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New Desktop for Linux
naasking writes, "A new desktop project has been started by former Apple and AOL employees. Their goal is to create a graphical environment for Linux that "your mother could use." The company doing it is called Eazel. " It also is supposed to be based on GNOME. CT: Several people noted that this shell is destined to be the GNOME 2.0 shell/file manager.
- What's the key combination to print something in Windows?
- What's the key combination to close a window?
- What's the key combination to save a file?
- Where does Game X install itself in the Start menu?
Ask 10 people and you'll probably get at least 5 different answers, simply because every application is allowed to do things differently. This makes the learning curve exponentially greater because you need to learn the shortcuts for _every_ application!
As much as I hate the MacOS from a technical standpoint, it really does have everything else beat hands-down when it comes to simplicity and consistency. (Or at least it did -- Aqua looks pretty hideous...)
- A.P.
--
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"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
There seem to be a lot of misunderstandings about this.
1) It doesn't seem to be a fork on Gnome, but rather an extension of it (perhaps a set of modules for it?)
2) It is NOT being developed by Apple or AOL. These are a bunch of people who used to work for Apple and AOL, but neither company is itself directly involved.
3) I know a lot of people are just going to post without reading the article, so I might as well reiterate it here: yes, it's GPL'd.
4) Once again, this is NOT Apple doing this. But I wouldn't be surprised if some of the people from the now-defunct Human Interface team there are now working on it.
Now, my own views on the project: I hope it works out. GNOME and KDE are both making good progress towards bringing a good, usable GUI to Linux, but both still have a long way to go. A boost, particularly from people who've designed UI's professionally before, would be a great help.
I see a lot of posts on here that pretty much parrot the line: "this is what Linux really needs." That's a load of crap.
If you want Linux to succeed in a mass market where the majority of VCRs silently blink 12:00 into infinity, then it must have something truly compelling to offer over the competition. This means that Linux needs to be simplified to the extreme. Sticking some pretty eye-candy on top of X isn't going to do it. To wit:
In short, Linux needs to be something totally different from what it is.
I use GNU/Linux because it works for me. I've used various flavors of UNIX, MacOS, and MS Windows as a professional programmer, student, home computer user, and employee. I've set up, installed, configured, even built machines targeted at all three operating systems. I use GNU/Linux at home (while my wife uses MacOS). I don't expect everyone to have the technical knowledge that I do, nor have the desire to acquire that knowledge. I mean, look, I do this stuff for a living, it's my business to know, but my doctor doesn't do this stuff for a living, so I don't expect him to want to learn to operate a computer just to get his work done, and neither should you.
What the world really needs is a new OS (perhaps based on the Linux kernel, perhaps not) that bundles ease of use and robustness in a single package.
It's high time some of you stopped deluding yourselves into thinking that GNU/Linux is the be-all and end-all of Operating Systems.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
No, not so much a flame as a caveat. One Eazel employee told, at a recent bay area Linux gathering, of how harsh the management is about prospective employees.
And several prominent Bay Area Linux people with heavy GUI backgrounds (like myself) were snubbed by Eazel to hire much less expensive neophyte programmers. Yeah, I was one of them, but I don't care as I found a great-paying and good job elsewhere. I was much more surprised when several other friends with good credentials were ALSO snubbed.
Basically, they'd be willing to pay a premium for a big name, but I sincerely doubt the employees will be treated well.
My vote on Eazel: nice concept, wrong company.
_Deirdre
...but it's going to take a lot of work. We need apps that my mom can use, and lots of them. Financial apps, word processing and spreadsheet apps, and a good web browser (Unix Netscape just sucks today).
Some of the pieces are already being worked on, and a few already exist. You might say StarOffice is good enough for mom to use, despite the fact that it doesn't always import MS formats properly. The financial apps are pretty poor right now. All the Free ones listed on freshmeat are so feature-poor, it's hard to use them for anything but the simplest checkbook balancing. When/If Intuit ports Quicken to Linux, things will be different.
