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"But imagine keeping e-mail a bit more like a blog. Then suddenly, youâ(TM)ve got instant messaging qualities and e-mail qualities happening at the same time."

That is the exact reason I use a threaded view in Evolution. WhatÂs more, I canÂt do without the virutal folders wich allow me to filter what I see on a daily basis. The times when I saw my "real" inbox are definetly over. Many other mailclients (Sylpheed for example) provide a similar approach to organizing mails. The way most people use their mailclients IÂm not surprised they canÂt handle the traffic anymore. But: the features are there, people just have to start using it.

cu,
Lispy

there is a great Gnome-Project wich adapts pretty fast to new Mozilla releases and ships with antialiased fonts (I didnÂt like them in the beginning but am an addict now ;-) called Dropline-Gnome. I keep installing this for my newbies along with Slackware wich I prefer as a Newbie-Distro for itÂs clear structure. From this day on I stopped worrying about fonts in Mozilla. Most Gnome Apps use these fonts so it provides a consistent look&feel, too.

But last time I tried Firebird I realised the problem was still there. The defaults are ok...but not a beauty. Well, if for non-slackware users I guess Ximian-Gnome ships with antialiased fonts as well...

You can download the installer and packages seperatly and point the installer at the files, the installer supports it. (though I can't vouch for how well, not having tried it.)
find the files at one of the Mirrors

For Redhat 9 user, there is a serious problem with rpm db conflict. It has been reported here, so install at your own risk.

You could try Here for a slightly more indepth review, or Here for a selection of screenshots.

Or, perish the thought, you could try Here

I really have no firsthand experience with Entourage. I made my assumptions on what I've heard from our Apple Admins. Personally I think the problems they had were caused by using Entourage with our (aging) MS-Exchange Server. Not sure though. Wasn't a big fan of Express either but my Mom and some friends of mine are using it and seem to like it. Personally I use neither. I use yet another Outlook-Ripoff... ;-)

It's okay. The only reason I knew was because I was looking at Ximian Evolution the other night. It has to be one of the best mail clients I've ever used.

Untrue. PHProjekt and PHPGroupware both fill that function nicely, and they do it through a browser at a tiny fraction of the client CPU/memory overhead of Lookout!

Ximian also has a few nice products in that area.

I am a big fan of web-based solutions anyway--they're easier to run and maintain, you have control of the presentation, and in a company using Windows clients, where the browser is such an integral, inseparable, vital part of the OS , users should be perfectly happy reading their IMAP mail with Outcrook, and clicking on links in their mail.

The only thing nobody has "solved" to my satisfaction yet, and this is probably more of a user education issue than anything else, is being able to open attachments from a mail, edit them, and have the attachment in the stored mail automagically updated with your changes. This is, as far as I'm concerned, a non-issue, but it's the kind of detail that management care about (that's some free advice for you evangelists out there).

Ximian Desktop (I'm assuming, based on the monkeys comment).

See more here

If you're intrepid enough to compile the sucker (takes over a day) you'll find the icons are simply windows .bmp formatted files that you can replace with whatever you want. This results in the creation of an alternate set of .res files that you can then drop into any OOo distribution. This is the approach that Ximian uses to bundle a different icon set into their 'enhanced' OpenOffice.org included with Ximian Desktop.

It is also possible to use completely alternative widget sets with OOo, as illustrated by the NeoOffice port using Cocoa widgets and Carbon-rendered widgets (screenshots of Neo vs. Office v.X). This approach, however, is still only available to GPL versions of OOo.

If you've got better ideas as to how to achieve cross-platform compatibility and skinning while maintaining the identical look and feel requirement Sun has, stop by the Graphics System Layer project and lend a hand!

And if you're an intrepid graphics designer (who knows a few other intrepid graphics designers...) and would like to make an alternative icon set for the approximately 1000 icons, please pipe up and help us out! Parts of our icon set are the direct result of the truism that programmers are definitely not graphics artists, and others are relics from when Star Division was busy mimicing Win95/Office97. Our community development can only provide the features the community wants if folks volunteer, else OpenOffice.org will continue to gain only the features Sun believes are needed for selling StarOffice, not necessarily those wanted by the user base of its free cousin.

its supposed to be here

It grabs the page at go.ximian.com, which is a shellscript, and runs it. Since it's at ximian.com, you might as well trust it.

You're right (or I'm as blind as you). I've seen "sources" subdirectory under xd2/redhat-9-i386 (at least on ftp.mirror.co.uk) but it's not there at the moment.

Ximian promised to deliver sources today so I guess they've couple of hours to comply. I'm not trolling but I expect former GNU posterchild (Miguel) and his company to follow GPL religiously.

Why is this a problem ?
They will be looking at a smooth transition, not a big bang, some people may continue with Windows boxes for a long time. These and those moved to Linux are still going to want to arrange meetings/... with each other. The trouble is that the MAPI protocol used in not known and there are no open source clients/servers.

• To do this the Linux groupware clients need to talk to Exchange. The only way that I know of doing this is with Ximian connector: which is proprietary and costs $1,449 for a 25 pack.
• Later on when the exchange servers are replaced, the remaining windows clients will need to talk to the replacement, the only way of doing this is with bynari which is a proprietary product.

We need to reverse engineer the current M$ MAPI protocols so that open source clients/servers can be written. The key to the success of this project is going to be seamless continuity of end user work while desktop and server machines are migrated one by one.

Does anyone know of tools other than ximian connector and bynari ?

OpenOffice does the .doc, .xls & .ppt well enough. Evolution/kmail does the email well enough (smtp). ``Well enough'' means can interoperate in terms of protocol and file/wire formats.

