From GUADEC, a presentation [.pdf] by Bryan Clark and Havoc Pennington of Red Hat on a proposed direction for Gnome, “The Online Desktop.” The proposal is, as I understand, to acknowledge the central place of the internet for the desktop computing experience and to treat your local environment more and more as a client for the server-in-the-cloud. Your bookmarks are Del.icio.us, your photo “app” is Flickr, your mapping software is Google Maps, and so forth. This idea, not so new to the graybeards whose eyes are rolling violently back and forth in their old heads, is interesting for several reasons:

• the mix of open and closed source; open on the desktop side, not so open on the server cloud side. But with easy APIs, does it really matter to end users?
• the requirement for an always-on network connection
• the promise of kiosk computing
• ease of maintenance; you don’t do it, essentially — the services do
• the shift from an imitation of Windows (or Mac or Xerox Parc…) to an actually new, innovative approach available only on Linux

A bit more on what I believe is the empty promise of kiosk computing:

The idea behind this is always described by a use case of a random person walking up to a random computer and through {magic, our product, the Online Desktop, whatever}, all of their preferences and files automatically appear in front of them. Whether or not this is technically possible is not the point; I’ve worked on several projects where we’ve done something almost exactly like this. The question really ought to be: does this use case exist? I think that, outside of a few specialized instances, it does not. Those specialized instances include college campuses, hospitals, and perhaps shop (i.e., factory) floors. And even in those instances, kiosks and these users aren’t all that common. I was at a major teaching hospital today in Los Angeles where physicians and nurses tote laptops into exam rooms. In other hospital settings, the shared workstation is still common, but it’s certainly not the only approach. Kiosks also exist on college campuses, but what percentage of college students today don’t have their own computers? The truth is, people like to own their own hardware. Perhaps in poor countries, the appeal of having your own LiveCD with an Online Desktop of your own running on a shared workstation will subsitute for hardware ownership?