As for the web browser, this is probably the "killer app" for most people. Ask anyone what program they use most every day, and they will probably answer NS/IE. The problem is that web browsing on Linux sucks. Unix Netscape on the whole is just crap. Its more unstable than Win32 Netscape, and X just makes the fonts look like shit. The text is unreadable and ugly. Furthermore, plugin and Java support in NS on Linux is abysmal. This is a serious problem. Mozilla looks to change all that, by providing a high quality, standard web browser implementation cross-platform. That would be quite a feat! Unfortunately, that's also quite a ways off.
In sum, I think efforts like these are nice, but I really believe that it's a little early to be making things mom can use. In many ways, right now we don't even have stuff WE can use.
This is the best thing that could have happened to Linux. The problem with other desktop environments to date is that they're being developed by people bent on one-upping windows. They may not even realize it, but they're taking all the user interface decisions that Microsoft has made--many of them fundamentally wrong--and are duplicating them. For example, human interface designers have been been very vocal about the problems of "nested expand-to-the-right" pull down menus (a la the Start menu). And yet this a fundamental feature of KDE (not to pick on it too hard).
What Linux needs is some fresh air; some people who are more than just coders looking for a project, and who have their own ideas they want to bring to life. There has been much research and are many available books and papers on interface design that don't follow the Mac/Windows paradigms that we've been seeing on personal computers for sixteen years now.
Something to note here is that there are some real gurus behind this effort. This is much different than two college students with little historical perspective trying to outdo Microsoft in a "me too!" sort of way.
Heh. Getting my mother to use Linux wouldn't be that difficult. My fiancee is another matter entirely. She's about as computer literate as a house plant. Which is why I hope they suceed. I'd like to be able to discuss Unix and Linux issues without her eyes glazing over.
That said, making Linux an easier pill for John Q. Public to take requires more than a GUI.
It's going to require a "Plug and Play" ability for peripherials...or at least better automatic detection and mounting. The latter is mostly an issue of better driver support. The former is a much more drastic change.
It's also going to require a increased ability to set things up from the desktop graphic tools. Don't get me wrong. I'm a command line evangelist. As a systems admin, the command line tools give me a better insight to how the system works. John Q. Public, OTOH, really doesn't give a flying fsck how the system works. John Q. Public wants to run his Quicken 2000, Office 2000 (two products that, if ported, would make a lot of converts), games and web surf for cheap airline tickets and pr0n. What he doesn't want to do is kernel tuning, add patches (or service packs), manually add zip disks, etc. A computer is a tool. If the average user can't figure out how to use our tool or gets continually frustrated, he'll buy one that he can use a lot easier...Macs and Win 9x.
What we really ought to be doing is not beta testing with other techies, but beta testing with people like my fiancee. Those that have no clue and really don't want one. If it passes that test, then it will be ready for prime time as a home computer OS.
I agree with you here.
Another thing "mere mortals" want is an all-graphics interface; everything point and click.
I disagree here. I suspect what "mere mortals" want is a tool, as opposed to today's scaled-down mainframes. It's been very instructive watching my father use my computer, and having to explain what a window is, what a scroll thumb is, the fact that page-up and page-down keys exist and what they do, and how to use a word processor. (Ever tried to explain the margin feature that manages indentation on most word processors? How about auto-numbering? I finally switched him to a word processor with fewer features because they kept getting in the way of his getting things done.) A windowed interface is intuitive for me, but I grew up on computers. He didn't.
I'd argue that what "mere mortals" want is to get a job done, and any interface that does that for them is what they're looking for. For instance, the interface my father would really like to have is a secretary. He'd like to be able to say to the computer "take this hand-written note and get it to Joe", which the computer should interpret as "turn on the scanner, scan this piece of paper, perform OCR, ask me about anything that looks misspelled, out of context, or just plain wierd, perform the corrections, figure out how best to reach Joe - fax, email, whatever - and get this message to him." Sorting through a file structure to find a file is a distraction for him, and having to configure a PPP auto-dialer is right out. The closest thing I've seen that even tries to approach this level of usability is MIT's Oxygen project.