Source code will be released the same week of June 9. It's mentioned in their faq.

Another cool thing: according to this screenshot (I apologise for contributing further to Ximian's /.ing but I have no mirroring capability), you can get the XD installer to install acroread, RealPlayer, flash, Java and the Ximian (MS web) fonts.

There was a recent distro (I forget which one) that, as its first screen, had a "Download all the things we can't distribute" menu. I have recently gone through the "Install all the Mozilla plugins for Red Hat 9" stage, and even with years of Linux experience, come up with things I've had to strace and dependencies you can't be sure about and Sun Java vs Blackdown Java etc...

This is another step forward for Everyperson Linux. If I couldn't get RP working, even as just a browser plugin, I'm sure that my parents or non geek friends couldn't!

But this does point out the obvious gap between 'Distributions that want to be Free' and 'People who want to make Linux work for the real world.' It's nice to see there are members of both camps. At the end of the day Ximian want the corporate world to buy their desktop, and I'm sure they will.

I note that Ximian Desktop 2.0 still hasn't been released for Solaris, despite Ximian claming it has been (see Press Release)>

Quote:

Red Carpet version 2.0 is available on a variety of Linux distributions, including:

* Red Hat 7.3, 8.0, 9
* SuSE 8.2
* Mandrake 9.1
* Solaris 8


Obviously Solaris is not a 'Linux distribution' but I would like to know when it (and if) it will actually be released for Solaris.

Building Gnome on Linux & FreeBSD is relatively painless compared to the non trivial task of building it on Solaris. Sadly, the avalible builds for Solaris, including Sun's own Gnome 2.0 build, are either very out dated or very limited (or a mixture of both). And it's not as if KDE is a viable alternative either, many of the applications, such as KDE's mail application are actually useable on Solaris (e.g. it does not display messages in the preview window).

I'd been looking forward to Ximan Desktop 2.0 as Ximain's 1.4 Desktop is much faster than Sun's 1.4 Desktop, which I've assumed are down to Ximian using GCC rather than Forte (as I've found that everything I've used compiled with Forte rather than GCC is much slower, for example, Mozilla).

So even if Sun are interested in releasing an up-to-date Gnome desktop (which despite promises, they don't seem to be), I can't see it being nearly as good a Ximian Desktop.

I would have thought that Solaris users are far more likely to be corporate users willing to shell out for such a package (and any support options) - particularly in environments that have a lot invested in low end Sparc Stations or Sun Ray environments. I wouldn't bother with it on Linux as most Linux distributions have good Gnome desktops in any case (and it's become trivial to build on Linux).

Does anyone know if it will actually be coming out for Solaris? Can Ximian comment?

These things

http://ximian.com/images/screenshots/desktop/

After beating through the slasdotting, Ximian Desktop 2 will be released June 9, 2003

A OO.o screenshot

Heres the announcement...

Ximian Announces Ximian Desktop 2 to Provide Complete Enterprise Desktop for Linux

Major Upgrade Offers Full Application Suite, Enhanced Usability and Robust Windows Interoperability to Enable Enterprise Adoption

BOSTON, MA -- June 2, 2003: Ximian, Inc., the leading provider of desktop and server solutions enabling enterprise Linux adoption, today announced Ximian® Desktop 2, a major new version of its popular Linux desktop software installed by over 1,500,000 users worldwide. Ximian Desktop 2 provides a complete productivity application suite, breakthrough usability features, and seamless Windows interoperability to enable organizations to easily and affordably deploy Linux desktops in mixed Windows/Linux environments. Innovations include an intuitive interface, the Ximian Edition of OpenOffice.org for Microsoft Office file-compatible documents, one-click Windows network navigation and easy printer setup to reduce training and support costs. Ximian will demonstrate Ximian Desktop 2 publicly at the Jupiter Media Enterprise Linux Forum in Santa Clara, Calif. on June 5 and 6. The product will be available for purchase and electronic installation the week of June 9.

"Our goal with Ximian Desktop 2 has been to enable enterprise customers to cost-effectively adopt and support Linux desktops," said Nat Friedman, co-founder and vice president of product development at Ximian. "Ximian Desktop 2 is the culmination of direct feedback from strategic design partners including over 25 enterprise customers and business partners worldwide. The result is an enterprise-ready Linux desktop that is easy to use, supports existing Windows infrastructure, and is affordable to manage."

"Siemens Business Services is seeing increasing interest from customers for Linux desktop solutions, especially in the public sector," said Duncan McNutt, senior project manager at Siemens Business Services in Germany. "Our evaluations show that Ximian Desktop 2 can be a great fit for Linux workstation deployments. Its familiar interface for Windows users, full application suite, integration with Windows environments and centralized management through Red Carpet(TM) Enterprise(TM) can help reduce support costs for enterprise customers."
Ximian Edition of OpenOffice.org Highlights Application Suite

Based on the open source GNOME 2.2 project, Ximian Desktop 2 delivers a tightly integrated suite of applications with robust support for Windows file formats, networks and standards. It starts with the Ximian Edition of OpenOffice.org, a significantly enhanced version of the open source productivity suite, which lets users create, edit and save Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint 97/2000/XP documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Ximian improvements to OpenOffice.org include default Microsoft Office file formats, 800 new icons, a host of user interface enhancements, GNOME desktop theme and font consistency, and the ability to seamlessly browse, open and save files on remote file systems.

