Inside Ximian

An anonymous reader writes "Linux and Main is running a story of a visit to Ximian headquarters and a talk with Nat Friedman, Miguel de Icaza, and Jon Perr about GNOME2, Ximian 2, and getting Linux onto the corporate desktop. Interesting and funny, with lots of details about the place and the guys."

Comments

Ximian rox =)

[willie3204]

FP

Let this be a lesson.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you kiss Microsoft's ass, you'll contract Mono.

Re:Let this be a lesson.

[Computer!]

"Microsoft really knows how to turn up the pain on its customers," says Nat. "It's like The Princess Bride, in the scene where he cranked up the pain."

Ximian

[jflash]

And once we're in there, we discover that not all Open Source developers are Dope Smoking Long Haired Linux Hippies...


Jim

Re:Ximian

[Cosmicfool]

No... all open source developers are pot smoking hippies. it's been verified by several studies... true story.

Re:Ximian

[Anonymous Coward]

hahahahahahahhahahahaha MOD THIS UP....

Re:Ximian

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah ... take Miguel for instance: short hair

running out VC yet, guys?

[Anonymous Coward]

i'm waiting for the flame-out!

Re:running out VC yet, guys?

[Anonymous Coward]

People are probably lining up at their door for that outlook plug in thing. and if that isn't happening, there is always the 4 people paying for "support". I am sure the $200/month they get for actual services and products pays for all their overhead/costs. ther e is always hp who is giving them money. they are a certain funding source. and sun, who is rock solid financially, will always donate some cash to the ximian people.

Development isn't much different than Everquest

[jsonmez]

"Oh, yes! Writing code and squashing bugs. I usually get here at 7, 7:30 a.m., and I learned not to turn on the lights, because there are probably people who have been here all night coding, who are asleep on the couch or the floor."

Re:Development isn't much different than Everquest

[Christopher Thomas]

"Oh, yes! Writing code and squashing bugs. I usually get here at 7, 7:30 a.m., and I learned not to turn on the lights, because there are probably people who have been here all night coding, who are asleep on the couch or the floor."

Also much like grad school (weekends? What are those?)

Why do people use ximian?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've often wondered why people bother with ximian. Are the packages it releases any better than the ones released by gnome itself?

Sure, it has a pretty autoupdate feature, but then so does debian and mandrake, and it can be added to redhat, .... And if you install it then your installation seems to be not quite compatible with a standard gnome install.

Is it yet another linux company that is going to crash and burn once it runs out of VC? Just what is there to encourage people to pay them money?

Corrin (sounding really like a troll...)

Re:Why do people use ximian?

[Wdomburg]

>I've often wondered why people bother with ximian.
>Are the packages it releases any better than the
>ones released by gnome itself?

The Gnome project doesn't provide packages at all, so yes, the Ximian packages are better because they exist. :)

What they're really competing against is the distribution offerings. It seems the common consensus that Ximian is a much more polished product; e.g. the misfeature of filenames in save dialogs disappearing if you changed directories was first fixed in their distribution.

It becomes even more of an issue if you're running an older distribution, since the majority of companies only release bug fixes rather than new versions of software. So if you're running Red Hat 6.2 you have the option of sticking with Gnome 1.0.55, which shipped with it, compiling from scratch, or installing Ximian, which is based off 1.4.0.

>Sure, it has a pretty autoupdate feature, but
>then so does debian and mandrake

I'm not familiar with the Mandrake solution, but Ximian is much more end user friendly than apt-get. I'm an experienced user, and I still find value in having a simple graphical interface to browse through updates.

>and it can be added to redhat ... and one of the ways you can add autoupdating is by downloading Red Carpet. :)

>.... And if you install it then your
>installation seems to be not quite compatible
>with a standard gnome install.

What's not compatible? I've never had issues running either binaries or source I've compiled myself, and I've been running Ximian since they were Helix.

>Is it yet another linux company that is going to
>crash and burn once it runs out of VC?

Without looking at their financials, wouldn't be able to tell you. :)

You should keep in mind, however, that their revenue is solely from product sales. Both Sun and Hewlett Packard have contracted them for work on getting Gnome ported and packaged to their respective platforms.

>Just what is there to encourage people to pay
>them money?

Depends on the person. Someone looking for interoperability with Exchange might be encouraged by Red Carpet. Someone looking to deliver a standard desktop with centralized management across multiple platforms might be tempted by Ximian Gnome and Red Carpet CorporateConnect.

And I've already given examples of programming contracts.

Matt

Re:Why do people use ximian?

[Tadghe]

To Moderate or post...oh what the hell.

>>.... And if you install it then your
>>installation seems to be not quite compatible
>>with a standard gnome install.

> What's not compatible? I've never had issues running either
> binaries or source I've compiled myself, and I've been running
> Ximian since they were Helix.

I think what the orig poster may have been talking about is what happens when you Install Ximian and then try to use anything *other* than Redcarpet to update...up2date doesn't play well with Ximian packages, and it makes upgrading your distro a PITA (first have to force rpm to remove all the Ximian packages, then upgrade, then reinstall Ximian...and hope it works).

I'd disagree with you on the apt-get being hard comment, but I don't use debian on desktops.

Re:Why do people use ximian?

[Wdomburg]

>I think what the orig poster may have been talking
>about is what happens when you Install Ximian and
>then try to use anything *other* than Redcarpet to
>update...up2date doesn't play well with Ximian
>packages, and it makes upgrading your distro a
>PITA (first have to force rpm to remove all the
>Ximian packages, then upgrade, then reinstall
>Ximian...and hope it works).

I considered that, but it didn't seem to fit the "incompatible with gnome" statement very well.

In any case, I agree that upgrading the distribution after a Ximian install is harder than it should be. Unfortunately I think the problem transcends Ximian alone. If you install any third party package that overlaps with what Red Hat provides, there is a distinct chance of clashes.

One possible way these sorts of issues could be avoided would be for package management tools to make more intelligent use of the Vendor metadata tag. For example, the Red Hat installer could match for "Red Hat, Inc." (I believe they set this consistently), and either skip packages from other sources, or prompt the user.

It doesn't entirely solve the problem. Say I installed Ximian on Ficticious Linux 1.0. At the time FL 1.0 didn't ship anything that depended on libfoo, so Ximian installed libfoo-1.2.4. I go to upgrade to FL 2.0, and they now include an application which requires libfoo-1.2.7. It might turn out that the installer would ask me about the dependency, I'd tell it to go ahead an install the new version, and life would be grand. But even if you assume there's no incompatibilities, it still complicates the install process.

>I'd disagree with you on the apt-get being hard
>comment, but I don't use debian on desktops.

If I gave the impression that I thought apt-get was difficult, I apologize. However, I do think it isn't as intuitive for inexperienced users as clicking on "Get Software" followed by clicking on "Upgrade Now" or choosing the new application you want to install.

Matt

Re:Why do people use ximian?

[Tadghe]

> In any case, I agree that upgrading the distribution after a Ximian
> install is harder than it should be. Unfortunately I think the
> problem transcends Ximian alone. If you install any third party
> package that overlaps with what Red Hat provides, there is a distinct chance of clashes

I totally agree, it's not any diff with any other distro I've used. I think that until it's gets as easy to create and use some distro's package format as opposed to tar.gz that won't change :-( Some day in the future when "everybody" packages source in source.superpackageformat that will get easier, but I don't know if I'll live that long :-)

>If I gave the impression that I thought apt-get was difficult, I apologize

No need, my Debian experience is limited to servers (with no GUI so I can't really comment, since It's not really a "end users" enviroment). For "newbies" I'd agree that Ximian and the like are much more friendly (when they work :-) )

Fenway neighborhood, huh?

[slagdogg]

Well, let's hope Ximian has a better year than the Red Sox ...

Re:Fenway neighborhood, huh?

[BurritoWarrior]

Or Century.

The last time the Red Sox won, they had Civil War veterans in the stands.

Re:Fenway neighborhood, huh?

[BlackBolt]

Yeah, before they were veterans.

BlackBolt

Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[lakeland]

I've often wondered why people bother with ximian. Are the packages it releases any better than the ones released by gnome itself?

Sure, it has a pretty autoupdate feature, but then so does debian and mandrake, and it can be added to redhat, .... And if you install it then your installation seems to be not quite compatible with a standard gnome install.

I can see why people would install gnome2 over kde3, although I personally prefer kde, but why would you install ximian gnome over normal gnome?

Is it yet another linux company that is going to crash and burn once it runs out of VC? Just what is there to encourage people to pay them money?

Corrin (sounding really like a troll...)

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[mrcparker]

From what I have read, Ximian gets a whole lot of their financing through contracts with Unix companies like Sun to port GNOME to their architecture.

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to agree with your comments, as well as point out an RMS issue. Especially with the new features in KDE 3.1, Xiamian is gonna be blown away. What is up with the closed source Exchange interface? That is so lame, fortunately KDE developers are hard at work on an opensource version. My, has worm turned or what? I recall a few years ago deIcaza et. al. were bitching about the non-gpl QT license. Well, looks like they're gonna have to eat their words...

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[afidel]

two words: ximian connector This is a killer app for us as we are (unfortunately) transitioning to a unified messagin/calandering system based around exchange. While imap will work for messaging something like connector is needed for calandering.

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[chetohevia]

Ximian GNOME has a number of advantages over the standard desktop GNOME that comes with your distro.

For the desktop itself, we put a lot of effort into making sure it's more attractive, easier to use, and better updated. We focus on the desktop, we're desktop experts, and it shows.

* If you're using it in a large company, it's cheaper because it's the same on more than one platform: this consistency makes both UNIX and Linux systems less expensive to support. (This portion, by the way, is free).

* People buy Ximian Connector because they want to be able to connect to Exchange 2000 systems without having to use Outlook Web Access and without having to use a Windows box. Especially in large corporations where engineering is a Linux/UNIX installed base, it's important to be able to schedule with the management and use the shared address books and so forth; if you can't, you might as well not exist.

* People use the Red Carpet CorporateConnect service in order to have a stable, cross-platform way to ship their own software, plus operating system and desktop software from multiple vendors. They need to manage software installation sets and updates across multiple platforms, without vendor lock-in.

