27C3 - Version 1.6.3

27th Chaos Communication Congress
We come in peace

Speakers
datenwolf
Schedule
Day Day 1 - 2010-12-27
Room Saal 2
Start time 20:30
Duration 01:00
Info
ID 4017
Event type Lecture
Track Community
Language used for presentation English
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Desktop on the Linux... (and BSD, of course)

you're doing it confused? weird? strange? wrong?

Time to take a look back and under the hood of the current state of FOSS based desktops: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly – Bloat, strange APIs, too much complexity.

The first decade of the 21st century brought huge progress in the development of FOSS Desktop systems. Users can now choose from a broad range of environments, which all adhere to a coherent set of standards. Not to forget that FOSS did even pioneer some GUI technologies which were later adopted by other (read: non free) systems.

There's one year left of this decade. Time to take a look back and under the hood of the current state of FOSS based desktops: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

  • "Yo Dawg!" Stacking layers of redundancy. (Phonon -> GStreamer -> Pulseaudio)

  • Do you really need a full blown desktop session for a login screen? (GDM >2.21)

  • The graphics subsystem (X11) is network transparent and provides IPC. So let's build our own IPC system, that's not network transparent (DBus).

  • I think the login process is not complicated enough yet. (ConsoleKit)

  • Good ideas, poor implementation, abusive use. (PolicyKit)

  • Making things happen automatically doesn't "make things just work!". (Network Manager, ivman, HAL based mount)

  • Unified configuration madness. (gconf, XSettings)

  • Zombies: Some things are so bad, that even their original creators now abandon them (HAL).

  • What if special use cases require you, to get rid of some or multiple of the above? Admin's Nightmares!

and last but not least

  • Possible security flaws in each of the above.

And of course we'll also look at some of the pearls of strange API design in some of the above.

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