Desktop on the Linux... (and BSD, of course)

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.