* Companies like HP and Sun pay us to perform custom development work, including accessibility improvements and platform ports.

* Individuals like you sign up for Red Carpet Express to get faster downloads.

* Linux ISVs can ship software through Red Carpet or Red Carpet Express. This isn't a really big business now, but it has potential.

Is that a reasonable enough answer?

For more information about Ximian desktop software and other products and services, feel free to visit http://ximian.com, write to us, or fill out the information request form at ximian.com/about_us/contact/information.html.

Yours,
Aaron Weber
Ximian, Inc.

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[Skuld-Chan]

I don't think so really and they really only work on redhat variants. I've found that on debian it really trashes dependancies.

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[sbuckhopper]

You said:
* Companies like HP and Sun pay us to perform custom development work, including accessibility improvements and platform ports.

As an honest question (and I'm not trolling here) based on the recent news of Bruce Parens' forced departure from HP and the reasons for a forced departure, does Ximian still do work for HP? By HP's statements it sounds like they now think that Linux is a passing fad.

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[PD]

Thank you for not using the words "productize", "big picture", "methodology", "consumers", "leverage", "methodology", or "proactive" in your description of what your company does. I could actually understand every word of what you wrote.

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[g4dget]

Is it available for OSX and Windows as well?

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[Anonymous Coward]

You might want to look in downloading "aspell" via red-carpet, as well.

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[SLot]

Sure, it has a pretty autoupdate feature, but then so does debian and mandrake, and it can be added to redhat, .... And if you install it then your installation seems to be not quite compatible with a standard gnome install.

The easiest way I've seen to keep Ximian from screwing up things that up2date should do (thanks /. poster who originally wrote this!) is to get a list of ximianized packages, tell up2date to ignore them in /etc/sysconfig/rhn/up2date in the pkgSkipList section.

Something like:
rpm -qa --queryformat "%{NAME}\t%{VENDOR}\n" | awk '$2 ~ /Ximian/ {print $1}' |sort | perl -pe 's/\n/;/' > ximian.list

works well for me.

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[BlackBolt]

Whoa. Deja vu.

BlackBolt

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[Anonymous Coward]

"* If you're using it in a large company, it's cheaper because it's the same on more than one platform: this consistency makes both UNIX and Linux systems less expensive to support. (This portion, by the way, is free)."

If you weren't such hypocrites, it would all be free and open. I do recall Miguel preaching up a storm when it came to non-GPL software awhile back. Apparently his ideals and beliefs have been sold out in an attempt to become something bigger. Surely with big buisnesses like Sun and HPaq backing you, you could do the "Right Thing" and provide the source code to all of your software. I'm sure I don't need to provide a link to Stallman's page, but you and your colleagues would be well advised to read his wise words.

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[bcboy]

On the other hand, Red Carpet remains the quickest way to destroy a perfectly functioning Linux box.

How old is this program, now? And the latest versions still segfault in the middle of rpm transactions, leaving the system unusable. I've lost track of how many times I've seen this happen.

Having nicely polished gnome packages is good, and all, but with an installer that routinely eats the rpm database, it's not really worth it. Amusingly, after it does this, the installer is no longer able to install or remove anything because dependency checks always fail.

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[ajs]

I've often wondered why people bother with ximian.

You seem to already know the answer to your own question. However, I will point out that the question in your subject line is not the same as this one. I "bother with" Ximian. I don't usually purchase it unless I have a specific need for media (which I've done once).

Are the packages it releases any better than the ones released by gnome itself?

Well, for starters, Ximian is more than just Gnome. Most people install Ximian because it's a little bit more "tuned" than the version of Gnome that comes with their OS (or, in the case of Solaris, because their OS does not come with Gnome by default at all). However, Ximian also includes many third-party programs that are not part of Gnome propper (e.g. Evolution, which is a Ximian app, not a Gnome app, and at least under Red Hat the Ximian version of Evolution is far more recent and less buggy than the one that comes with the OS). In the end, you probably won't up the overall package count on your machine by much when you install Ximian, but the quality of the installation will generally improve quite a bit (I know this is true for Debian and Red Hat; feel free to comment for your own OS).

Sure, it has a pretty autoupdate feature, but then so does debian and mandrake, and it can be added to redhat

Yep, it can be added to Red Hat quite easily: install Ximian.

Just what is there to encourage people to pay them money?

Businesses over a certain size cannot afford to use a desktop which is not maintained by someone else. Red Hat's desktop (and those of the other Linux vendors, from what I've seen) is ok, but generally unusable for anyone who isn't a developer. This leaves the choice of Ximian, MacOS or Winderz for most companies. I think we'll see a lot more MacOS going out onto corporate desktops, but Ximian's share will probably increase the most rapidly for the next couple of years (it's easier to tripple a user-base of 1000 than it is to tripple a user base of 100,000).

The really interesting gating factor will be what the big Linux Vendors (especially Red Hat, but also Caldera and SuSE), Sun and HP will do with their desktop offerings. Sun could quickly consume the corporate science market, as there's already a big buy-in there. HP could take quite a bit of government seats, as they have some amazingly well entrenched deals with places like the DoT.

And then there's Red Hat. I see Red Hat eating up the educational niche over the next 5-10 years. There's a lot of software that doesn't exist yet, but these places just can't afford to keep playing ball with MS.

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[Anonymous Coward]

i agree to this, the whole gnome crap matured to a commercial pile of shit. if you want to point users wishes about gnome 2 then you need to be a paying customer to either ximian, sun or redhat otherwise no one gives a fucking fuck to your wishes.

thats the expirience you get when reading all kind of gnome mailinglists.

gnome is up to the way of beeing a commercial product.

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[Anonymous Coward]

but then, gnome isn't just about linux. unlike kde, gnome is focussed on a unix desktop, not a linux one. this is reflected in the commercial use of gnome by sun and hp - and the use of kde by.... ummm... no-one but a few dying linux distros.

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[Anonymous Coward]

jesus, you are so fucking retarded. sorry no offense but go to a mirror in your house and look inside it then repeat what you have just said. gnome is starting to get commercial. users outside have no influence of it anymore they can't state any wishes to the gnome developers anymore. you need to become a good paying customer of either sun, redhat or ximian to get your wishes heard. the gnome developers are nothing else than puppets for these companies. if you work on a gnome project nowadays then it's like working for these companies without getting paid for the hours you investigate.

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[Anonymous Coward]

Troll has left the lawn for the standup stage.

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[Anonymous Coward]

oh, it can trash redhat just fine too.

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you have problems besides red carpet. I've never had it segfault.

Red carpet, though a little resource hungry, functions perfectly on my systems (many).

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[Anonymous Coward]

tripple

Triple

Just so you know for the future.

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[Sanity]

Just for sh1ts and giggles, let's pretend to be a smart VC taking a cold hard look at Ximian's business model.

If you're using it in a large company, it's cheaper because it's the same on more than one platform: this consistency makes both UNIX and Linux systems less expensive to support. (This portion, by the way, is free).

So is RedHat's Gnome, so is the default KDE installation, so is the default Gnome installation. This doesn't differentiate Ximian's offering from most of the other ways you can get your hands on Gnome, and since Ximian Gnome is Open Source, there is nothing to stop Redhat or others integrating your work into their product, removing whatever competitive advantage you have.

People buy Ximian Connector because they want to be able to connect to Exchange 2000 systems without having to use Outlook Web Access and without having to use a Windows box. Especially in large corporations where engineering is a Linux/UNIX installed base, it's important to be able to schedule with the management and use the shared address books and so forth; if you can't, you might as well not exist.

Fair enough - but it would be better if people used Open Source alternatives, Connector will be useful until a viable Open Source alternative to Exchange becomes popular. Is Connector really a long-term viable revenue generator? Doesn't it pit your Open Source friends against your business model?

People use the Red Carpet CorporateConnect service in order to have a stable, cross-platform way to ship their own software, plus operating system and desktop software from multiple vendors. They need to manage software installation sets and updates across multiple platforms, without vendor lock-in.

This is nothing apt-get can't do, but apt-get can do it automatically on a cron job.

Individuals like you sign up for Red Carpet Express to get faster downloads.

Is there really a shortage of mirrors and bandwidth for Open Source software distribution? The bandwidth utilization on one popular (and very fast) mirror of a number of distros (mirrors.kernel.org) hardly ever seems to use more than half of its available bandwidth. Why not mirror Ximian at kernel.org and let people get faster downloads for free, or does your business model depend on people only having slow free access to Ximian?

Linux ISVs can ship software through Red Carpet or Red Carpet Express. This isn't a really big business now, but it has potential.

You wish. I repeat my point - Red Carpet doesn't really do anything that apt-get with a simple GUI (or running as a cron job) can't do. Hardly the basis for a viable business.

Is that a reasonable enough answer?

They are good answers, but something tells me that you would get laughed out of any VC's office that really understood Open Source and Linux.

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using red-carpet since the beginning for redhat 6.2, redhat 7.2, and debian since they released it and have not once had it segfault on me.

which distro are you using? have you reported bugs? Slashdot isn't exactly the best place to rant about bugs, since most likely the developers won't see it.

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[Anonymous Coward]

So is RedHat's Gnome, so is the default KDE installation, so is the default Gnome installation. This doesn't differentiate Ximian's offering from most of the other ways you can get your hands on Gnome, and since Ximian Gnome is Open Source, there is nothing to stop Redhat or others integrating your work into their product, removing whatever competitive advantage you have.

yes, and these distributions do. However, each distro's default GNOME is completely different from every other distro's default GNOME which makes it a pita to train people on. When you are a system administrator, you want consistancy. You can't get that by installing a mixture of linux distros. Of course, then again - I guess if you went with all RedHat or all 1 distro, then it wouldn't make a difference there, but Ximian GNOME is still far more polished. Also keep in mind that a lot of companies have a mixture of Unix and Linux and want to have all the desktops look and feel the same, you can only do this 1 of 2 ways: compile and install everything from source yourself or install Ximian GNOME - what's it gonna be? Doesn't take a brain child to figure that one out.

