Reg live natter with GNOME superstar Miguel de Icaza If anyone is a paid-up member of the open source club, surely it is Miguel de Icaza. He helped found the GNOME UI and desktop beloved by millions and claimed to be the most popular desktop environment for GNU/Linux and UNIX-type operating systems. For GNOME, De Icaza earned the MIT Innovators under-35 award in 1999, beating …
Well, the article itself admits that he "went off script" way back in 2001. Why is anyone even giving him a sounding board now? He has clearly been fixated on Microsoft and other non-Unix tech for over a decade now. He's been a Microsoft cheerleader for far longer than he's been anything else.
It would be like any one of us fixating on what we were doing 10+ years ago.
That ship sailed already.
I stayed with SUSE & openSUSE over the years and their default KDE desktops, so luckily I avoided all the Gnome disappointments over the years. SUSE did not move default KDE over from 3.5 until the new desktop was stable at about the KDE 4.4 version, so I feel fortunate to have avoided Linux desktop problems all the way around. I was also an early user of Thunderbird and the KDE PIM, and never found Evolution to my liking, so I've basically avoided all his products that were bundled as defaults with Ubuntu and Fedora/RedHat over the years.
Seems to me that Ubuntu's market share was hurt by clinging to Gnome as the user interface - a practical approach of using the most stable KDE version would have been much more effective at attracting and keeping new users.
You know we are all at work at 2 PM, right?
Anyway, if he can take non-live questions, I'd be interested in answer to these:
1. What do you think of the GNOME project as it is now? Have you become disillusioned with it?
2. Will Linux support for Mono continue? A lot of vendors such as Unity (game engine) depend on it.
3. Honestly, what distro do you use? I haven't had driver issues in over five years. I moved full-time to Linux (KDE) at home after Steam for Linux came out with Crusader Kings II, and that is definitely a vote of confidence in what I find a superior OS. I think your experience is pretty unique at this point.
This looks suspiciously like a pretext for Miguel "MVP" de iCaza to promote his corporate sponsors, with his usual "they're not evil" rhetoric.
No, of course Microsoft and Apple aren't evil. They're just cute fluffy bunnies who save puppies from fire-breathing dragons, not litigious corporate despots on a belligerent crusade for world domination. Honest.
I've never seen anyone sell out as completely and brazenly as iCaza. He actually seems to take a perverse sort of pride in it.
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