Ximian Desktop 2 also features Ximian Evolution(TM) 1.4, the new version of the award-winning email and personal information management application that can optionally be integrated with Microsoft Exchange 2000 and other messaging and collaboration servers (see related release, "Ximian Announces New 1.4 Versions of Ximian Evolution, Connector for Microsoft Exchange..."). It also includes the Mozilla-based Galeon web browser along with Microsoft Windows metric compatible fonts and common browser plug-ins to provide access to and faithful rendering of virtually all web content. Ximian Desktop 2 additionally provides built-in Linux software updating with the new Red Carpet 2.0 application.

Other capabilities include:

* drag and drop CD burning
* buil

.. is going to be Evolution 1.4 and Ximian's OpenOffice.org for GTK2.

That, coupled with GIMP 1.3 (the screenshots only appear to show GTK1 GIMP 1.2), will mean that GNOME (specifically GTK2) has all the productivity applications to finally get a consistent look across everything, something Linux has not been able to do until now.

Unlike KDE, they are not all being provided by the KDE project - Mozilla, for example, is GTK2 native now.

The real coup for Ximian will be getting GTK2 into OO.o - if they can do this, then the last minor inconsistencies will only be in applications like mplayer, realplay and xmms, and we've all expected media players to look different for years.

(Though, you could go get RhythmBox..)

Ximian's starting to look /.'d, but by all accounts this could be out very very soon. And even if you don't like the desktop, Evolution 1.4 and OO.o Ximian Edition will knock your socks off.

Dear reader the GNOME armageddon has started,

First of all I want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it.

Belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language.

Even if you don't care at all for GNOME, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

On the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the GNOME community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.

Many of us like the GNOME desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. GNOME is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of *NIX, only to name some of its advantages.

Unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of GNOME. The core development team somehow got the idea of targeting GNOME to a complete different direction of users, the so called corporate desktop user.

In other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting GNOME on their computers.

Having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like RedHat, Ximian and Sun decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. So far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

Some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf, an evil Windows Registry-like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that GNOME leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. These are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. Now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

You may imagine that users got really frustrated, because their beloved GNOME desktop matured into something they didn't want. During the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more, more and more emails arrived on the GNOME mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

But the core development team of GNOME don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. The reply they give is mostly the same -- users should either go and 'file a bug' at BugZilla or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback isn't appreciated.

If you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden that they are directing into the commercial area. The core development team actually don't care for the complaining home user -- it's more

I've been using Evolution as an IMAP/SSL client for a couple of years now, and I haven't had any problems with it at all. Give it a try.

• office suite
• browser
• mail client
• operating system

If you're after icons then you can find them from any number of themes for Gnome and KDE, with clear and standard licences.

ahem.. you better count Gnome out, based on your crazy american imperialist views.
check out the "March 31th" entry from this official diaryif you are interested in Miguel de Icaza's stance on the war.
miggie bravely "marched on Boston against War"
(Caution this is is the most boring page ever concieved - you have been warned)

love, peace, hope, dock
miguel

interns and temps don't usually appear on the credits, as you'll see if you bothered to find out anything about what you're blabbering on about. i'm not surprised, though, it doesn't really seem like you really know much about anything, but you'd like to think you do.

the whole point of the class status pages is to show the work remaining for the various mono assemblies. the errors and todos are what it's all about. some people thought it was useful.

if you bothered to look at the cvs pages, you'll see at the bottom that CVSWeb is written by zeller@think.de. if you don't like it you should complain to him. the reason i sent you those links is that you asked for some of my code to peer review.

so, what is it that you do (apart from pathetic trolls), pizzaboy?

Hey, don't talk bad about monkey!!!!! Monkey are nice.

Dear reader the GNOME armageddon has started,

First of all I want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it.

Belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language.

Even if you don't care at all for GNOME, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

On the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the GNOME [gnome.org] community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.

Many of us like the GNOME desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. GNOME is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of *NIX, only to name some of its advantages.

Unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of GNOME. The core development team somehow got the idea of targeting GNOME to a complete different direction of users, the so called corporate desktop user.

In other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting GNOME on their computers.

Having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like RedHat, [redhat.com] Ximian [ximian.com] and Sun [sun.com] decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. So far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

Some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf, [gnome.org] an evil Windows Registry-like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that GNOME leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. These are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. Now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

You may imagine that users got really frustrated, [osnews.com] because their beloved GNOME desktop matured into something they didn't want. During the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more, [gnome.org] more [gnome.org] and more [gnome.org] emails arrived on the GNOME mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

But the core development team of GNOME don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. The reply they give is mostly the same -- users should either go and 'file a bug' at BugZilla [gnome.org] or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback [gnome.org] isn't appreciated.

If you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden tha

Dear reader the GNOME armageddon has started,

First of all I want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it.

Belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language.

Even if you don't care at all for GNOME, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

On the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the GNOME community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.

Many of us like the GNOME desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. GNOME is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of *NIX, only to name some of its advantages.

Unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of GNOME. The core development team somehow got the idea of targeting GNOME to a complete different direction of users, the so called corporate desktop user.

In other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting GNOME on their computers.

Having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like RedHat, Ximian and Sun decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. So far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

Some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf, an evil Windows Registry-like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that GNOME leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. These are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. Now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

You may imagine that users got really frustrated, because their beloved GNOME desktop matured into something they didn't want. During the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more, more and more emails arrived on the GNOME mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

But the core development team of GNOME don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. The reply they give is mostly the same -- users should either go and 'file a bug' at BugZilla or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback isn't appreciated.