Fair enough - but it would be better if people used Open Source alternatives, Connector will be useful until a viable Open Source alternative to Exchange becomes popular. Is Connector really a long-term viable revenue generator? Doesn't it pit your Open Source friends against your business model?

Good question, I wonder that myself. Then again, I don't know of anyone making an Exchange plug-in for any other mailer.

This is nothing apt-get can't do, but apt-get can do it automatically on a cron job.

actually, they just release rcd (which is a command-line utility that can be used in cron jobs for example). I haven't actually tried it yet though so can't comment much on it.

Is there really a shortage of mirrors and bandwidth for Open Source software distribution? The bandwidth utilization on one popular (and very fast) mirror of a number of distros (mirrors.kernel.org) hardly ever seems to use more than half of its available bandwidth. Why not mirror Ximian at kernel.org and let people get faster downloads for free, or does your business model depend on people only having slow free access to Ximian?

I suspect it's for people who want the super high-speed downloads. I generally download from duke.edu's mirror and get pretty fast download speeds (~100k/s). A friend is subscribed to RedCarpet Express and gets a good 150k/s, but 100k/s is plenty fast for me (plus I'm a poor college student).

You wish. I repeat my point - Red Carpet doesn't really do anything that apt-get with a simple GUI (or running as a cron job) can't do. Hardly the basis for a viable business.

I see your point, but I'd like to point out that less-useful things than red-carpet have made tons of money. Example? I give you my Pet Rock (tm). Anyone can go out and paint a silly rock, but it made millions. Point here being that people are willing to pay for convenience. Whether they can get the same thing cheaper but with a bit more effort or not means nothing. The average joe will always go for the easy way even if it means paying more.

As another example, have you ever gone grocery shopping? I bet your grocery store has a brand X version of a bunch of cerials you like. Common ones that I find are froot loops, cheerios, frosted flakes, etc - do you ever buy them? Probably not. And why not? They're the same thing...they cost less (usually a good buck less), why don't you buy them? It's all about the branding.

Hopefully you understand these 2 basic concepts...otherwise I would have to repeat your next statement back to you (but replace open source/linux with basic Business 101)

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[sg_oneill]

By HP's statements it sounds like they now think that Linux is a passing fad.

No. It's just that they have a strong relationship with MS that bruce was fucking with. That's all. It's strange to imagine anyone thinking it's a fad when that fad just keeps getting BIGGER!

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[bcboy]

I've had it happen on redhat 6.2 through 7.1, dozens of times. In some cases I was able to track down what the problem was. For a long time it mishandled disk space, always assuming it had more when and where it wanted, and would segfault when this failed. For a long time it would always segfault on SMP systems for reasons I wasn't able to determine.

Segfaults are annoying, but they wouldn't bother quite so much if they didn't always happen while transacting rpms, because that really shits things.

Just ran the latest version a couple days ago on a 6.2 system, and once again it segfaulted.

Then there are the endless other bugs: broken mirror support (i.e. doesn't connect where it says it's connecting), broken mirrors (craps out when the mirror doesn't have a file that should be there), mishandling of dependencies, etc. etc.

In my six or so years with linux, Red Carpet is hands-down the least reliable program I've ever used.

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the advice. I will not install it.

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[sg_oneill]

Yeaah, but the point was is bagging microsoft WAS his job *until* HP decided to get into bed with M$.
Oh by the way and totally off topic;-. I filed a complaint with the Australian Competition and Consumer Council about govt aiding and abbetting microsoft by excluding linux from SOE contracts. (Bruce'd probly like that!)

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[mgv]

On the other hand, Red Carpet remains the quickest way to destroy a perfectly functioning Linux box.

Its sad that someone chose to moderate your statement as flamebait. What you say is true. I lost a linux install from Red Carpet, and no longer touch it. I'm sure its an intermittent fault, but its pretty major to me. Its clearly a world away from the open source linux kernel which is rock steady

Having said that - I love evolution. It meets all my expectations and more for eMail. I'm sure that other people see a need for Kmail, etc, but personally I would be happy if it were the only eMail manager in a distro (thats a personal opinion, not a flame).

So I'm hardly going to criticise ximian for their software overall. However, poor installers mean a serious hit to the credibility of ximian, which is unfortunate. In the long run red carpet will do more damage to ximian than anything else will.

BTW, IIRC, Red carpet is closed source, yes?

Michael

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's strange to imagine anyone thinking it's a fad when that fad just keeps getting BIGGER!

So did hair in the 80s. And jeans in the 90s.

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian?

[WNight]

I'm curious as to why you think someone needs to "maintain the desktop"?

Do you mean the literal desktop, like the UI of your window manager, or do you mean the whole computer?

And what "managing" do you get from Ximian that you don't get from Mandrake, or SUSE, or Redhat, or whoever?

My old work (since gone except for the embedded-apps department) switched to Linux in an interesting way, they stopped forbidding people to run Linux... The two lead coders had it installed within a week, within a month *everyone* in the engineering wing had it installed, even the guys in S&H (using internal web-apps and Open Office.) This is with just default Red Hat, nothing special, nothing managed.

The only thing that would help them would be the Evolution pluggin. Occasionally management schedules them for a meeting and they wouldn't know, except that they run VMWare (for testing the apps from Windows) and they keep Outlook open in it. I imagine Evolution would work more quickly than VMWare so it'd be a win.

Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[ekrout]

1) Does it have to be aesthetically-pleasing to the eye?

Yes.

2) Does it have to be just like MS Windows?

No. Working with any computer's interface is a learned behavior. People learned about the _ [ ] X buttons at the top right of their programs because every computer they sat down at was running Windows. They soon realized that the X closed a window, the _ made it temporarily dissappear.

Many studies say that modern day UI must "look like a Microsoft product". Sorry to break it to you, Sun et al., but this simply isn't true.

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[mackstann]

Many studies say that modern day UI must "look like a Microsoft product". Sorry to break it to you, Sun et al., but this simply isn't true.

If only UI developers would take that to heart....I look at Gnome, I see a windows knock-off. I look at KDE, I see a pretty windows knock-off, with OSX knock-off bitmaps.

Why can't the open source desktop people come up with something innovative and useful instead of trying to build a cradle for all of the MS converts?

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[Anonymous Coward]

Many studies say that modern day UI must "look like a Microsoft product". Sorry to break it to you, Sun et al., but this simply isn't true.

If only UI developers would take that to heart....I look at Gnome, I see a windows knock-off. I look at KDE, I see a pretty windows knock-off, with OSX knock-off bitmaps.

Why can't the open source desktop people come up with something innovative and useful instead of trying to build a cradle for all of the MS converts?

Software doesn't have to look like a microsoft app, but it DOES have to be easily usable, and the fastest way to get there is to make it work the same way as all the other applications a user is familiar with, which necessitates design decisions like the ones micrsoft has made.

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[g4dget]

You assume that there is a single standard of usability that applies to all people and all applications. That's completely bogus. Microsoft's UI may work well for some people, and it doesn't work well for many others. Do we all drive the same car? Do we all wear the same clothes? Do we all listen to the same music? Why should we all use the same kind of UI?

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[Wiwi Jumbo]

Personally, I feel you have it the wrong way around....

"Microsoft's UI may work well for many people, and it doesn't work well for some others."

But maybe that's just me....

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[krogoth]

Such as?

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[the gnat]

I've found WindowMaker (or AfterStep) does quite well in this regard. Sure, it's another knockoff (of a truly innovative OS), but it's nothing like Windows. It's also quite stable and much faster than GNOME or KDE. It just isn't as intuitive for first-time users, and since it doesn't behave like Windows and thus doesn't meet the demands of idiots and corporate types who think Linux needs a standard GUI, all the development effort and publicity goes into GNOME and KDE.

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[NineNine]

Why can't the open source desktop people come up with something innovative and useful instead of trying to build a cradle for all of the MS converts?


Because they're trying to sell to MS converts. Believe it or not, but most people have better things to do than to learn how to use a new GUI.

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[BlackBolt]

Why should we all use the same kind of UI?

Because the desktop model is the best one we have right now, just like cars all seem to have four wheels, even though they're all different models and colours, and clothing is all basically designed the same, and music typically follows the same patterns and rhythms.

When somebody comes up with something more intuitive, 3-dimensional, or whatever, all the OSes will flock to it. But until someone figures it out, this is all we got. See what you can do. I've tried, and it always comes back to the current design, or thereabouts (title bars, icons, etc.). Any variation is usually weaker. I personally think that to evolve from this system, we have to ditch the monitor and get something else.

BlackBolt

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[steveha]

Why can't the open source desktop people come up with something innovative and useful instead of trying to build a cradle for all of the MS converts?

Let's turn that around. How about you show me a user interface that you consider innovative and useful, and then we'll see how it compares with GNOME 2 and Windows.

Any desktop interface that I would want to use will have certain elements in common: windows I can resize, that can overlap, and that can be dragged around; title bars that help me sort out which window is which; some indicator of what apps I have running and a way to switch among them; etc. GNOME 2 does many of these things the same way Windows does, and that's fine with me.

Don't forget that Microsoft has hired usability experts and done usability testing; some of their features really are the best way to do things.

So, as a starting point, a Windows-ish interface isn't bad. And GNOME 2 lets you customize things your way. Do you want the Mac OS X "traffic light" buttons in the upper-left of each window? You can do that. Do you hate the "foot" menu (the GNOME answer to the "Start" menu)? Get rid of it; you can, easily. So far, GNOME lets me do everything I actually want to do.

steveha

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[Anonymous Coward]

No shit! It seems that whenever someone talks about gnome/kde/whatever there's some knucklehead who bitches about 'windows copies' and wants to see something really new and useful. I think most of them want to see something that looks different or flashier, but works the same way. There are quite a few features to the current window managers that make them functionally better than 'windows' -- if somebody wants a completely new interface model, they better come up with a suggestion, because I haven't seen _anything_ that looks more useful than the current situation.

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[RAMMS EIN]

``I look at Gnome, I see a windows knock-off. I look at KDE, I see a pretty windows knock-off, with OSX knock-off bitmaps.
Why can't the open source desktop people come up with something innovative and useful instead of trying to build a cradle for all of the MS converts?''

Because you're looking at the mainstream-aimed-at-windoze-lusers desktops only. There are innumerable window managers out there that don't copy Windows' behavior.

