Calum Benson wrote: > On 23 Jul 2009, at 22:25, Peter Tribble wrote: >> It just doesn't seem that the multi-platform, multi-version, multiple >> simultaneous sessions concept is considered useful in modern >> desktop development. Why not? Why is the model that you only have >> one session on one machine? > This is one of several points that Bob Doolittle from the Sun Ray team > was trying to get across to GNOME (and KDE) developers at the Desktop > Summit in Gran Canaria earlier this month. Time will tell how > successful he has been; all we can do is try to keep getting involved > early whenever any part of the GNOME infrastructure is redesigned, and > keep repeating the message. > > To be fair, simultaneous multi-sessions in GNOME are a lot less hairy > now (probably from about GNOME 2.12 onwards) than they used to be, but > of course that doesn't really help us interoperate with Solaris 10, > which is stuck on 2.6.
Hi Calum. You're quite right that we need to keep getting involved early. Code talks while words walk :). I heard some disturbing talk at GCDS about limiting user choices in order to optimize the "mainstream" experience. That's a dangerous path because users represent a broader and more diverse community than developers and if we limit our vision and narrowly constrain users exclusively to how *we* work we eliminate freedom and diversity in how our tools are used. It's a delicate balance to achieve flexibility and usability but we don't always need to sacrifice one to achieve the other. We should be enabling choices, environments, and ways in which our tools can be used - that's the original vision of Unix/Linux that has served us well for many years. Personally, as a thin client user it's not unusual for me to have a few simultaneous sessions in different server groups while I debug issues for Sun IT, and connect between them. It's even nice to have a few sessions on a single server sometimes with different types of sessions - maybe one I'm using for administrative work while another is for development. Unfortunately things like firefox already get confused by such use. You can no longer even use different profiles to get firefox to run on multiple servers/displays/screens. -Bob
