and on... The omission of SCPM is pretty grave.

I went to find solace in my Really Slick Screensavers. I added my missing KDE4 screensaver entries and expected them to work as they always have. Then I ran across yet another omission - the KDE xscreensaver compatibility applications were missing as well. This omission was even more curious, as they are missing in the binary packages but are present in the source packages. I re-built the RPM from source, re-installed it and the xscreensaver compatibility layer appeared. Odd... and now I'll have to re-do that step with every patch & upgrade.

I don't know what to think of 11.3 yet. On one had it works extremely well and the longer release cycle appears to have served them well. Still, I can't help but feel that some things were omitted to simplify the packaging of the distribution... and that could be a bad omen of things to come.

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.

openSuSE 11.2 (No I Will Not Spell It Their Way)

I installed openSuSE 11.2 at the beginning of this week and am glad to finally be done with unsupported KDE 4.x packages. Installation took much less time than previous incarnations, and boot time, shutdown time and suspend time is ridiculously faster.

One exceedingly nice item is that a native KDE 4 Network Manager is finally included with the distro. Setting up a wireless connection was just fine once I got the necessary firmware installed for my wlan adapter and VPN connections were managed correctly for the first time in a long time. Remote routes specified by the VPN concentrator were applied (w00t!) and negotiation took only one or two seconds.

Packages are stable and fairly seamless - moving in to this install has also taken much less time than previous versions.

Fonts scale particularly well. Finally 96dpi is obeyed on my monitor and both GTK and Qt apps look fantabulous.

Things are painless, stable and work out-of-the-box. openSuSE 11.0 was not without hitches but worked great overall - and openSuSE 11.2 is great with no compromises.

Hulu Desktop and Linux = Sweet Brain Mush

I hadn't really tried Hulu much... just a few passing searches in their webapp. When they released their Linux desktop client I decided to try it out.

Sweet merciful crap.

I couldn't believe the sheer volume of what they had that I actually wanted to watch. It ran flawlessly in Linux - and their Fedora RPMs installed just fine on my OpenSUSE workstations.

Man... so much completely awesome stuff is being released right now. I NEED MORE HOURS IN THE DAY TO DORK WITH IT!

Suspend to RAM - Actually Works? Really?

Let it be known that today I was actually able to get my Linux laptop, using the proprietary NVIDIA drivers no less, to suspend to RAM. I'll give you a moment to pick yourself up off the floor.

Using a less-than-stock build of OpenSUSE 11.0, KDE 4.1.3, the latest NVIDIA drivers and a Dell Precision M6300 I was able to successfully both SUSPEND TO and RESUME FROM RAM. I crap you not. I even took a picture.

Wow. That's... like... historic.

Dark Power Adjusting Laptop Brightness

One reason why I was really looking forward to KDE4 was the level of abstraction it offered from services and hardware while offering a lot of unification as far as end-user interaction and desktop integration.

One fantastic example of this has become PowerDevil, which was introduced around the KDE 4.1 time but is now standard in KDE 4.2. Its functionality is based upon Solid, KDE4's hardware abstraction layer (which also abstracts audio & bluetooth).

PowerDevil runs as a fully-fledged KDE4 service, meaning it doesn't need to be some awkward "TSR" or persistent applet in your system tray. That also means that it runs much leaner than kpowersave, which largely monitored events and then attempted to send system calls along to the appropriate background resources.

The PowerDevil coders may talk down the control panel UI, but it works rather well. And while it doesn't have a Plasmoid (applet) yet or much in the way of UI, the beauty of KDE4 means it doesn't immediately need to. Since PowerDevil is well integrated into the KDE4 desktop, KRunner displays all the immediate options you need when you type "power profile" into the runner dialog. Very nice.

This kind of desktop integration is exactly what will make KDE4 a success in the long run, and it's great to see projects like PowerDevil emerge that take advantage of what KDE4, Solid and Plasma have to offer.

OpenSUSE 11.0 - Desktop Linux Actually Done Right

I've been pretty unhappy with SuSE Linux as of late. I thought 10.1 was well done, but subsequent releases were of poor build quality and in places just sloppy. There were times it began to show promise, only to fall just short.

I've been living inside of openSUSE 11.0 for the past several days, and tried out RC1 as well. All in all it's a very impressive distribution, and I'm surprised they were able to put this level of polish on KDE 3.5, KDE 4 and Gnome at the same time.

Package management, the Achilles' heel of SuSE up to this point, is scores better. YaST2 actually loads its package management tool quickly, and metadata indexing doesn't take decades like it used to. Compiz is nicely integrated, and KDE 4 is actually quite well done. I'm installing the unstable 4.1 packages right now, and we'll see how that looks as well.

There are some speed issues, but then again I'm using KDE 4 with desktop effects cranked up. However, the fixes to package management alone make SuSE a fantastic winner for the desktop Linux space. Honestly, once KDE 4.1 comes out I wouldn't be surprised at all to see more corporate desktops and developer machines turning to SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.

SuSE Ten Point Ugh

It definitely seems like Novell's openSUSE distribution has taken a page from RedHat's Fedora Core. RedHat took their mainline distribution and split it into two - an Enterprise product, and a "community" product. Ultimately their community product had a lot of problems with communication and collaboration, although it seems they've leveled off since. The "Core" distro was really a way to publicly test and iron out bugs for their enterprise product.

10.3 definitely feels this way. Although they have an open Bugzilla, there are lots of bugs that should have been caught. Eclipse doesn't even start, Intel wireless cards have problems with NetworkManager and autoplug, and Xgl has crashes and other weird problems. Novell is even looking to awkwardly cram all of KDE into /usr, like RedHat infamously did. Mosfet blew a mosfet about this layout, and rightfully so.

I had a similar volume of really, really annoying bugs in 10.2, although most were eventually remedied after several weeks. And I even grew to like some of features that annoyed me at first. But the first few months of a release are choppy at best.

So I'll hold off on any big judgement. The problem with Linux desktop releases is that everything is really close to almost working... so close that it's maddening. I think that's why people fly off the handle when a new release comes out - you're so close to having a perfect setup, it's absolutely maddening when a few nagging bugs completely screw it up.