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[Anonymous Coward]

now get a sheet of paper and write this down.

'i am a stupid asshole that don't know about the difference between a DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT (such as kde or gnome) and a WINDOWMANAGER (such as windowmaker or afterstep)'

now glue this sheet on your monitor.

you stupid moron.

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[Anonymous Coward]

> Don't forget that Microsoft has hired usability
> experts and done usability testing; some of their
> features really are the best way to do things.

the problem here is that gnome 2 starts to uglyfie their interface look at the button re-ordering etc.

ok -> cancel

is now

cancel -> ok

which breaks almost everything else on linux X related apps.

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[spitzak]

Why can't the open source desktop people come up with something innovative and useful instead of trying to build a cradle for all of the MS converts?

A lot of responses here seem to say "it must look like MS for people to understand it" and assumme that "innovation" means totally different, like some sort of 3D interface. This is not what is needed, and I agree with the original poster in being unhappy with Gnome/KDE's windows-copying.

Here are some ideas I would VERY much like to see:

POINT TO TYPE!!!!!! Goddamm it, make it the default. Complete novices learn it very very quickly and it makes it almost impossible to return to a click-to-type system. This is the biggest way to get Linux converts. It also does not confuse Windows users, if when a new window openes or otherwise grabs the focus, you warp the pointer to the window.

STOP RAISING WINDOWS WHEN YOU CLICK ON THEM. This is one of the biggest problems with the systems today (because both KDE and Gnome and even NT let you turn on point-to-type, even though it is not the default). This stupid behavior, which was eliminated in f**king 1982 by X11 (see X10 for the last version that did this), makes overlapping windows and the desktop metaphor completly useless because it is impossible to refer to one piece of data while working on another. Click-raising is also the reason for monstrosities like "MDI" and "paned windows", which seriously limit the ability to display large amounts of data in a window.

RESIZE AND MOVE WINDOWS WITHOUT RAISING THEM! Here is a bit of cleverness from X11 history that seems to have gotten lost. If you click a window frame without moving, it raises. But if you move or resize it, it stays where it is! This can be done even if click-raises or click-to-type is left on.

GET RID OF "LAYERS". This crap appeared with NeXTstep and refuses to go away. I WANT to put a window atop the toolbar. Just let me raise the toolbar by clicking on it. There, that wasn't too hard, was it? The only windows that should be forced to stay above others are "modal dialogs", and the ONLY thing they should do is be forced to lie above the windows they are blocking interaction to, they should have no effect on other applications.

GET RID OF "APPLIACATION ACTIVATION". There is aboslutely no reason that all windows created by a program have to stick together in a layer. PLEASE make it possible to raise a dialog without raising the underlying window, so I can copy data from another window into it!

You can try my window manager fltk for my attempts to do these ideas. It really isn't hard, in fact the window manager is much shorter than most.

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[Nicolay77]

Look at what he has done:

- Nidnight commander -> A norton commander clone. Almost nothing is faster to use with the keyboard.
- Gnome -> I was an act of envy over the KDE people. And MC became a windows explorer clone.
- Ximian -> Now having a Exchange client clone. (Very silly NOT trying to do a server)
- Mono -> A total waste of resources playing catch up with MS .NET bussiness (yes, that is NOT a technology, at least not yet)

So a promising programer becomes gradually a waste of time and resources (people should follow other more usefull projects) just because the only thing he knows is to copy, not to invent.

Better learn from Apple!!

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[Peter S. Housel]

X11 was released in 1982? Hardly. I remember the university transitioning our Sun 3 machines from X10 to X11 when I was in school (1985 through 1990). This page says that X11 came out in 1987, though I don't remember clearly enough to be sure.

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[bogie]

Why reinvent the wheel? Unless of course your goal is to make sure nobody uses your product because its too different.

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[Anonymous Coward]

Why can't the open source desktop people come up with something innovative and useful instead of trying to build a cradle for all of the MS converts?

Sawfish (is that the default Gnome WM still?) with the crux theme has an innovative "Display title buttons to mimic: " option where you can choose Mac OS Platinum, Mac OS X, MS Windows or NeXTSTEP.

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[g4dget]

When somebody comes up with something more intuitive, 3-dimensional, or whatever, all the OSes will flock to it.

That's like saying every musician should use a CD player instead of an instrument because it is so much more "intuitive". Being intuitive is not the only measure of quality of a UI, and for a professional user, it is largely irrelevant.

Windows satisfies the needs of most people because most people have very modest needs, that's all.

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup they're too busy learning the new Word 2002.

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[Anonymous Coward]

What's with the end user animosity, just makes no sense. Competition is always good, and from what I have heard from many developers they like the gtk stuff better than the qt stuff. Why should someone have to gripe, if you don't like it don't use it.
Also keep in mind coporate america's average employee is just above the monkey intelect level, so familiarity is key. Don't you get the monkey theme?

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[Anonymous Coward]

You're telling me to be creative without saying exactly how!

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[NotZed]

yeah amiwm does all this too :)

couldn't live without it!

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[Wdomburg]

>POINT TO TYPE!!!!!! Goddamm it, make it the
>default. Complete novices learn it very very
>quickly and it makes it almost impossible to
>return to a click-to-type system. This is the
>biggest way to get Linux converts.

I personally hate that "feature" with a passion.

>It also does not confuse Windows users, if when a
>new window openes or otherwise grabs the focus,
>you warp the pointer to the window.

Another feature I hate. If I want my mouse pointer somewhere, I'll move it myself.

>STOP RAISING WINDOWS WHEN YOU CLICK ON THEM.

I prefer this behaviour myself.

>GET RID OF "LAYERS".

Another feature I prefer. If I didn't want my toolbars permenently visable, I'd set them to hide.

>GET RID OF "APPLIACATION ACTIVATION"... PLEASE
>make it possible to raise a dialog without
>raising the underlying window, so I can copy data
>from another window into it!

I can count the number of times this would be useful to me on zero hands. I highlight from app A, raise app B, paste. No need for the window I'm pasting from to be raised when I've already gotten the data I'm copying from it.

On the other hand, it has been useful for me to have the window associated with a dialog raised when I'm going to interact with it again.

I'm not saying everyone should work how I do. I'm saying not everyone works how you do. Your preferences are not objectively better.

Matt

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[Anonymous Coward]

Then YOU come up with something that beats the common desktop, with icons and clicky clicky and all that. It's not easy, or it would have been done already.

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[g4dget]

It has been done already. Many professional users feel much better served with traditional X11 in a style that doesn't emulate Windows or MacOS at all. There are user interfaces like those used with Oberon or the Xerox Cedar/Mesa. There are the Symbolics and Ti Explorer environments. There are Smalltalk-80, Self, and Morphic. And an entirely new GUI paradigm has, in fact, appeared over the last decade: HTML and browsers.

So, there are plenty of alternative environments, environments that professionals use and prefer. Like a truck or a racecar, most people wouldn't know what to do with many of them, but that's entirely OK. An artifact doesn't need to be usable by the masses to be valuable.

The only problem with any of this is that Microsoft and Apple spend millions marketing their consumer GUIs to PHBs and claiming that they are professional environments, that UI researchers support that silliness, and that many programmers swallow that nonsense. As a result, rather than having a flourishing marketplace of ideas and advanced GUI environments, efforts (both commercial and academic) are all directed at creating yet more GUIs for the masses.

It's as if every culinary school in the world were only teaching MacDonald's-style cooking and developing new recipies for french fries. That would obviously be a bad idea for food, and it has to stop for GUIs as well in the long term.

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[captaineo]

Yes, we are definitely entering religious-war territory...

Re: point-to-type - I am undecided on this one. Most of the time it works great for me and it saves mouse clicks. However, sometimes it is annoying because I accidentally leave the mouse outside of where I was typing, and have to move my hand to it, re-point the mouse, and move back to continue typing. Also I don't really like the "wild light show" effect I get when moving the mouse around (titlebars changing colors as I activate/deactivate windows by moving over them).

Re: pointer warp - I'm pretty strongly against this; I don't like the feel of having the pointer out of my control. (I think what you really might be asking for is better positioning of dialog boxes - many Linux window managers do a terrible job of deciding where to put pop-up/dialog windows).

Re: not raising windows on click or move - I bet you have a very different strategy for arranging windows... Personally I hate it when I have to use a system that doesn't raise windows on click. But it's probably because I depend on this feature for my subconscious "desktop navigation." I'd have to sit down and try your method to see if it's better.

(I do change my mind sometimes - not long ago I couldn't figure out what the big deal was with "tabbed" web browsing - then I discovered how awesome it is, and now I can't stand browsers that don't support tabbing! It's just a much better way to work than opening N different browser windows).

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[spitzak]

I don't really like the "wild light show" effect

This can be eliminated by the brilliant "innovation" of not highlighting windows. In my uses of point-to-type I find that I automatically assumme the mouse cursor indicates the window with focus, even in the KDE window manager where this is not true, and it has correctly highlighted the window titles. This is proof to me that window title highlighting is useless when point-to-type is in effect.

pointer warp - I'm pretty strongly against this;

It only warps the pointer when necessary so that the window with focus and the cursor position agree. This is vital so that knocking the mouse does not change the focused window and so the feedback of mouse position is correct. It would not be necessary to warp the pointer ever if the only way the focus changed windows was when the user moved the mouse. However it appears that it is much more user-friendly to set the focus to each new window as it appears, especially for pop-up dialog boxes. You also suggest that the box should appear positioned so that it is under the mouse, that would work if X did not have such delays that it can't be guaranteed, but if the user moved the mouse too much then we have to warp it anyway.

not raising windows on click or move - I bet you have a very different strategy for arranging windows.

All I want to do is copy information from "small" window B to "big" window A without A popping up and obscuring B. This is impossible on Windows, KDE, Gnome, OS/X. It is possible on older X11 machines. This is really a huge step backwards in usability. My note about X11 is that the X11R5 release notes say quite clearly that "we used to have clicks raise windows, this was determined to be stupid, so we removed it". This cannot have been any later than 1983 since it was released before I graduated from MIT (X11R6 that most people are familiar with is later). It is pretty horrifying that something that was discovered almost 20 years ago has still not gotten into the standard.
And everybody stop talking about "copy & paste". I am NOT trying to copy the text literally, I may be trying to compare it, or transcribe it like changing digits to words, or any of a million other things that copy & paste cannot do!

