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The connectedHuman Machine Interface (HMI)peripherals dictate therange of use. These need some kernel-support (e.g.evdev,ALSA,DRI,V4L2) some middleware-support (e.g.PulseAudio,Maliit), but eventually the UI (e.g.GNOME Shell,Plasma Next) must be tailored to them to enable anergonomicworkflow.Software can be grouped intoLinux kernel,middleware and user application.Ergonomics regardingresponsiveness requires the latency/delay of the input-processing-output loop to be below a certain threshold.Linux gaming requires an even lower threshold andVR the lowest.When employing awindowing system, any user applications runs as a client of thedisplay server (here:Wayland compositor).A couple ofdaemons provide functionality:systemd,PulseAudio,NetworkManager,PackageKit, etc. The user sees and interacts with them solely through some graphical front-ends written in one of the commonwidget toolkits: (GTK+,Qt, etc.). Regularly these front-ends are mistaken to be the actual program. This ain't dramatic, but its wrong. The above scheme depicts how it actually works, and one can easily deduce why not only developers and plumbers but also end-users do profit from a well-designed and lean display sever protocol. The same wayUncomplicated Firewall is confused withnetfilter.Android predatesTizen and usesSurfaceFlinger.DRI and XDRI andWaylandOpenGL is the rendering API of choice on Linux
Linux kernel – article is correctly constrained to describing the kernel and not any operating system
Linux – article about the family of operating systems; this article has been a mess for years and the articleLinux distribution doesn't quite do the job either.
Linux range of use – outsourcing of the above article to get some breathing room
Linux for mobile devices – "mobile devices" are basically high-end embedded devices. **Loads of marketing** Android, Tizen, Sailfish OS,Ubuntu Touch, Firefox OS, Web OS, Chrome OS, but little to nothing about the underlyingsoftware architecture of these operating systems
Linux-powered device – a marketing relict only for stuff that ships with Linux pre-installed; today this is so much, that we better use the above classification
Software on Ubuntu is a nice example of showing and interlinking available software; but it is Ubuntu only and German only. I think, such a structure around existing articles would be useful to the Wikipedia as an encyclopedia
AlsaPlayer allows adjusting the playback speed forward and backwards. I happen to know that, but in case I did not, how would I most efficiently find software with this property
only contain a very small fraction of all the free and open-source software available
and especially they usually "exclude" each other
especially GNOME is strictly speaking only composed of theGNOME Core Applications only;Inkscape orGIMP not only don't belong, but also bring their ownGUI Widgets, additionally to those in GTK+! IMO (User:ScotXW) this is agood thing. For that matter that there are several DEs, the least they should do, is to concentrate on "widgeting" their core applications and sharing the bigger programs as well as the lower levels of the user stack
Let them do their stuff in "their" articlesGNOME/KDE SC, but let as maintain some core and glue article(s) regarding Linux on the desktop computer.
An encyclopedia is about explaining stuff, and I see theneed use for acore and glue article from which to link to the various DEs and also to components hosted byfreedesktop.org and other components
Convergence is a term for the coming™ amalgamation of desktop, laptop, mobile computers and what not else. Smartphones have as much as 1GiB of RAM and Quad-Core CPUs, while computer monitors have become (big) touchscreens (for the user to getgorilla arms). I would insidiously call the result: a "home computer". So, when the marketing people will certify that "convergence" has arrived, we could address that stuff asLinux on the home computer (instead ofLinux kernel-based operating system with a graphical shell). People are actually coding stuff, to make this happen, e.g.Aaron Seigo fromKDE: connect your tablet with keyboard, mouse and a bigger screen, and the UI will automagically change accordingly.
From a software perspective differentiating devices based onchassis dimensions is pointless anyway. For the software engineer, the only two properties that matter are:
theHuman Machine Interface (HMI) peripherals and
the availablecomputing power.
