Conectiva Interview

Interviewed by Jono Bacon

Conectiva are a popular and established Linux distributor in South America. Conectiva have gained a solid reputation for their products, and I spoke to Roberto Teixeira about Conectiva and KDE.

What is the companies line of business? What kind of products/services do you offer?

Conectiva is the largest linux company in Latin America. We develop a linux distribution called Conectiva Linux. Along with that we offer a long line of services for medium to large corporate customers.

In our product line, along with Conectiva Linux Desktop and Server Editions, we offer "off-the-shelf" solutions as well as customized solutions. Conectiva has developed several solutions for the linux comminuty/market. Some of the most famous and successful are the Conectiva Application Server and Conectiva Advanced Application Server. With CAS we allow our corporate customers to have a large number of users with lower-end computers/thin clients. One step further, Conectiva Advanced Application Server builds on top of CAS to allow these customers to maintain legacy applications written for Microsoft Windows platform running in linux desktop machines without emulation.This has proven to be a great success story for Conectiva.

What is your typical customers requirements?

Usually our customer wants better performance/stability along with lower prices. That's basically what everybody wants actually. Typically our customers are tired of hard license agreements and want to switch to an alternative operating system or simply have specific requirements that simply can be properly satisfied only with linux.

On the desktop side, most customers were very reluctant to switch to linux because of legacy applications. That's where our Conectiva Advanced Application Server made its great revolution in the Brazilian linux market. A customer can have desktop machines running KDE (we always recommend KDE as the desktop environment to our customers) and still use their Microsoft Windows applications. We usually demonstrate this solution running Sun's StarOffice for Linux and Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows running side by side in a KDE desktop on top of a 486DX2 box with 16MB of RAM. Of course this is not the purpose of the solution. We do not desire to see a lot of linux desktops running IE. The purpose is to allow a company to continue using its ERP applications while taking advantage of the stability and performance that linux provides.

How does KDE fit into your IT requirements and what solutions does it offer?

KDE is just the best desktop environment in existence for the linux market. Period. No other desktop solution comes even close to KDE's small learning curve and, perhaps more important, stability. That's the main reason why KDE has been so widely used in our corporate customers. As a linux-base company, we needed a desktop option when we offered our services to potential customers. KDE fitted right in.

We now develop most of our configuration applications using KDE. Although until recently we had WindowMaker and GNOME as options, we switched to a real KDE-base distribution. While this doesn't mean we do not ship other options in our CDs, we tend to not mention them in our documentation and promotional material. By all means KDE is our official desktop.

How many machines does KDE run on and what Operating Systems do you use?

I don't know the exact number, but it must be something in the vicinity of 100 boxes using KDE right now in this office. All of them use Conectiva Linux, of course.

What items did you take into consideration in choosing KDE, and what made you finalise upon it?

It may sound cheesy, but the fact is that choosing KDE is really a no-brainer when you have such a diverse user group as our company has. Our employees range from Linux gurus to people who have very little computer experience like lawyers, accountants and personal secretaries. They all use Linux here and almost all use KDE by default, since we believe it is the best desktop for people to learn how to use. I really believe that our employees are the evidence that Linux is really not hard to use. Also, KDE is usually considered to be a lot more stable than any other desktop environment.

Did you consider other desktop environments such as GNOME, and why did you settle on KDE?

For some reason GNOME is not really very popular here in Brazil. I believe that GNOME offers some good points in desktop, but mostly of it is eye candy. GNOME also seems to be very unstable most of the time. As I mentioned before, KDE has the great advantage of a relatively small learning curve and a rock solid stability. Someone said once to me that he perceived GNOME applications as being in an eternal alpha state as KDE's always seemed to be stable, well finished. That's what people need, I think, no one likes to have crashes all the time.

What particular KDE software do you utilise in your business? KOffice? KDevelop?

Kmail is a widely used. It's a great email app. Konqueror is also very popular in office. KOffice is really not so widely used as it was not really usable until not too long ago and StarOffice ended up becoming popular. KPresenter has been more used recently by some of our sales and marketing teams recently. As a side note, konqueror is widely used even by people not using KDE as it is considered to be a very good browser.

What commercial software would you like to see available for KDE?

There are some applications that KDE really lacks at the moment. We have recently looked for a good project managenment application to run in Linux but found none that suited our needs. That's a big problem for us. Currently we are using some applications developed in-house in PHP but they are still not what we want. In my opinion, this is THE application that still needs to be created. Also, some people complain about the lack of something similar to GNU Cash for KDE.

Do you feel KDE is a cost effective platform?

Absolutely. KDE is great to deploy and maintain. And since it's so stable, it also demands very little in terms of support. Very good.

Where would you like to see the future of KDE go, and what would you like to see in future releases?

Honestly I hope KDE continues on the current road. Its philosophy of constant and rapid evolution is great for our business. Most bugs we find are quickly fixed by the developers and this has come to create an overall good image of the KDE project and also a lot of confidence in the future of it. However, KDE's biggest problem is still its performance. It's really slow on low-end machines. We have overcome this with our application servers, but this is most a workaround than a solution. This is something I would like to see changing in the future (hopefully soon).

Some people complain about the lack of eye candy as well. With the new Windows XP, some people believe that a desktop is not a real desktop without a lot of animations and high contrast colors. Personally I disagree as most people like eye candy at first but they tend to turn them down very quickly because ultimately people need a desktop environment that helps them get their job done easier and faster. And that's what KDE does.

Conectiva - http://www.conectiva.com/

Interview by Jono Bacon for KDE::Enterprise - http://enterprise.kde.org/

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