PS I do certainly propose that you raise windows by clicking on the title bar or on any of the edges. Also watch a novice Windows user and see what they do when they want to raise the window: they click on the title! (why: because clicking on the contents may do some unwanted action) So everybody is already used to this behavior.

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[spitzak]

You are talking about Sun's version of X11, not MIT's.

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[syd02]

"Do we all drive the same car? Do we all wear the same clothes? Do we all listen to the same music?"

SUV or Sedan. It's enough choice for 90% of us. Where is the stearing wheel in your vehicle? Where is the gas pedal? How about the glovebox? Surely the glovebox can be found in some VERY interesting places.

I would bet that you're wearing either pants or shorts right now. Is it even possible anymore to buy a shirt that has buttons all the way up the front but doesn't have a collar? Do they come in pink? Would you even wear one if the salesperson told you that nobody else would ever buy something like that?

I'll be going to the symphony tomorrow, but 90% of the rest of you will turn on pop, rap or country. Yes, there are a few moments of creativity and originality, but it's basically all the same (verse, chorus, verse, chorus, repeat...) because people like it that way for some reason.

How many radically different UI choices do we need to have before people stop complaining about how "everyone is just copying Windows"? It seems that some geeks are just terrified of the possibility that they aren't very "special" when it comes to their computing.

Sometimes it really is OK to just be like everyone else. If you want to be really original, try doing something like this in the following order...

1. Save your document.
2. Compose something unique.
3. Open your application.
4. Create a new document.
5. Quit the application.
6. Close the new document.

Computers are just machines. We use them to express ourselves, but the process of using one doesn't itself have to be an expression of anything. Who really cares where the task confirmation button is and whether or not it says "OK", "proceed" or "DO IT MOTHERFUCKER!"

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[spitzak]

I personally hate that "feature" (point to type) with a passion.

To me this means you have refused to try it.

I prefer this behaviour (clicks raise) myself.

Again I don't think you have tried a system that correctly works. And you have become too used to programs that use tiled to get around these bugs. However try MSWord and edit several documents that you want to cross-reference and you will quickly see the light. PS: it is easy for click to raise windows, the user can click on the title bar or any edges. Also any program can raise itself in response to a click, so if you are writing software and are convinced that this behavior is necessary, you can make it do it. I recommend that any clicks that don't serve any other purpose (such as clicks on the gray background of control panels) should raise the window.

Layers: Another feature I prefer. If I didn't want my toolbars permenently visable, I'd set them to hide.

Alright I'm not so adamant about that. However I don't think it is necessary as long as a click on a dead area or the edge of the toolbar raises it. What I really hated was NeXTStep that insisited on putting the menus atop *all* windows due to "layers" and then thinking that hiding the menus when you "switch appliations" was an innovation, when in fact it was a kludge to get around the fact that the system could not put a window atop a menu. And now it takes two clicks, plus you must look for the menu, to pick an item on NextStep from another program's menu. And you don't get the edge-of-screen-navigation speedup of Mac menubar so you eliminate the only plausable reason to switch appliation menus.

Anyway auto-hide toolbars really solve my complaints there. However since the "unhiding" action could also "raise" there are no layers necessary. I would like to see Windows and KDE/Gnome get rid of that stupid 1-2 pixel border, just use an invisible X11 window to pick up the mouse position and *really* hide that toolbar!

Appliation activation: I can count the number of times this would be useful to me on zero hands. I highlight from app A, raise app B, paste. No need for the window I'm pasting from to be raised when I've already gotten the data I'm copying from it.

Exactly the same problem as click-to-raise but now besides one window you have *all* the windows of app B raising to obscure the information from A you want to see. And again you make the stupid assumption that all communication can be done with cut & paste.

On the other hand, it has been useful for me to have the window associated with a dialog raised when I'm going to interact with it again.

Actually this is a serious bug because it prevents a program from having more than one "main" window. Both X11 and Windows have the idea that a dialog box has a *single* "parent" window, which is acceptable for interface reasons since usually the actions in only one window are blocked by the dialog. But Windows and KDE (not sure about Gnome) and most CDE window managers insist on raising that window when you raise the dialog. This makes overlapping main windows useless for the same reason click-raise and application-activation-raise make overlapping windows between applications useless, by hiding information you want. The result has been that virtually everybody has been forced to single "tiled" main windows or "MDI" main window containing all the subwindows, which is a huge waste of screen realestate and very confusing to the user because of the extra borders. Tiled windows are stupid, if they were a good idea we would be using the Andrew window system or Windows 3.1 and tiling *all* the windows. Unfortunately this simple bug in the window management convinces people that tiled windows are necessary.

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[captaineo]

All I want to do is copy information from "small" window B to "big" window A without A popping up and obscuring B.

Ah, I see... I don't do this kind of thing very often, but one example might be when I have two source code windows open and I'm alternating back and forth. I tend to set up the windows side-by-side, but since I write long lines they usually don't quite fit; they overlap a bit. And it's annoying because usually the wrong window is on top when I need it! Your suggestions would probably help in this case... But again this is pretty much the only example I can think of from my own experience, and you have to balance it against my years of conditioning with click-to-raise =).

One other issue that bears considering is minimizing switches between the mouse and keyboard. It may sound insignicant, but I really believe I work faster (and experience less hand/wrist stress) the more unnecessary trips to the mouse I can skip.

Of course what we really want isn't "point to type," it's "think to type" =)

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[g4dget]

Looks like all the UIs you have ever used are consumer UIs, and all the cars you have ever driven are consumer cars.

How can UIs differ? Try something like Morphic or CLIM or Mathematica or a host of others. There are no documents, no "OK" buttons, not even distinct applications. A command line or Emacs are also excellent examples of UIs that are completely different from the Windows/MacOS paradigm.

I don't care what the "task confirmation button" says, I care that such a bogus and annoying object exists on my screen in the first place.

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[syd02]

Don't worry, Ximian isn't going to take away your command line. Anyway, I thought we were talking about UIs for mainsteam computing. If you're forced to offer Emacs as an "excellent example" of a different UI, I'll just say that I'm glad the folks at Ximian have a comparitively boring and unoriginal approach to creating a desktop environment.

BTW, I've used Emacs enough to know that it is also for consumers. Yesterday's consumers.

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[the gnat]

'i am a stupid asshole that don't know about the difference between a DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT (such as kde or gnome) and a WINDOWMANAGER (such as windowmaker or afterstep)'

The parent poster said "USER INTERFACE". Not "DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT". You do not need a desktop environment to have a user interface. Fuckwit.

I suppose since so many idiots here don't read linked articles, it was inevitable that they eventually not read relevant comments either.

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[Anonymous Coward]

the parent poster wrote windowmaker, afterstep, kde and gnome in one sentence so everyone who reads that assumed that he put all this shit into the same box.

don't forget that there are people outside that still don't get the difference between a desktop environment and a fucking window manager.

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[Wdomburg]

>To me this means you have refused to try it...
>Again I don't think you have tried a system that
>correctly works.

I know its hard to conceive of someone who doesn't like your favourite pet features, but really, it doesn't mean they've never tried them, or they're being stubborn.

I've used TWM, FVWM2, Afterstep (classic, not the post 1.0 eye candy fest, ick), Sawfish, Enlightenment, MWM, Swm, XFwm, OLVM, Blackbox, Metacity, KWM. Just for good measure I've also used Windows 9x, Windows NT, and MacOS 7/8/9.

I've tried click-to-focus, focus-follows-mouse, and sloppy focus, I've tried workspaces and viewports, etc.

> However try MSWord and edit several documents
> that you want to cross-reference and you will
> quickly see the light.

Word isn't a particularly easy application for me to do anything in since I haven't had a Windows desktop in six years. :)

However, I edit and cross reference multiple documents all the time, usually in terminal windows. I've never had any issues switching between the windows I'm using with keyboard shortcuts or even the occasional mouse click. And if I'm making a lot of back and forth references, I *want* them to be tiled.

> PS: it is easy for click to raise windows, the
> user can click on the title bar or any edges.

Window borders are typically narrow (don't want to waste screen real estate, do we?) so this require much more precise mouse movement than clicking on the window itself.

> Also any program can raise itself in response to
> a click, so if you are writing software and are
> convinced that this behavior is necessary, you
> can make it do it.

So application authors have to anticipate the work habits of their users, and assume that it is consistent for ALL their users? Sorry, but I prefer consistency.

> And again you make the stupid assumption that
> all communication can be done with cut & paste.

For a dialog box? Yes. Dialog boxes should never require extensive interaction. If they do, its a design bug.

> This makes overlapping main windows useless for
> the same reason click-raise and
> application-activation-raise make overlapping
> windows between applications useless, by hiding
> information you want.

You think it makes them useless. I think its useful to have the parent raised because typically when I interact with an windows dialog, I want to interact with that window again.

> Actually this is a serious bug because it
> prevents a program from having more than one
> "main" window.

Funny how I'm using multiple top level windows for several applications right now. How does it prevent it again?

> The result has been that virtually everybody has
> been forced to single "tiled" main windows or
> "MDI" main window containing all the subwindows,
> which is a huge waste of screen realestate and
> very confusing to the user because of the extra
> borders.

I've never felt myself forced to use anything. I use multiple overlapping toplevel windows with no issues at all. As stated there are times I will deliberately tile windows, but when I am cross referencing heavily, I *want* everything on the screen on the same time.

(On a side note, there are very few Windows-style MDI applications on Unix if you hadn't noticed. The more prominent solution, tabs, don't waste much screen real estate and don't have extra borders.)

> Tiled windows are stupid, if they were a good
> idea we would be using the Andrew window system
> or Windows 3.1 and tiling *all* the windows.

Sorry, but that argument is just stupid. It might make sense if a) the only difference between AWS or Win 3.1 and other windowing systems was tiled vs. overlapping windows, and b) tiling is either the best solution for everything or the best solution for nothing.

