rml is a god.
Robert Love is going to change everything on the Linux desktop. He is an absolute god in this department, and severe thanks go to Ximian for hiring him.
A little background. rml was a kernel hacker, until recently. He did a number of interesting kernel things. A few weeks ago, Ximian hired him to do whatever is necessary, on the low-level kernel-interaction side, to make Linux on the desktop rock.
Already, he’s designed a new hardware abstraction layer (HAL) for Gnome, he’s hooked it into hotplug/udev via dbus, so it knows about all hardware events, and he’s got a prototype (“pretty much feature complete”) of gnome-volume-manager, which will detect all volume related events (CD/DVD insertion, hook up camera/thumb drive, network mount, etc.) and do the correct automount/autorun/autoplay thing for them. Put in a DVD, have it start playing.
I realize that most of this is already supported by Windows, but having it in Linux will completely rock. Plus, it’ll be essentially free, because it’s non-polling (unlike the Windows version). Expect Linux to be light years ahead of Windows on the desktop by the end of 2004, if rml has his way.