If you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden that they are directing into the commercial area. The core development team actually don't care for the complaining home user -- it's more

We ported some of our internal Java business applications to C# for use with Mono, and emperical results already suggest the solution is several times faster than the Java code. The port was very easy, with each line of Java code mapping onto one line of C# or less. Porting the UI to Gtk# was more difficult, but we find the Gtk# code more maintainable and the UI, along with the Gtk+ WIMP plugin integrates much more nicely with Windows than SWING. We'll be investigating a switch to Linux over the next few months for some of our Point-of-Sales terminals as a result, and it should be easy thanks to the portability of Mono and Gtk#.

We also ported some of our backend tools for use with Mono. In use with the newly released Mono JIT runtime, Mini, we've achieved some truly stunning results. It turns out that some of the optimisations in the new JIT are better than those used by GCC, so once the code is loaded in memory, it performs better than raw C code. Although I don't yet have hard numbers to back up these result (the transition is still in progress), it has to be said that Mono is the real answer to Java performance. Being Open Source, we can also contribute back to the runtime to make it better suit our needs. It also plays nicely with RedHat 9's NPTL threading implementation, which is more than I can say for the current crop of Java JREs.

Your post implys, IMHO correctly, that no matter the steps taken to protect software against piracy, there will be piracy. However, there will emerge in the end a need to by software from a vendor in order to get support. Hmmmmm...

Seems to me there's a few companies out there who do something very much like that. Seems we have the answer for Microsoft, don't we?

Soko

Just as the roadmap talks about embedding Minotaur into Phoenix, the way forward for the calendar could be as an embedded extension for Minotaur.

Some people like a standalone mail/news client that isn't your jack-of-all-trades Outlook/Evolution replacement. That's going to be Minotaur.

But Minotaur could also be an Outlook replacement for those who are looking for that sort of solution. Allow the calendar to be installed as an extension (like Phoenix's extensions) and you've got three of the main features of a PIM (mail, address book, calendar). Develop some sort of stickynote-style scratchpad extension and you've mostly got the whole thing.

Evolution at the moment is only available for Linux and friends, and it seems as if there are no plans for a Windows port any time soon. This would provide a lever for those on Windows to abandon MS Office entirely. I mean, OpenOffice.org replaces much of the rest of MS Office bar Outlook; a Minotaur that can be extended to be that Outlook replacement would finish the job.

Not to mention having a further competitor to Evolution on Unix and Linux, particularly once Kontact gets going.

Going the extension route makes far more sense than adding the Calendar to the monolithic Mozilla suite, slowing everybody down.

And anyway, does a stand-alone calendar really make sense? A stand-alone Composer perhaps. But a calendar naturally fits into a PIM environment - surely this is the way forward?

Thexder.

Is it just me, or is this picture pretty similar to Ximians logo?
Just mirrored.

It actually thought that I saw a code monkey :)

At home I also use IMAP, it is just great, it's a shame its so hard to find a good graphical (I come from windows world so I do like my graphical app sometime) imap client for linux (sylpheed I tried and don't like, which leaves mozilla-mail and that is what I call heavy taking 2mins just to check mail, I use it anyway, but I can't wait for minotaur).

Hard? No, I wouldn't say that. Kmail, which has won various awards, fully supports IMAP. Screenshots are here.

Evolution, which is basically a feature-for-feature clone of Microsoft Outlook, also supports IMAP. Screenshots are here.

I've used both and they are both excellent GUI mail clients. I've also used IMAP with both, and their support of IMAP is very good. Evolution is nice because it is a total PIM/Groupware solution, while kmail is a nice "just-a-mail-client" app (it's a lot like Eudora). Both support nice filtering options for POP3 mail. With IMAP you really need server side filtering, though as there is no standards for filtering mail on IMAP. Both support multiple mail accounts and servers and multiple protocols. Both apps support all standard Unix mail formats, including mbox and maildir. In addition, Evolution supports Eudora, Netscape and Outlook Express mailboxes.

Both are nice apps, each has their strengths and weaknesses, but both are open source and run on many Unix platforms and of course Linux.

At home I also use IMAP, it is just great, it's a shame its so hard to find a good graphical (I come from windows world so I do like my graphical app sometime) imap client for linux (sylpheed I tried and don't like, which leaves mozilla-mail and that is what I call heavy taking 2mins just to check mail, I use it anyway, but I can't wait for minotaur).

Hard? No, I wouldn't say that. Kmail, which has won various awards, fully supports IMAP. Screenshots are here.

Evolution, which is basically a feature-for-feature clone of Microsoft Outlook, also supports IMAP. Screenshots are here.

I've used both and they are both excellent GUI mail clients. I've also used IMAP with both, and their support of IMAP is very good. Evolution is nice because it is a total PIM/Groupware solution, while kmail is a nice "just-a-mail-client" app (it's a lot like Eudora). Both support nice filtering options for POP3 mail. With IMAP you really need server side filtering, though as there is no standards for filtering mail on IMAP. Both support multiple mail accounts and servers and multiple protocols. Both apps support all standard Unix mail formats, including mbox and maildir. In addition, Evolution supports Eudora, Netscape and Outlook Express mailboxes.

Both are nice apps, each has their strengths and weaknesses, but both are open source and run on many Unix platforms and of course Linux.

Will the real Ximinem please stand up?

http://ooo.ximian.com/

All you adminstrators are just imitators, so grab yer alpha shaders an' GL accelerators.

And to think, I'm still waiting for Ximian to release it's version of Gnome for RedHat 8.0.

This definitely seems to be a troll (and an overactive one the last few days).

If you search Slashdot users for "miguel", several listings come up. The one that appears to be the real Miguel is this one . The ID is 7116. This listing also point to what more likely seems to be Miguel's true home page.