In close, I repeat, "I'm not saying everyone should work how I do. I'm saying not everyone works how you do. Your preferences are not objectively better."

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[Peter S. Housel]

IIRC Sun didn't release versions of X in those days; in 1987 they were still mostly supporting SunTools and had come out with NeWS. We used the Xsun server from compiled from the tape we got from MIT.

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[spitzak]

Of course if you tile the windows then none of these things are problems. The problem is if you have data that is large enough that you cannot tile the windows and they have to overlap. Try working with 2048x1556 images in the special effects industry and you will know that this is not an unrealistic scenario.

Basically click-to-raise makes it impossible to work with these images even at .5 zoom. We are forced to use scrollbars (actually I was forced to get rid of the scrollbars to increase the available space and use alt+drag to move the contents) reduce the windows and pan which makes it impossible to make good decisions because you cannot see the whole image. And working at .25 or smaller zoom is just bad for spotting details (ie mistakes). And this is not a problem with just multiple images, most programs have an extremely large control panel and you cannot mess with it because raising it necessarily hides the image you are working on!

Basically the problem is that you are using data that is small enough that you can tile the screen. When windows are arranged this way, there is no difference between click-raise and click-does-nothing. I'm sure you think this is sufficient but you have been forced into this point of view by the absolute necessity of tiling your data, because click-raise makes overlapping windows impossible to use.

Also I know that window edges are very narrow. This is why programs should always raise the window on clicks that don't serve any purpose. Most programs add a pretty significant border inside the window that can be used to raise it. I believe that as long as programs do this you would never miss click-raise, as there is always a very large amount of available clickable space. Also as I said the programmer can also decide that various clicks mean that the user wants the program in the foreground, ideally they should do this when the actions make it clear that the user is not copying or referring to data outside the window but instead looking at data inside the window.

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[spitzak]

That version of NeWS was the NeWS/X11 merge which Sun tried first. It contained all the code of the X server. The "pure" NeWS system was very short-lived, perhaps only a year, around 1986.

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[spitzak]

That's a very good example of what I need.

The important thing is that I am not saying that *no* clicks raise the windows. Besides the title bar and edges, I recommend that programs raise themselves when clicked on any interior areas that do nothing. The writer of the software or toolkit could also decide that some clicks that do something should also raise the window. I think it may also make sense to raise the parent when a modal dialog box is closed, but again this can be done by the program.

The main thing to realize is that if the system raises windows on a click, it is impossible to get another behavior. While if the system does not raise windows on a click, but provides a raise_window() function, then it is trivial to get the standard behavior. This is why I am quite adamant that this is a feature we need in the GUI. It does not matter which is better, what matters is a system where both are possible.

Re:Frequently Asked User Interface Questions

[Wdomburg]

> The problem is if you have data that is large
> enough that you cannot tile the windows and they
> have to overlap. Try working with 2048x1556
> images in the special effects industry and you
> will know that this is not an unrealistic
> scenario.

In other words you have somewhat peculilar requirements that make a particular type of interface less useful to you. This does not extend to "focus follows mouse is inherinetly superior and more innovative".

> And this is not a problem with just multiple
> images, most programs have an extremely large
> control panel and you cannot mess with it
> because, raising it necessarily hides the image
> you are working on!

Most programs? The majority of programs I work with have at most a menubar and a toolbar. The toolbars can be universally turned off, and often can have the menubar turned off. Other, such as
Gimp or Glade, have multiple control windows, but they're set as toplevel, so raising them has no effect on other windows.

In other words, you're looking at things with blinders; i.e. your own experiences and the applications that you work with.

> Basically the problem is that you are using data
> that is small enough that you can tile the
> screen. When windows are arranged this way,
> there is no difference between click-raise and
> click-does-nothing.

Actually, I often use data that is too large to tile. In those instances I use keybindings to switch between windows. The only time this becomes insufficient and I tile is when I specifically need to see both data sets simultaneously, which wouldn't be solved by changing focus or raise behaviour.

> I'm sure you think this is sufficient but you
> have been forced into this point of view by the
> absolute necessity of tiling your data, because
> click-raise makes overlapping windows impossible
> to use.

No, you're ignoring that I explicitely stated that I've used multiple windowing systems, with a plethora of focus and raise behaviour. So, again, I reiterate, I've tried it your way, and it annoys me to no end. Not only that, but its not that the behaviour was too ingrained for me to see the benefits of autoraise. Before I ran Linux I had a 386 incapable of running Windows, and I explored my options on X *before* I settled on the behaviour I prefered (including focus follows mouse with auto-raise).

> Also I know that window edges are very narrow.
> This is why programs should always raise the
> window on clicks that don't serve any purpose.

> Most programs add a pretty significant border
> inside the window that can be used to raise it.
> I believe that as long as programs do this you
> would never miss click-raise, as there is always
> a very large amount of available clickable

I would contest that "most" applications add a signifigant border. Of the applications I have open right now (terminal, word processor, spreadsheet, web browser, mp3 player) the majority of the blank space is only on the menubar and toolbar, which is only at the top of the application window. This is far from being efficient.

> Also as I said the programmer can also decide
> that various clicks mean that the user wants the
> program in the foreground, ideally they should
> do this when the actions make it clear that the
> user is not copying or referring to data outside
> the window but instead looking at data inside
> the window.

I'm sorry, but applications should not decide on windows behaviour.

It's obvious you have a set of criteria for how YOU work. As I've stated twice already, it is not objectively better. Nor is mine.

It's not impossible to get a window manager to do what you want. You can focus and raise however you want, you can have it leave the stacking order of parents along when you raise a dialog, you could have your windows bounce across the screen like they're in pong if you'd like.

I just chafe at the implication that pandering to your preferences somehow equates to innovation.

Matt

Re:Ximian? Linux on teh Corporate desktop?

[rkhalloran]

The EXACT SAME troll showed up in The Register's letter column; didn't get enough response there, binky?

GNOME2

[Anonymous Coward]

Inside Ximain - answer this: where the hell are the GNOME 2 packages?! (and no, not the snapshots)

Good arguments not to use Ximian

[Anonymous Coward]

I usually get here at 7, 7:30 a.m., and I learned not to turn on the lights, because there are probably people who have been here all night coding, who are asleep on the couch or the floor.

All night coding = bug-ridden and backdoor prone
Real programmers can estimante time costs, keep shedule and only program when they are well off and have maximum concentration.
I suppose Linux will never leave the hobbyist stage.

Re:Good arguments not to use Ximian

[Mark Gordon]

A couple of our programmers are night owls. Yes, they work all night, but they sleep all day. Gets a bit inconvenient having to walk around them when they're sprawled out, but it doesn't affect the code quality.

Re:Good arguments not to use Ximian

[BlackBolt]

Yes, and they all wear blue shirts and ties every day. And they all drive Volvos and SUVs.

Thanks for the stereotyping and generalizations, it stops people from thinking.

BlackBolt

Geek Nostalgia

[MAXOMENOS]

The offices are not as one imagines but instead as one dared not hope them to be -- almost movie-set hackerdom with such corporate accoutrements as are absolutely necessary. Here is a big room, plumbing and air ductwork covering much of the ceiling, Brazil-style. In the third of it unencumbered by cubicle dividers arranged to provide both private workspace and openness, there are beanbag chairs, tall stools and cafe tables, and a couch, arranged in no particular fashion. The lights are not on. ("On Fridays we have a group lunch, and one of the teams makes a presentation," the visitor is told. "That's why it's dark.") Here and there, wiring that would be ceiling lights of some sort dangles from the neo-industrial architecture above. They have no bulbs and, strangely, look better that way.

*sigh* reminds me of the place I worked last year before the layoffs hit. I'm miss working there. The work environment was just like this, the people were talented and smart, and the work was challenging and fun. Those were the days.

Re:Geek Nostalgia

[Anonymous Coward]

Did ever occur the thought to you that your company went down because of this environment ?Economics is something for professionals which must be done professionally. It's not a hobby or a game.

Re:Geek Nostalgia

[cjpez]

MAXOMENOS' company went down because they had a beanbag chair?

Re:Geek Nostalgia

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess they should have bought more Aerons...

Re:Geek Nostalgia

[TheKubrix]

damn you, now you made me all depressed, I had that too till that *#@$!@ merger between Bell Atlantic and GTE, now I rot here doing pidly things and no cool lunch room with a big screen :(

Re:Geek Nostalgia

[MAXOMENOS]

Did ever occur the thought to you that your company went down because of this environment?

More likely it went down because all the companies that loved our product decided not to buy until the economy improved.

How to cheat on holdthebutton.com

[Anonymous Coward]

When holding the button, right click your mouse, the flash context menu will now pop-up. Due to the crappy nature of flash, the button will stay "pressed". Just left click when you "held" the button for a few weeks.

building

[manon]

Did you notice the building Ximian is located in? Looks so .gov to me... I'll better run a 'find / -name "gnome.nsa"' fast

Re:building

[joelgrimes]

I thought that picture of the building must be a joke.

If it's not then WHERE THE HELL DO THEY GET THAT KIND OF MONEY?

Re:building

[nathanm]

Did you notice the building Ximian is located in? Looks so .gov to me...

No, it was a common building design in the earlier part of the 20th Century. Another poster to this thread mentioned it used to be a Sears building at one point. There is an almost identical building here in Minneapolis that also used to be a Sears, and another half dozen with similar designs elsewhere in the Minneapolis/St Paul area.

Re:Ximian? Linux on teh Corporate desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

He got one from you, donkey puncher.

Icaza's office? Isn't that in Redmond?

[Anonymous Coward]

n/t

Re:Icaza's office? Isn't that in Redmond?

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard it was in a dog house underneth bill gates desk..so he can pleasure him

Cool logo

[capnkid]

Well the project sounds ambitious and all... but I tend to gauge the success of a company such as this by how cool their logo is. I think these guys are going to have a great future. Anybody else as shallow as me?

Re:Cool logo

[Anonymous Coward]

looks like a guy bending over to me

appropriate enough for a company trying to make it in the 'linux desktop' dream-world.