The goal of any UI is obviously always an efficientworkflow while performing the intended tasks. Marketing calls it "user experience", probably because of the "work" in workflow. There are a couple of computer sizes and the marketing departments are spitting out additional ones, plus all the codenames for their newest "platforms" to bamboozle the poor customer. And the Wikipedia is full of it. And I would like to not pay attention to it at all. Because smartphones have as much as 1 GiB of RAM and quad-core CPUs, the articlesDesktop Linux andEmbedded Linux would imperatively describe one and the sameLinux kernel-based operating system with a graphical shell. So wouldTablet Linux andNetbook Linux. Both, tablet and a netbook are "mobile devices" (and at the same time "embedded devices"), but the latter has a keyboard (and maybe additionally a touch-display). Because of convergence the underlying operating systems would not differentiate.
Lots of words ... ⇒ so, I would like to merge the articlesDesktop Linux, and the Mobile Devices-parts of theEmbedded Linux (andSailfish OS, andWebOS andFirefox OS) into a new article called:Linux on home computers (orLinux kernel-based operating system with a graphical user interface). On the way there one could split off the Mobile Parts ofEmbedded Linux into a new article calledMobile Linux and then merge this later. The point is, that only the UI differs from traditional desktop systems.The entire underlying software is identical.
To ensure that not existing Wikipedia articles about Desktop Linux
are encouraged to be created, (e.g. There is an article aboutMode setting and there should additionally be an article calledKMS (Linux kernel) which describes that particular Linux kernel module. At the moment the KMS module is part of theDirect Rendering Manager, but at the Linux Plumbers Conference 2013 a split of that one module into two kernel modules is being discussed.)
are well interlinked with each other and with the rest of the Wikipedia articles
Template:GNOME contains links to programs that areGTK+-based but not part ofGNOME, andTemplate:KDE contains links to programs that areQt-based but not part of theKDE SC. These programs should either be left there or moved to the (additional) navbarsTemplate:GTK+-based andTemplate:Qt-based). I don't know how else to keep track of the existing articles.
Template:X desktop environments and window managers – I likethis version much better, because it includes Wayland, Mir and SurfaceFlinger. We can either create a new Template with a better suiting name or, what I'd prefer, change the existing one, and then move the entire article to a better suiting name! ShouldCanonical Ltd. ever change the license of Mir, it can still be excluded. So far, Mir is under GPLv3. I certainly will use a Wayland-based OS, but I certainly see no reason to exclude thesedislay server out of this often linked-to template. And since X11 will only gradually be replaced, it would be inapt to create a second template.
AvailableComparison of ...-articles usually intermix proprietary with free and open-source software, are quite crowded, hard to maintain and usually not maintained at all! They often do not mention the graphical toolkit, the programming language, when the program was last updated, etc. Also they regularly lack the program logos. It would be nice to have pages likeMultimedia, thisAudioPlayer, etc. in the Wikipedia. Given thatWikidata is on the way, we of course should not waste too much time creating and grooming comparison of-pages, yet a couple of those would be a really really nice to have.
There is theTemplate:Man. Wherever manpages are available, this template should be used. For example, insystemd forsystemctl andjournalctl, or inGNU GRUB forgrub-setup andgrub-install or innetfilter foriptables,ip6tables,arptables,ebtables andipset, etc.
New technologies are regularly introduced on such Summits/Conventions/Congresses. Usually they offer the papers as PDF and often also a Video recording even years after!
The official Homepages of such events are usually well organized, so there is little point in making a big fuzz on the Wikipedia. But it seems to me very useful, when citing something to also link to the Wikipedia page for the corresponding event: e.g.[4]
I (User:ScotXW) think, that awesome looking screenshots are nice, but I'd rather have diagrams to understand the clumsiness or elegance of the implementedsoftware architecture. Especially at the moment (2013) there is a lot of talk about Wayland replacing X11, yet the Wikipedia offers very little to make it easy for the interested person to understand the advantages that come with the transition from X11 to Wayland. A comprehensive Wikipedia article will address and satisfy the individual interested in the mere news, but also early adopters and even people willing to participate further.
Nice looking screenshots are justeye candy, so they need to look as awesome as possible! They do not contribute to any understanding whatsoever! Their sole purpose is, to attract the user to read on or even to install the concerned programs/combination of programs.
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