A First Look At The Xandros Desktop

Gentu writes "OSNews has an exclusive article regarding the awaited Xandros Desktop. Xandros is the company who purchased the Corel Linux source code and rights, so in essense, this is the second generation of the once promising, Corel's Linux. OSNews previews beta 3b and they say that this distribution, along with Lycoris, Lindows (and possibly Red Hat 8), is the one to compete for the purely-for-the-desktop Linux market."

Comments

Also check out:

[Anonymous Coward]

Desktop distros:
http://www.lycoris.com
http://www.bluelinux.org

Re:Also check out:

[i_am_nitrogen]

Don't forget Lindows, which is a fork from an earlier version of Xandros (IMO much better in its current 1.3 version that most linux distros, as far as ease of use goes).

http://www.lindows.com/

Re:Also check out:

[packeteer]

what about mandrake?... i know mandrake can be used as everything else but its best as a desktop distro... personalyl i find it to be VERY easy and have used it to convert many windows users... also mandrake 9.0 comes out any day now...

Re:Also check out:

[Anonymous Coward]

When you learn the correct command to UMOUNT a volume, then people will take your opinion on Linux seriously, until then your just a Mandrake LOSER.

Re:Also check out:

[Anonymous Coward]

BSD elitist :-P)

Re:Also check out:

[Alcazar]

Not to mention that he forgot head....

Re:Also check out:

[laymil]

ln -s /bin/umount /bin/unmount

because its intuitive to type the un sometimes...and people fuck up :)

Re:Also check out:

[packeteer]

Ok every time i post about Mandrake someone rips into my sig. It is there on purpose. I know that the actual command is "umount" but what the command does is "unmount". It sounds better if your not "umounting a women". Jesus everyone needs to calm down and realize that console skills arent required BECAUSE of distros such as mandrake. Personally i am very good at using a console and it helps me a lot but whenever i install mandrake on a windows convert's computer i dont even install a console interface. It just needlessly confuses them and if they later feel like they want to explore the OS more i simply tell them the very short command to install it off the cd's.

More choices

[I_am_Rambi]

Sounds like it would be interesting. Can the Corel Linux be better than Open Office? Will it also come with an email/calendar client? (Which is one thing that I miss in open office.) Can it translate Word docs easily? I think that it would be better to be compatible than be great and uncompatible.

Re:More choices

[Anonymous Coward]

wtf you talking about? corel linux is LINUX.. an OPERATING SYSTEM. not a fucking office suite

Re:More choices

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, seriously, lay off the weed for a week. Linux isn't an office suite, man!

Re:More choices

[MaxVlast]

Then how can it do presentations? I wanted to make PowerPoint presentations. I was told Linux could do that. How do I make it print envelopes?

Re:More choices

[Com2Kid]

Then how can it do presentations? I wanted to make PowerPoint presentations. I was told Linux could do that. How do I make it print envelopes?

Don't laugh, I got this one from a person yesterday.

Bleh.

Re:More choices

[Julian Plamann]

I did as well surprisingly... heh.

Re:More choices

[Alan Partridge]

only a fucking geek would find it funny. If you don't understand that making Powerpoint presentations and printing envelopes are PRIMARY reasons for many users to even have a computer, then all the linux bullshit in the world isn't gonna make MS curl up and die. A far as most office-bound schmucks are concerned, Windows DOES print envelopes and make Powerpoint presentations.

Re:More choices

[Anonymous Coward]

If you use Primarily Powerpoint then keep your Windows. You are already part of The System.
Now you are inform that The System will protect all your Software and Hardware. Congratulations, The System will not charge any fee for the next 10 security upgrades. You must not complain about The System in public places. Any fee that is not directly upon payment from you to The System is relative and will not affect your pocket, your have not rights over them.
ex. The taxes used in School Software Licences, Other goverment agencies Licences.
Cheer
The System Server

YAWCLD

[Anonymous Coward]

yet another windows clone linux distro. *yawn* look at the screenshots.

wake me when there's some of this "innovation" linux is known for. heh

Re:YAWCLD

[the MaD HuNGaRIaN]

I agree WHOLE HEARTEDLY.

This looks so much like WINDOWS it makes me want to VOMIT.

Thank GOD I switched to Mac!
OS X = POWER + USABILITY + FRESH UI

Hell, even M$ got tired of that look. As Fisher-Pricey as Luna looks, it's a hell of a lot better than those butt-ugly 1995 era screen-shots.