Re:Cool logo

[fault0]

I like Ximian's logo and all, but I'm not sure I like the name. The monkey metaphor is just too George W. Bush-ish

Re:Cool logo

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm dancing like a monkey!!!!
(but i wanna use caps damnit)
-Gir

Re:Cool logo

[stankyho]

It actually has always reminded me of the DRI logo.
Dirty Rotten Imbeciles

Re:Cool logo

[Anonymous Coward]

What? You mean the one of the monkey hunched over jacking-off?

Re:Cool logo

[St. Vitus]

The logo has always reminded me of DRI's thrasher logo (as seen best on the Thrash Zone cover). So, yeah, I definitely think the project has an edge.

Re:Cool logo

[BlackBolt]

Please don't insult the monkeys. At least you could say that it's a Ballmerific! metaphor.

Oh, wait, that's a baboon. My bad.

BlackBolt

Re:Cool logo

[Anonymous Coward]

Which reminds me of a swastika!

Re:Cool logo

[Anonymous Coward]

i heard you like to molest the children of rabbits twice a year :) CHOICE D!

Re:Quick...

[Anonymous Coward]

Trashdot Editors: "Quick, cmdr...post a bunch of new lame stories right away. That'll force our obvious lame troll "Florida voting" story down on the page so no one will reply anymore."

Er... The correct term is "Trashdot Janitor". plz fx thx

Re:Ximian? Linux on teh Corporate desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

"it hasn't crashed or performed any weird operations ever"

This post has a Pinocchio rating of 12 inches.

ximian gnome

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever you do, DONT install ximian gnome on debian. I installed Ximian 1.4 on my debian box and it took a long time before I could get everything working properly again.

They have an office?

[/dev/trash]

Doesn't that cost money?

Bravo!

[slutmonkey]

So, would anyone care to explain how this post garners -1 Flamebait, but the parent is 3 Informative?

Anyone?

Bunch of AC hataz!

Re:Ximian? Linux on teh Corporate desktop?

[Pfhreakaz0id]

See. Anything that is based on "reality" is called a "troll" by the /. faithful and modded out of existence, so they don't have to confront these "facts". You are obviously new here :)

Why We bought Ximian

[ike42]

My research lab has bought Redcarpet subscriptions for all our linux workstations. There are several good reasons for this over the alternatives you suggest:

1. Ximian's Gnome really is tidiest and most frequently updated Gnome distribution. Although they have fallen behind some others with Gnome2, I expect things to get back to normal when they do release.
2. Redcarpet does much more than update Gnome; you can use it to manage software installation accross a network. It has channels for updating several linux distros, StarOffice, Codeweavers stuff, VMWare, etc. None of the other automatic update tools really compare in content or in ease of use.
3. If you purchase you can have automatic updates and use redcarpet to manage installation of your own software.

If you only manage one computer, and you like to spend your time installing and updating software, then you probably don't really need to pay for Ximian. But it is great if you've got other things to do then worrying about keeping a mess of workstations updated.

However, if you like a company's product you should buy it. By purchasing from Ximian we are helping to support Gnome development. It is just self-interest. Gnome is good for us, so we pay for Gnome.

Re:Why We bought Ximian

[Anonymous Coward]

excuse me, but how is this related to gnome ? you are paying ximian not the people that seriously work for gnome. isn't it unfair stuffing the money into the ass of ximian ?

Writing style?

[dukethug]

Did anyone else find the writer's fawning, adjective-heavy style irritating, even for a Slashdot article?

The Question is: Why would a Corporation by it?

[GroundBounce]

From the article and other statements they've made, they are really going after corporate desktops with their for-sale products. There's really no reason for an individual user to actually buy the CD since it can be downloaded. If I remember correctly, the whole thing is only 80Mb or so (it installs to around 200Mb), so it's possible even with a modem connection.

Corporate users who decide to adopt Linux and GNOME for their desktops may indeed decide to buy it, however. If Ximian can really provide a consistent and reliable set of applications, easy updates, and support, then corporations may perceive it as a viable alternative to the endless Microsoft license cycle. If they feel they will get timely support, painless updates, and good consistency, then they will be willing to pay for it; it will still cost them a bundle less than MS.

Although paying for free software sounds like an oxymoron, corporations are willing to do it if they perceive it buys them consistency and support.

Re:The Question is: Why would a Corporation by it?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Corporate users who decide to adopt Linux and
> GNOME for their desktops may indeed decide to buy
> it.

why should a company or corporate user want to 'BUY' it ? i mean gnome 2 is in no way usable and probably wont be usable for the next couple of years, now that they uglyfied the whole gnome 2 UI. before someone gets that stupid he/she better get off and buy a license of windows XP and install a serious operating system. easy to use and simple to handle.

Re:building [not AC, just don't have password ATM]

[Anonymous Coward]

[Ximian employee, but I can't find my login/pass ATM.]

It's an old Sears building, and actually on the National Register of Historic Places. It's also a bit misleading- we've got one quarter of one floor of the place, not the whole damn thing. The picture used in the article manages to crop out that part of the building, even. :) So, yeah... wish we had enough cash to have the whole building. No serious danger of us buying out the Best Buy, the movie theater, or Blue Cross of Massachusetts yet.

linux is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

When die-hard linux developers defect to the dark side, it's a sign that that people are seeing through the hoax that linux is technically stable and robust when in fact, the vm is unstable under load, necessitating a complete rewrite, and the fs loses fs integrity on crashes, necessitating ext3fs. All along, linux has been a piece of junk. The truth is out there.

Re:Ximian? Linux on teh Corporate desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

wow, open-source FUD. Imagine that. There are many, many, many, many people who will tell you that windows 2000 and XP don't crash any more than linux does. quit licking other people's balls and tend to your own or go back to moscow-stock you filthy communist hippie.

Re:Ximian? Linux on teh Corporate desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah right, the reality is that capitalism is evil. everything should be free, and linux will see to that. NO ONE SHOULD PAY FOR ANYTHING OTHER THAN SUPPORT. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. that's what those fucking hippies want, to give away their cash-offerings and become tech-support drones. GO OPEN SOURCE, GO! I think we should create a time-machine and throw Richard Stallman back in the fucking 60's.

Evolution

[DaedalusLogic]

I admire the hard work put into Evolution. I was in the process of moving all my contacts over into their PIM. Until... I had a large message to send out and the program was straining under the weight of not having , instead of ; between addresses in an e-mail to ~40 people. These folks were not on a regular distribution list and probably never will be. It made sense to send the message that way. It took minutes for the program to move through through the addresses so I could add another.

It's slick... I'll use it some day but it didn't impress this time around. I'll try it again in about 6 months.

Re:Evolution

[tucay]

You could have just clicked on your "To" button and been presented with a point and click dialog to select your 40 recipients.

Re:Evolution

[DaedalusLogic]

That's part of what was malfunctioning. Its hard to describe the errors. Because of the semicolons not being preferred I had to switch out for commas so I could make sure everyone was on the list in the To: pop up. Most of these people were also new recruits for our organization. So they had no entries and we were compiling the e-mail from a txt file... a sign up sheet and contacts... It was a rare situation, but it brought to light an annoyance that I'd rather not have in a mail program. More power to them fixing it... When they do I'll be on board, I liked everything else I saw. Mozilla Mail has me for a little while longer until then.

Re:Evolution

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, for heaven's sake, everybody knows that GNUS is the only news/mail client worth a damn.

Mod +1 Funny

[Anonymous Coward]

(Well, it was, wasn't it?)

Brazil Style

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder where this guy experienced Brazil like that. No plumbing or air ductwork in sight from where i stand, in Brazil.

Re:Brazil Style

[billmil]

He means the fine dystopic retro-futuristic Sci-Fi movie by Terry Gilliam, Brazil

As an ex-Ximian user...

[Sanity]

...I found it best to stick with my distro's default version of Gnome, and use apt-get to keep my system up-to-date. I found that Ximian's "Red Carpet" software had a nasty habit of screwing up the RPM dependencies on my system, and while visually appealing, I didn't really like its interface (for example, the way you need to click on every single package you want upgraded even if there are 50, 60, or 100 of them).

I also got the impression that the purpose of Red Carpet was more to-do with providing Ximian with some kind of business model, than actually providing useful functionality to the end-user - otherwise why not just build it around apt-get and give us all some flexibility?

In the end, I didn't really see any solid advantage to going with Ximian Gnome (although I do like Evolution), and it had the disadvantage of making my rpm dependency tree more complicated than it needs to be.

Re:As an ex-Ximian user...

[Rastor0]

I found that Ximian's "Red Carpet" software had a nasty habit of screwing up the RPM dependencies on my system, and while visually appealing, I didn't really like its interface (for example, the way you need to click on every single package you want upgraded even if there are 50, 60, or 100 of them).

Umm... I guess you could upgrade each package individually... but why not just click the little "update now" button in the lower right-hand corner of the main screen which applies all pending updates, without having to select or enter anything?

Re:As an ex-Ximian user...

[Sanity]

Umm... I guess you could upgrade each package individually... but why not just click the little "update now" button in the lower right-hand corner of the main screen which applies all pending updates, without having to select or enter anything?

What a wonderful piece of user-interface design. And what about adding new packages? Is there a way to do that in bulk? It is a pretty common operation.

The bottom line is that Red Carpet is redundant, apt-get does everything it does, and in a more flexible way. If you must have a gui, then build the gui around apt-get, and do some usability testing on it.

Re:As an ex-Ximian user...

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you every try Edit->Select All ?

obviously you didn't ;-)

Re:As an ex-Ximian user...

[Anonymous Coward]

And what about adding new packages? Is there a way to do that in bulk? It is a pretty common operation.

yes. edit->select all
thanks for playing

Ximian Connector

[Anonymous Coward]

Now if they'll just port Ximian Connector to OS X - imagine how many Windoze machines could be replaced in corporate. This is who Apple should be working with.

that's what people think and post to gnome's lists

[Anonymous Coward]

unfortunately written in german language but it's worth reading it Please Read This. looks like gnome is too much under control of sun, redhat and ximian. their developers are nothing else than the puppets of these companies.