Well, aside from the 1337ness factor, probably the best thing I can think of is portability. Suppose, like me, your only Mac is an iBook 400 dual-USB. Totally kicks ass for network administration and client support, but I can tell you from long and painful experience that it's not much for compiling. On the other hand, my desktop box is a dual-Xeon monster that absolutely zips througth compiling - a vanilla linux kernel takes a couple of minutes on this box. Now, if I were running Darwin on it, and I wanted to port one of my favorite apps onto it, it would be a hell of a lot less painful for me to do by setting the arch flags in the makefile and deal with all the debugging on a machine that takes less than a tenth of the time to do the compiles before packaging up the binary.

That's just one reason. I'm sure that there are others.

• Build is complicated.
  
• Some people were under the *wrong* impression that GNOME was slower than KDE. Later on, we benchmarked both, and noticed that GNOME is faster, and smaller than KDE (GNOME 2.2 vs KDE 3.1). So that is not really an issue, but a bad reputation we had from GNOME 1.4
  
• Integrated file manager/browser. This one is the only thing that people have repeatedly said they find confusing about GNOME.
  

The one big feature missing for me in evolution is a spam filter. Fortunately, spamassassin works great even if you have to run it locally. Here are some instructions for evolution users who need to run it locally or are lucky enough to have spamassassin installed on their mail server.

• "the user don't know what a window manager is",
• "the user don't know what themes are",
• "the user don't know what a homedir is",
• "the user can't compile a kernel",
• "the user don't want to customize their desktop",
• "the user shouldn't see preferences which purpose they don't know"

dear reader the gnome armageddon has started,

first of all i want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it. belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language. even if you don't care at all for gnome, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

on the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the gnome community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.

many of us like the gnome desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. gnome is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of u*nix. only to name some of its advantages.

unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of gnome. the core development team somehow got the idea of targeting gnome to a complete different direction of users. the so called corporate desktop user. in other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting gnome on their computers.

having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like redhat, ximian and sun decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. so far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf, an evil windows registry like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that gnome leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. these are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

you may imagine that users got really frustrated because their beloved gnome desktop matured into something they didn't want. during the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more, more and more emails arrived on the gnome mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

but the core development team of gnome don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. the reply they give is mostly the same. users should either go and 'file a bug' at bugzilla or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback isn't appreciated.

if you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden that they are directing into the commercial area. the core development team actually don't care for the complaining home user. it's more important for them to reach the customers with the cash. it seems that this has been told to them by the company leaders. everything about gnome has been decided already, a way back or direct communication isn't possible. don't get trapped by sentences like 'we listen to our users'. they listen to you - yes, to make funny silly jokes about you afterwards.

i thought that everything was build up on friendship, build on programming for fun, build on understanding each other. but the reality looks like it's all for the big money. the cash is what matters everything else is a lie and a dream. time for people to wake up.

not long ago they threw one of the most important long year core developer martin baulig out of team. a guy who worked really hard on getting gnome into the right direction. a nice friendly person who put all his time into gnome. but narrow minded gnome elites such as havoc pennington were responsible that he left the gnome project. the trouble and the pressure that was put on him was to much.

with the new gnome desktop a lot of user interface changes happened such as button reordering. needless to say that this confuse people who are used to the 'right' button ordering for ages. even our fellow linux guru alan cox wasn't thrilled about this idea. but the gnome elites such as havoc pennington, seth nickell, calum benson and dave bordoley knew it better. why following the road of any other desktop that exists ? why not doing something that don't confuse their users and still stay usable ? well it seems to be too easy. gnome needs to be different than anything else so they changed the button order which was one of the reasons that users became unhappy. they said that there was a hard fight about this and the decision was made to change the buttons. but i belive they simply copied the behaviour of macos because most of the gnome developers use a macintosh as either laptop or desktop. sad that they forgot to keep in mind that users tend to mix applications and that this will lead into weird button searching and clicking.

but as if this wasn't enough the same people decided that the new gnome human interface guides were the ultima non plus ultra in human interface guides. the announcement contained informations that the kde usability people got initiated into it. unfortunately the kde people heard about it the first time when seth nickell went to the kde mailinglist which happened after the announcement. you can imagine that they got highly pissed off about this attitude. you can read more on this link. to summarize it, the kde people clarified that gnome should care for their own business.

the problem that came with the new interface guides was, that every little gnome hacker started to become an user interface expert over night. a lot of gnome programs that we like to use matured into a disaster over night. hackers that never programmed correctly for their life started to blindly follow the hype of simplification. for an example look what happened to galeon's interface (pay attention for the last paragraph). even philip langdale a long year galeon hacker got highly indignant by the target that gnome leads and wrote this email to the galeon mailinglist.

here another reason why users became angry. the elite assumes, that the user knows nothing about their system. you find a couple of heavily insulting mails on their mailing lists containing sentences like the quoted ones.

