Kde/Crista Tibirna Interview

When did you start with KDE and why was the project started?

This is two questions :-)

2) KDE was started in October 1996 with a call for participation from Matthias Ettrich

1) I was lucky enough to be on the LyX mailing list the day Ettrich made his announcement there. I immediately started to follow the project but as at that time I was in a crucial moment of my PhD studies, I delayed the moment where I begun participation (with code, collaboration in the mailing lists etc.) until mid 1997. I became a member of the KDE core team in 1998.

What do you see as the future of Linux?

Hmm... I believe that the current status que will be largely perpetuated. Linux will continue to be used by Scientifics, by programmers and by hobbyist, will have an important share of the server world and will take over about 20-30% of the embedded market.

What would you like to see happen as far as driver support etc ?

Industry producing hardware that came with CD-ROM containing both windows/mac (traditional) and Linux drivers by default. In source code. Wild dreams, but still...

What do you think is the really big thing Linux needs to get it in everyone's hands???

This would be speech recognition and speech synthesis, all around the system.

1) Do you want it to be a mass user os?

If this would benefit the users, of course.

2) If you do why?

Because it would benefit the users :-) I'm a user too, besides being a developer.

Is it hard to work on a open source program for Linux? 1)what I mean is it more of a hassle to get api's etc working with standard hardware that is closed or that a company doesn't support open source?

I can't comment on this, I didn't try to write code for closed hardware.

What do you do on the KDE project?

At the beginnings I was doing quality control, education, patching and bug fixing all over the place. Then I did quite some code in KControl and in KWin. The smart placement of windows and the smart borders are my dearest innovations. For the smart placement, I used inspiration from an old FVWM hacker teammate. The smart borders are original and I believe they were copied by a few other OSS projects afterwards. I also took care of the KDE.org web site, introduced a news section for the KDE community (that evolved much since I left it to the new team) and many more. Right now, I don't code much (family, studies and full time work take away all my time, and a bit more :-) but I have some interesting ideas I will want to code up in the future versions of KDE.

If I'm new to Linux where do you think that I could get more info etc about using Linux (where a new user wouldn't get bashed for being a newbie)?

Depends on the newbie. If he's the kind of book reader, there are a lot of good books about Linux in the specialized bookstores. If he's an autodidact, the Internet and the huge Linux documentation that comes in form of HTML, PS and text files with any respectable Linux distribution are more than enough. This is how I learned much of the little I know about Linux. And by actually trying things on an actual Linux system too.

How do you feel KDE helps new users?

KDE helps new users by its simple existence. Offering a familiar graphic interface to people coming from Windows (TM) or MacOS (TM), KDE sweetens the steepness of the learning curve. Also, it might not be so evident these days, but KDE was one of the first major projects to heavily popularize the usage of the great gettext GNU utility. Gettext allows for readily translation of strings seen by the user in a program. I believe that a newbie appreciates a lot to have her computer greet her in her own language, thus easing the way into the knowledge of the system.

1) our not new user's ?

Not sure I understand this syntagm.

What are your goals for KDE???

As Matthias Ettrich said at the release of the KDE-1.1.2 version, the most important goals that we envisioned when we launched KDE - that is: to provide a high quality graphical interface and application development framework for Unix - were reached with the release of the KDE-1.1.2 version. Our current goals with KDE are simple: keep the code on the par with the latest computing technologies, strive to innovate beyond the current industry trends, offer the best experience in using computers to our fellow users and developers.

What do you see KDE becoming on the Linux desktop???

This is a common-place question that I heard asked often and I don't really know how to answer it, whenever I hear it again. Let's try though. KDE already became something on the Linux desktop. Without KDE, I believe Unix would still be at the stage of using CDE or eventually a bunch of unrelated and disbanded applications put together in a large variety of differently behaving window managers. The arrival of KDE pressured Unix developers to think out of the box. Most OSS projects that are alive nowadays take for granted the need to reach for the high quality in user support, translation and functionality that KDE made a commodity. If KDE has to become something else on the Linux desktop, that would be a highly modular, largely portable (from handhelds to mainframes) user interaction system, with high quality full featured human interaction (through speech, through vision, and even through sensing). And of course this will come, but it will perhaps take a few years.

Do you ever think that Linux will have a gui that would compete with windows?

Well, whether I think it or not, KDE does compete with all other user interaction systems out there, be those Windows, MacOS, BeOS, OS/2 or anything else. They're doing all the same thing, thus they're all competing for the same potential user category.

1) Should it?

Ah! You meant "compete" as in "beat the c??p out of it". Aha! Well, frankly, I don't care. We will never be able to offer the kind of bully marketing, "feel comfortable, please, although we know you're not!" style of attitude that Microsoft offers to its customers, and that makes it perhaps so successful. All that I care is that I haven't to be forced to use Windows ('cause I tried to used and I almost died). If this also make other take advantage of the existence of KDE, then I can also be happy that my few lines of code, mixed in the huge work of the excellent KDE team of developers, makes this world a possibly better place.

2)do you feel that having a gui like windows on Linux would be a bad thing?

No, I don't feel so. The fact that Microsoft has a following of 90% of all possible desktop users in this world says a thing about the usefulness of their products. We would be fooling ourselves if we wanted to believe that this kind of proportioning is entirely due to the ugly monopolist maneuvering of Microsoft. They surely have to had done something very good then, anyways, be it that they "borrowed", invented or simply copied their ideas. Thus, having something similar with their offering on Unix will help us accommodate migrating Windows users. It also offers the advantage of providing a very good point to start a new software revolution. Now the UNIX-like operating systems have their chance at inventing a new paradigm of user oriented computing.

Do you think that a standard gui like windows would help new users?

I never reflected on this question myself, but from what enthusiast KDE or Gnome users say, yes, being like Windows (TM) helps at the beginning. Then they discover how to configure their KDE system to their liking and the personal Unix sagas begin from there :-)