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 mailinglist 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
everyones hands???
This would be speach recognition and speach 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
bugfixing 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 interesing 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 newbiee)?
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 oftenly 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 speach, 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, altough 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 existance 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 accomodate
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 enthousiast 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 :-)