• "the user don't know what a window manager is"
• "the user don't know what themes are"
• "the user don't know what a homedir is"
• "the user can't compile a kernel"
• "the user don't want to customize their desktop"
• "the user shouldn't see preferences which purpose they don't know"

such evil practices shouldn't be tolerated by the users and need to be fighted. u*nix users aren't stupid people. who actually gave havoc pennington the rights to decide what the user wants and what not ? various users told him that people who use a u*nix like system are well aware of their capabilities dealing with such a complex system. there's a reason why people are switching from alternative operating systems. they want to learn, they want to use the full power of the system, they want to change everything they like.

to top all this, look at the future plans of nautilus. the current maintainers got the idea of changing the whole nautilus concepts into an object oriented user interface design. you may be highly interested in reading the exact words of alex larsson's vision for nautilus' future direction by clicking on this link.

to summarize it, it's assumed that the user don't need to deal with his homedir or his whole filesystem because it may confuse him or because he don't understand it. the new concepts of nautilus should be that the user deal with symbols in the nautilus view. e.g. you get a cdrom symbol and by clicking on it you see the directory of your cdrom, you get a photo symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your pr0n pictures, you get a music symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your mp3's. you don't know where all these files are located because you don't deal with the bottom layer of your homedir or filesystem anymore as mentioned earlier.

the question is why are people that know nothing about their users, that know nothing about correct user interface design destroying gnome ? the users don't deserve all this specially those that backed gnome for all the years. even sun threw a bunch of so called user interface experts together and have them work on gnome. don't forget that sun are the creators of the common desktop environment. we don't need another cde clone named gnome. even havoc pennington author of the good user interfaces text isn't able to get his own written software following his rules.

not long ago there was an report about the 'two captains of nautilus' where the reporter (uraeus a gnome contributor himself) reported alexander larsson and david camp. you may imagine that such a report can't be taken serious because it's done by their own people. we here have a saying that sounds like this 'one crow doesn't hack the eye of another crow out'. now you can click on this link and read more. it may be interesting to read the replies from various users all over the globe of what they think about gnome and nautilus in general (please pay attention to the listed ip's there). another nice and informative reading can be found by clicking on this link.

the fileselector problem was a long discussed issue in the gnome community. finally they came to an solution for this and have decided to go for this ugly fileselector instead going for this one which was developed by a free volunteer for a long time and in general looks and behaves better.

most users have no problems with the idea of keeping things simple and clean. removing some not needed preferences was indeed a good idea but it doesn't stop. people started to remove everything from their apps. you're forced to use dubious programs like gconf-editor which basically works like the windows registry editor, to tweak uncommented preferences. i don't think that this is an advantage. even the possibility to tweak preferences with an editor was taken away with that ugly implementation of gconf. all your preferences are stored in a directory tree with an unknown amount of *.xml files. even if you delete programs their keys are still remaining orphaned in these trees and finding them is like playing trivia. at the end it's worth a discussion if a system driven by a single home user needs such a registry like system. we didn't need such a system for over 30 years but the gnome development team got the idea copying one of the most retarded systems from windows to u*nix. not to mention that the copy is more retarded than the original.

it's a shame to see how such a nice desktop got thrown into the trash by such people. but there is a lot more behind the scenes that i don't know about. everything around gnome is a big marketing strategy. poor people are working the hell out of gnome for nothing and companies such as those mentioned above are getting the big cash. for sure you could say - go and fork gnome - but seriously how can you go and fork gnome ? such a big project which needs a bunch of people to keep the code alive and compatible. well you know it's all about open source the code is signed under the gnu/gpl or gnu/lgpl, you can't own it. even the companies are aware of this. but if you can't own the code - go and hire their developers. you can direct them like puppets in any direction that you - as company - like. exactly this is happening with gnome.

well you could easily come up and tell me to simply not use gnome and let them do whatever they like. well, you are right with that but things are more complicated nowadays. gnome is influencing a lot of third party projects such as xfree86 which recently added a lot of gnome components into their cvs repository. please know that with the next coming xfree86 version you get a lot of gnome components without even knowing it. code like, gnome-xml, pkgconfig, fontconfig, xcursor and xft2 were mainly written by people who're heavily involved into gnome development. also the gimp is maturing more and more into getting the look and feel of a native gnome application. the cvs version of the gimp has a lot of gnome pixmaps inside and they are heavily working on integrate the gimp into gnome. if not today but the direction is sure and i fear the day this gonna happen.

it's ok that these things exist and it's ok to see xfree86 and the gimp are beeing hacked on. but please think about the people that don't like or use gnome. what about them ? why force them to have gnome components installed on their systems ? why can't gnome go the same way that kde went e.g. doing their own stuff without infecting other projects like aids. seeing more and more libraries and applications that were in no way related to gnome jumping on the pkgconfig boat which's really not needed. look what will happen to solaris, the world famous operating system on u*nix used by big companies and long years experts. they really plan to replace cde with gnome. i know that cde wasn't the best invention of desktops but it rarely crashed and it fits far better into the philosophy of xfree86 with their configuration system than gnome. you know the good old way having your settings defined with .xdefaults and all nice default configurations are going into /etc/x11/app-defaults/ and so on. understandable that the good old way may be blocking the future of applications for multiusersystems - but why must it have to be a windows registry like system that replaces future configuration ?

well to come to an end i personally don't like many of this stuff. i can't stand the button reordering, i don't like the gconf system and even more i don't like the commercial outsourcing of gnome and the bad influence that gnome has on other applications. the bad attitude of some gnome developers is another story since we are all different reacting humans. luckily there are people sharing some of my thoughts otherwise i wouldn't be able to proof my text with so many links. even amongst the gnome developers there are silent voices of people that hate many of these decisions and silently use something else. right now if you checkout the gnome cvs repository every day you find out that the whole gnome development seemed to came to an halt. the contributions to their cvs are poor. while projects such as kde are reaching easily 10-20k commits per month - gnome is getting around 1-2k per month on it's best times. it really looks like the situation of gnome is unclear so it would be better to have it not influence so much other programs or at the end we deal with an disaster.