GNOME HIG soon on your KDE system

[Anonymous Coward]

i like the idea that the GNOME HIG (human interface guides) will soon affect KDE too. specially crap like the button re-ordering in gnome 2 which still disgusts me. luckely i am still using gnome 1 and hopefully will continue using it for the next couple of years. hey the xfree server is moving towards gnome now. it embedds 'gnome-xml, pkgconfig, fontconfig, xcoursor, xft2' ... soon in your xfree 4.3 :)

gnome-xml, pkgconfig == gnome people
fontconfig, xcoursor, xft2 == keith packard who's beloved desktop is gnome

what you don't belive me ? grab the CVS of it.

soon the kde people need to follow our ass :)

Re:Prepare for War!

[Anonymous Coward]

Your diatribe is much appreciated.

speaking out of the secret bag.

[Anonymous Coward]

the reason why evolution is not yet ported to gnome 2 is because ximian is planning to release the gnome 2 port of evolution using 'mono' and 'c#'.

what ?

[Anonymous Coward]

something i don't get is:

'bringing gnome to the business desktop users'

- but gnome 2 totally sucks. even hardcore gnome users refuse to use it. read all the flames and rants about gnome 2 on all kind of news pages and mailinglists.

'we have our super evolution thingy'

- probably the only application that they managed to write. probably they are never able to write such a piece of software again (not to mention all the zillion bugs it has) (see bugzilla)

'we have people working on openoffice'

- which is in no way gnome related. looks like ximian is trying to tie 2 different things together. openoffice has it's own framework, api and abi which is in no way gnome related.

Re:what ?

[Anonymous Coward]

- probably the only application that they managed to write. probably they are never able to write such a piece of software again (not to mention all the zillion bugs it has) (see bugzilla)

being that I am one of about 6 or 7 hackers on Evolution (counting gal and gtkhtml hackers mind you) and the fact that Evolution is so many lines of code, can you name a single application this large that *doesn't* have zillions of bugs as you put it?

(btw, there's only about 2500 bugs filed under Evolution, Gal and GtkHTML combined, and a good 50% or more are feature requests and not bugs at all)

Mozilla has at least that many, and probably more. I wouldn't be surprised to find out the same is true for KMail, Balsa, mutt, etc - and they are all much smaller projects.

Re:what ?

[Seeker5528]

"- but gnome 2 totally sucks. even hardcore gnome users refuse to use it. read all the flames and rants about gnome 2 on all kind of news pages and mailinglists."

Gnome 2 works good for me. How many of those complaints are about Gnome 2 and how many are people saying things like "my favorite panel app has not been ported yet, what's up with that"? After reading this article I have a lot more confidence in the forward compatibilty of Gnome apps in the future then I do with the forward compatibility of KDE apps.

"looks like ximian is trying to tie 2 different things together. openoffice has it's own framework, api and abi which is in no way gnome related."

Given their relationship with Sun and the fact that Sun presented the idea of Openoffice being the default office suite for the Gnome project, is this really surprising that they would work together to bridge their respective component models so the 2 projects work well together? Open Office is a good office suite so what reason is there not to do this?

Later, Seeker

Re:what ?

[Anonymous Coward]

hear hear. only 2500 bugs.

Re:what ?

[Anonymous Coward]

well gnome 2 works no doubt. but it is not usable. i can't do the same work with it as i do e.g. on windows or on e.g. kde (i am no kde zealot)

and personally openoffice should not become part of the gnome 2 desktop since openoffice (as i said earlier) is no gnome component, i't doesn't use gnome libraries, the interface is not gnome etc. ximian may like the idea sun maybe too but not the users. (i don't like that crap) otherwise i can go off and use blackbox and tie all kind of apps into the blackbox menu and use them. what reason does a desktop environment make if you permanently break consistency with shit like that ?

Re:what ?

[Tony Hoyle]

The big things wrong for me are the OK/Cancel buttons being the wrong way around (I don't want to have to think about where the buttons are... with gnome I have to pause, read the desktop, then click rather than just click), and the sucky 12 point courier that everything defaults to (even if you try to change it in nautilus half the apps ignore the setting. gnome-terminal looks bloody awful in its default setting). Bring back the control panel too - I'm not a fan of having to search for 20 minutes just to work out how to change the background image (then finding that the option was broken/unimplemented...)

This is a .0 release.. I really liked gnome 1.4 it was clean and functional.... it'd be nice to get back to that level of functionaliy someday but for now I ended up switching to kde until gnome gets itself sorted again.

Re:building [not AC, just don't have password ATM]

[Nodatadj]

When did they open Best Buy?
You mean you don't have to go the whole way over to Cambridge to get stuff now?

As a matter of fact, we do all drive the same car

[Latent Heat]

From a user-interface standpoint, we all pretty much drive the same car -- steering wheel, brake pedal, gas, turn signals. In fact, when designers try to make cars too cute -- the used Camry I just bought has turn-signal style stalks sprouting out every which way from the steering column -- I get my wife operating the wipers every time she wants to put the car in gear, even though she once drove a Firebird with the gear selector on the console instead of on the tree like our old Taurus and Chrysler. And when designers try and enhance things -- like the VW/Audi change in gas and brake pedal placement to get quicker brake reaction time -- you end up with geezers making new doors in the garage and turning around and suing for "stuck accelerator syndrome."

Landmark Center

[arcturus21]

Having worked above Ximian in the same building for the summer i know the space well. The building is quite nice. I believe Ximian has the 3rd floor in the West Wing although I have not been there.

The building used to be a Sears warehouse and then was not used and in ill repair for many years. Now it is reopened as nice offices. It has twin large seven story Atriums in the center of both wings which allow some nice natural light into offices that would otherwise be without. More pictures of the building are here

Never seen it happen...

[Chuck Chunder]

I've used Red Carpet extensively on both a Mandrake 8 and Red Hat 7.2 box and have never had any such problems.

Red Carpet "just works", every time.

Re:As a matter of fact, we do all drive the same c

[g4dget]

From a user-interface standpoint, we all pretty much drive the same car

That's a predictable but wrong answer, and it shows the same blinders that people have when it comes to Windows. Professional cars (trucks, racecars, tanks, etc.) are very different from consumer cars. There is likewise no reason why software for professionals should look anything like consumer software. Asserting that it should is the same idiotic advertising machinery that sells cheap plastic thingies as "professional tools" to consumers who are eager to buy "the real thing".

And even among consumer cars there is enormous variation: other than the steering wheel and two pedals, all the other user interface elements can be found almost anywhere within reach, in almost any arrangement.

slashdot ?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now i can see why all people say that slashdot sucks nowadays ...

Re:slashdot ?!

[Anonymous Coward]

why does /. suck ? because other peoples opinion differs from yours ?

i think that /. is the best place on the net where people say what they really think about things without the need to hide themselves behind some asscrawling comments.

personally i like people that say what they think instead hiding behind some cock-choking sentences that contain stuff they don't mean.

well

[Trepidity]

Enlightenment is kind of nice, and fairly innovative. And even usable if you turn off some of the animations. I especially like being able to drag desktops over other desktops partially, while working on both.

It's too bad they threw out the code and started v17 from scratch 2 years ago, and are still "at least 2 years away" from having another release. But v16 is still pretty good.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

ex gte internetworking/bbn employee????

[Anonymous Coward]

just curious?

Re:ex gte internetworking/bbn employee????

[Anonymous Coward]

ex gte internetworking/bbn employee???? bbn? the hell are you talking about?

Re:Why _do_ people buy Ximian? (NOT on Debian)

[Sleepy]

> Ximian GNOME has a number of advantages over the standard desktop GNOME that comes with your distro.

Disclaimer: Ximian has a number of nice touches to GNOME that I really like. Standard GNOME2 kicks ass -- I'm using RH 8.0 beta -- so I'm anxious to see what you guys have done. I have some guesses as to what you've done to "enhance" GNOME2. I'll spare the possibility of being wrong by not stating my hunch. ;-)

The above is unnecessary fluff to protect against newbie moderators who mod tough questions as "troll". Now, on to my question:

Why the heck can't you guys work out your dependency conflicts with Debian???

I *know* you guys love Debian, and a lot of your coders use Debian, so this conflict I do not understand.

For those not running Debian, the problem is this: install Ximian on a Debian box, and you get circular dependency conflicts... making you feel like you have a RedHat box full of rpm's off Freshmeat. Debian puts a lot of work into their package management, and your .deb packages totally reduce one of Debian's main advantages over other distro's.

Your packages cause the APT database to think GNOME-related stuff is not installed, or is OLDER than Debian's (sometimes a mix of older AND newer). It's a messy problem.

The problem is magnified on Debian far worse than Red Hat (which also has the same problem), because it's easier to network-update Debian. When I ran Debian, I'd apt-get a couple times a day. I was an apt junkie ;-)

OH, and the OTHER large problem with Ximian GNOME is it seems you install your own menu system. This plain STINKS when you have large numbers of GNOME apps installed... those shortcuts are GONE, unless you enable multiple GNOME menus off the "foot button". Grrr.

-Scott

BTW, this sentiment was first touched upon in the URL below. Moderators, please consider that post.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=39651&c id=4231 772

completely off-topic

[misfit13b]

your sig: If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy

no no no, it's: "If you ever fall off the Sears Tower, just go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will try to catch you because, hey, free dummy." ;^)

ok, mod me down now - jack handy haters!

Re:completely off-topic

[Computer!]

I know. Not enough characters in the sig field for the whol-

Re:completely off-topic

[F34nor]

If you fall off a building, screech, because maybe you'll look like a simian and people will be like hey, free monkey.

That's how you make it on topic.

Re:building [not AC, just don't have password ATM]

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not open yet, but they're working on it. We're guessing it'll open just in time to drive us broke for Christmas.

Moderation abuse

[Sanity]

If ever there was a demonstration of the flaws in the moderation system, the way this comment was moderated highlights them. I make a well-informed critique of Ximian (I have done due-dilligence work for a number of Venture Capitalists), but because I happen to be criticizing one of the Sacred Cows of Slashdot - I get an "overrated" and a "flamebait" moderation.

I hope whoever is responsible for that gets punished in meta-moderation (but I won't hold my breath).

Re:Moderation abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I'll bet a lot of folks feel that way when they get modded down for criticizing Freenet. Those who live by the sword...