Underlying DE for the Workstation product, Desktop -vs- Workstation
Alex GS
alxgrtnstrngl at gmail.com
Sat Feb 1 17:42:12 UTC 2014
Intel actually has a website where it compares Desktop -vs- Workstation.
So beyond the marketing and semantics there's actually a real difference
between the two. Intel's marketing materials state:
"...workload-optimized innovation platform designed to deliver the
> processing, graphics and bandwidth capacities artist, animators, analysts,
> engineers, scientists and other professional demand in order to accelerate
> their innovation."
>
> "Still not everyone needs a workstation. A typical office worker running
> standard office applications such as word processing, e-mail, and
> presentation software will get all the performance needed from a standard
> business PC."
"The Workstation Advantage: workstation's are purpose-built to deliver the
> performance, reliability and stability demanded by designers, engineers,
> financial analysts, and researchers running large complex applications"
link: http://goo.gl/WNFXdm
Fedora Workstation does NOT need the latest mobile oriented experimental
desktop environment like Gnome Shell or Ubuntu's Unity. Just like a
Windows workstation needs Windows 7 and NOT Windows 8. In fact due to the
"reliability and stability" purpose of a workstation you should actually go
with something older, stable and mature like Gnome 2.0, which would entail
making Mate the default using Mutter or Compton as the compositor. My
current default setup happens to be Mate (Gnome 2.0) and the Compton
compositor.
Most traditional Linux workstation users were exposed to Mate already
because it's basis Gnome 2.0 was the default on RHEL for quite a while.
Mate is also the "safe" choice for adoption of the Fedora Workstation for
the Linux community in the political dimension. The Mate desktop was forked
from Gnome 2.0 by an Arch Linux developer and is used on all major
distributions including Linux Mint and recently Ubuntu 14.04. That means
it's respected, independent and has a large following among Linux
developers and engineers.
"The MATE Desktop Project is dedicated to keeping alive the traditional
> GNOME 2 desktop metaphor. Many users liked this desktop, and found it
> simple, configurable, and comfortable to use. Our goal is to continue the
> development of this desktop environment, adding new features, fixing bugs,
> and improving the software as support libraries and other dependent
> software improves and changes."
link: http://wiki.mate-desktop.org/board:manifesto
It would be unfair to the Gnome team to have to hold back their own mobile
inspired innovation and creativity because the Workstation product demands
a traditional desktop metaphor. We're beginning to see spectacular
cutting-edge UI/UX innovations come out of the Gnome project. Perhaps the
answer is to maintain a Fedora branded Mate desktop with official Gnome
applications and theming. That way the Fedora Workstation team could
facilitate the flow of these innovations back into Mate and make sure they
find their way upstream to the Mate developers.
Compton is based on xcompmgr-dana which is also the basis for Valve's
compositor used in SteamOS which speaks volumes about it's performance and
reliability. The basis xcompmgr was originally written by Keith Packard.
This setup is a mature, reliable and workflow neutral setup that's perfect
for a workstation use case.
"In digging through the steamos-compositor code, it's a modified version of
> xcompmgr."
link: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?px=MTU0MzY&page=news_item
"Compton is a lightweight, standalone composite manager, suitable for use
> with window managers that do not natively provide compositing
> functionality. Compton itself is a fork of xcompmgr-dana, which in turn is
> a fork of xcompmgr. See the compton github page for further information."
link: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Compton
This difference in purpose Desktop -vs- Workstation cannot be lost because
the end product cannot just be another version of Fedora Desktop with more
up to date Gnome Shell components, it should be a TRUE workstation-class
product. There's a huge risk that the Desktop use case will creep into the
Workstation product. To ensure further separation there should be two
different parallel tracks based on which desktop environment is in use:
Fedora Desktop = Core + Gnome Shell (Gnome 3)
Purpose: "Deliver a cutting-edge mobile inspired and integrated desktop
experience for hip tech-savvy consumers and forward thinking modern
business users."
Fedora Workstation = Core + Mate (Gnome 2 + Compton and/or Mutter)
Purpose: "Deliver the performance, reliability and stability demanded by
designers, engineers, financial analysts, and researchers running large
complex applications."
This way both use-cases can evolve to their full potential without any
compromises or limitations.
Thank you for reading...
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