now i hope this text was informative for you. i hope that you start to think about the situation and the global direction. the situation of gnome is unclear, their target is groggy too since i can't belive that the users that they are targeting ever heard of u*nix or linux. they plan to get out of the 0.05% desktop niche but this will for sure not happen if they continue their current direction and their bad ugly

Yes.

dear reader the gnome armageddon has started,

first of all i want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it. belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language. even if you don't care at all for gnome, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.

on the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the gnome community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.

many of us like the gnome desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. gnome is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of u*nix. only to name some of its advantages.

unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of gnome. the core development team somehow got the idea of targeting gnome to a complete different direction of users. the so called corporate desktop user. in other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting gnome on their computers.

having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like redhat, ximian and sun decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. so far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.

some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf, an evil windows registry like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that gnome leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. these are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.

you may imagine that users got really frustrated because their beloved gnome desktop matured into something they didn't want. during the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more, more and more emails arrived on the gnome mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.

but the core development team of gnome don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. the reply they give is mostly the same. users should either go and 'file a bug' at bugzilla or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback isn't appreciated.

if you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden that they are directing into the commercial area. the core development team actually don't care for the complaining home user. it's more important for them to reach the customers with the cash. it seems that this has been told to them by the company leaders. everything about gnome has been decided already, a way back or direct communication isn't possible. don't get trapped by sentences like 'we listen to our users'. they listen to you - yes, to make funny silly jokes about you afterwards.

i thought that everything was build up on friendship, build on programming for fun, build on understanding each other. but the reality looks like it's all for the big money. the cash is what matters everything else is a lie and a dream. time for people to wake up.

not long ago they threw one of the most important long year core developer martin baulig out of team. a guy who worked really hard on getting gnome into the right direction. a nice friendly person who put all his time into gnome. but narrow minded gnome elites such as havoc pennington were responsible that he left the gnome project. the trouble and the pressure that was put on him was to much.

with the new gnome desktop a lot of user interface changes happened such as button reordering. needless to say that this confuse people who are used to the 'right' button ordering for ages. even our fellow linux guru alan cox wasn't thrilled about this idea. but the gnome elites such as havoc pennington, seth nickell, calum benson and dave bordoley knew it better. why following the road of any other desktop that exists ? why not doing something that don't confuse their users and still stay usable ? well it seems to be too easy. gnome needs to be different than anything else so they changed the button order which was one of the reasons that users became unhappy. they said that there was a hard fight about this and the decision was made to change the buttons. but i belive they simply copied the behaviour of macos because most of the gnome developers use a macintosh as either laptop or desktop. sad that they forgot to keep in mind that users tend to mix applications and that this will lead into weird button searching and clicking.

but as if this wasn't enough the same people decided that the new gnome human interface guides were the ultima non plus ultra in human interface guides. the announcement contained informations that the kde usability people got initiated into it. unfortunately the kde people heard about it the first time when seth nickell went to the kde mailinglist which happened after the announcement. you can imagine that they got highly pissed off about this attitude. you can read more on this link. to summarize it, the kde people clarified that gnome should care for their own business.

the problem that came with the new interface guides was, that every little gnome hacker started to become an user interface expert over night. a lot of gnome programs that we like to use matured into a disaster over night. hackers that never programmed correctly for their life started to blindly follow the hype of simplification. for an example look what happened to galeon's interface (pay attention for the last paragraph). even philip langdale a long year galeon hacker got highly indignant by the target that gnome leads and wrote this email to the galeon mailinglist.

here another reason why users became angry. the elite assumes, that the user knows nothing about their system. you find a couple of heavily insulting mails on their mailing lists containing sentences like the quoted ones.

• "the user don't know what a window manager is"
• "the user don't know what themes are"
• "the user don't know what a homedir is"
• "the user can't compile a kernel"
• "the user don't want to customize their desktop"
• "the user shouldn't see preferences which purpose they don't know"

such evil practices shouldn't be tolerated by the users and need to be fighted. u*nix users aren't stupid people. who actually gave havoc pennington the rights to decide what the user wants and what not ? various users told him that people who use a u*nix like system are well aware of their capabilities dealing with such a complex system. there's a reason why people are switching from alternative operating systems. they want to learn, they want to use the full power of the system, they want to change everything they like.

to top all this, look at the future plans of nautilus. the current maintainers got the idea of changing the whole nautilus concepts into an object oriented user interface design. you may be highly interested in reading the exact words of alex larsson's vision for nautilus' future direction by clicking on this link.

to summarize it, it's assumed that the user don't need to deal with his homedir or his whole filesystem because it may confuse him or because he don't understand it. the new concepts of nautilus should be that the user deal with symbols in the nautilus view. e.g. you get a cdrom symbol and by clicking on it you see the directory of your cdrom, you get a photo symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your pr0n pictures, you get a music symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your mp3's. you don't know where all these files are located because you don't deal with the bottom layer of your homedir or filesystem anymore as mentioned earlier.

the question is why are people that know nothing about their users, that know nothing about correct user interface design destroying gnome ? the users don't deserve all this specially those that backed gnome for all the years. even sun threw a bunch of so called user interface experts together and have them work on gnome. don't forget that sun are the creators of the common desktop environment. we don't need another cde clone named gnome. even havoc pennington author of the good user interfaces text isn't able to get his own written software following his rules.

not long ago there was an report about the 'two captains of nautilus' where the reporter (uraeus a gnome contributor himself) reported alexander larsson and david camp. you may imagine that such a report can't be taken serious because it's done by their own people. we here have a saying that sounds like this 'one crow doesn't hack the eye of another crow out'. now you can click on this link and read more. it may be interesting to read the replies from various users all over the globe of what they think about gnome and nautilus in general (please pay attention to the listed ip's there). another nice and informative reading can be found by clicking on this link.

the fileselector problem was a long discussed issue in the gnome community. finally they came to an solution for this and have decided to go for this ugly fileselector instead going for this one which was developed by a free volunteer for a long time and in general looks and behaves better.

most users have no problems with the idea of keeping things simple and clean. removing some not needed preferences was indeed a good idea but it doesn't stop. people started to remove everything from their apps. you're forced to use dubious programs like gconf-editor which basically works like the windows registry editor, to tweak uncommented preferences. i don't think that this is an advantage. even the possibility to tweak preferences with an editor was taken away with that ugly implementation of gconf. all your preferences are stored in a directory tree with an unknown amount of *.xml files. even if you delete programs their keys are still remaining orphaned in these trees and finding them is like playing trivia. at the end it's worth a discussion if a system driven by a single home user needs such a registry like system. we didn't need such a system for over 30 years but the gnome development team got the idea copying one of the most retarded systems from windows to u*nix. not to mention that the copy is more retarded than the original.

it's a shame to see how such a nice desktop got thrown into the trash by such people. but there is a lot more behind the scenes that i don't know about. everything around gnome is a big marketing strategy. poor people are working the hell out of gnome for nothing and companies such as those mentioned above are getting the big cash. for sure you could say - go and fork gnome - but seriously how can you go and fork gnome ? such a big project which needs a bunch of people to keep the code alive and compatible. well you know it's all about open source the code is signed under the gnu/gpl or gnu/lgpl, you can't own it. even the companies are aware of this. but if you can't own the code - go and hire their developers. you can direct them like puppets in any direction that you - as company - like. exactly this is happening with gnome.

well you could easily come up and tell me to simply not use gnome and let them do whatever they like. well, you are right with that but things are more complicated nowadays. gnome is influencing a lot of third party projects such as xfree86 which recently added a lot of gnome components into their cvs repository. please know that with the next coming xfree86 version you get a lot of gnome components without even knowing it. code like, gnome-xml, pkgconfig, fontconfig, xcursor and xft2 were mainly written by people who're heavily involved into gnome development. also the gimp is maturing more and more into getting the look and feel of a native gnome application. the cvs version of the gimp has a lot of gnome pixmaps inside and they are heavily working on integrate the gimp into gnome. if not today but the direction is sure and i fear the day this gonna happen.

it's ok that these things exist and it's ok to see xfree86 and the gimp are beeing hacked on. but please think about the people that don't like or use gnome. what about them ? why force them to have gnome components installed on their systems ? why can't gnome go the same way that kde went e.g. doing their own stuff without infecting other projects like aids. seeing more and more libraries and applications that were in no way related to gnome jumping on the pkgconfig boat which's really not needed. look what will happen to solaris, the world famous operating system on u*nix used by big companies and long years experts. they really plan to replace cde with gnome. i know that cde wasn't the best invention of desktops but it rarely crashed and it fits far better into the philosophy of xfree86 with their configuration system than gnome. you know the good old way having your settings defined with .xdefaults and all nice default configurations are going into /etc/x11/app-defaults/ and so on. understandable that the good old way may be blocking the future of applications for multiusersystems - but why must it have to be a windows registry like system that replaces future configuration ?

well to come to an end i personally don't like many of this stuff. i can't stand the button reordering, i don't like the gconf system and even more i don't like the commercial outsourcing of gnome and the bad influence that gnome has on other applications. the bad attitude of some gnome developers is another story since we are all different reacting humans. luckily there are people sharing some of my thoughts otherwise i wouldn't be able to proof my text with so many links. even amongst the gnome developers there are silent voices of people that hate many of these decisions and silently use something else. right now if you checkout the gnome cvs repository every day you find out that the whole gnome development seemed to came to an halt. the contributions to their cvs are poor. while projects such as kde are reaching easily 10-20k commits per month - gnome is getting around 1-2k per month on it's best times. it really looks like the situation of gnome is unclear so it would be better to have it not influence so much other programs or at the end we deal with an disaster.

now i hope this text was informative for you. i hope that you start to think about the situation and the global direction. the situation of gnome is unclear, their target is groggy too since i can't belive that the users that they are targeting ever heard of u*nix or linux. they plan to get out of the 0.05% desktop niche but this will for sure not happen if they continue their current direction and their bad ugly

Count me as an "I do".

Ever since I dropped Mandrake 9 and Debian 3.0 on my two boxes, I've been without the Ximian interface. (After numerous visits to Ximian.com, I was about to give up hope.)

Consider that hope rekindled.

I don't know about the other problems; if you submit them to our Bugzilla with a more detailed explanation we would be happy to help.

Look! I'm ONTOPIC so blow it out your ass.

What gap?

Well, personally I think the Aqua widgets look better than the Keramik ones (if you ignore the stripes! argh!). However, I prefer the Mist theme for GTK2 above all those, they look good, clean, and imho pretty sophisticated. They look good while avoiding being theme overkill. It's completely personal opinion though, these things always are. I think Keramik is a bit fat.

You raise a good point wrt theming though. Sure, everybody thought Aqua was cool when it first came out, and I guess many still do, but looks are about fashion and taste, and fashion changes. I remember when Windows 95 came out I thought it looked brilliant!

Now everything supports theming, new "in" styles come and go like anything. I know you can hack theming support onto MacOS, but without actual support from Apple that's all it is, a hack. I wonder if that's really a good idea in the long run. Maybe they'll introduce charged for visual styles, to give value add.