Re:YAWCLD

[ragnarok]

OS X = POWER + USABILITY + FRESH UI

You forgot + OVERPRICED HARDWARE

Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!

Re:YAWCLD

[Alan Partridge]

still cheaper than it was two years ago... when you couldn't get it at ANY price. Macs are only overpriced if you actually think they're just slow PCs in a nice case.

Here's a hint.

[whizzmo]

When showing off a new desktop, at least put a decent skin on Mozilla.

I recommend Pinball .

Your preferences may differ.

Re:Here's a hint.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I use Pinball on my Mozilla too. It is the best I think. It is just that I did not bother to change it under Xandros...

Eugenia - OSNews.com

Re:Here's a hint.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm partial to Breeze, a little-known skin that isn't hosted on Mozdev or Deskmod.

Re:Here's a hint.

[whizzmo]

Ah, ok... no worries, then.

Re:Here's a hint.

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG! It's BeTastic!

Re:Here's a hint.

[LinuxInDallas]

Most likely the reason they left Mozilla with the old-style Netscape skin was that a vast majority of us are very familiar with it. I instantly associate that look with Netscape. If you want the desktop to look familiar to Windows users then a Netscape look-a-like browser is a good start.

Re:Here's a hint.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm personally rather partial to orbit myself. There is quite a lack of good original mozilla skins, it's a lot of work to do one though, I spose.

Re:Here's a hint.

[Anonymous Coward]

if you're targeting windows users, use this IE skin, not some crappy netscape skin

Re:Here's a hint.

[Moghedien]

Mmm, delicious skin. For those not reading ACs, it's here.

Re:Here's a hint.

[Anonymous Coward]

Definitely. Pinball looks like ass compared to orbit. Hopefully someday there'll be something even better.

Re:Here's a hint.

[Anonymous Coward]

That is of course, not Eugenia speaking there, but a troll. :P

No thanks

[Over_and_Done]

Looks a lot like WIN98. I understand that they are going after the converts from windows, but, this may be simplified to the point where the advantages of linuz are lost.

It looks like I will be sticking to some of the 'more traditional' distros. However, I guess I would get it for my parents.

Re:No thanks

[GoatPigSheep]

Thats too bad that it looks like win98, if they want windows converts it's going to have to look like winXP.

Re:No thanks

[asteinberg]

this may be simplified to the point where the advantages of linuz are lost.

Um, remind me again, since when was the primary advantage of "linuz" its beautiful looks? How about stability, and perhaps even more importantly, cost? If Joe User can get a fully loaded distro for half the cost of Windows (not to mention the included Office suite(s) and other software that Microsoft would have you spending hundreds of dollars on), I think that alone is plenty of incentive. If anything, the similarities to the looks of Windows should help this distro gain converts - the only thing holding most people back is the pain of learning a new system, and hopefully this will help to bridge the gap.

Re:No thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, linux is free as beer. Maybe not Xandros but most applications runing on Linux.

Re:No thanks

[Proc6]

Windows2000/XP is plenty stable for the average user. Cost? Know anyone who's paid for Windows in their lifetime? And don't say "they paid for it with the price of their desktop", but then Ill say "know anyone who's bought a desktop that didnt come with Windows in their lifetime?"

Re:No thanks

[BlameFate]

How about anyone who ever bought a desktop Mac?

Re:No thanks

[Alan Partridge]

I only know 30 or 40 of THOSE...

Re:No thanks

[BlameFate]

Me too :-( But in theory they *are* out there ;-)

Re:No thanks

[N3WBI3]

Unless you have used it you cant tell if 'the advantages of linuz' are lost. The power of Linux lies in the terminal (imho) the rest is just window dressing. How is this interfce any different than gnome/kde? The button looks different? no default pager in the 'start bar'? If its as stable as Linux, if it offers a terminal shell you have all the advantages of linux.

I am not to fond of M$ either, but their interface is very simple, and this is what jon and jane doe are looking for. Linux would/has do/done well to borrow very selectively from the M$ interface (if you dont like it put fvwm on ;) features like the 'start' button have worked their way into the linux world with desktops like KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment, dont get pissed if I did not put yours here. I use FVWM all the time not, but if at one point I could not have an OS that looked somewhat like windows I would still be on windows. It was not until I learned that all you need is knowledge of how to use the terminal I moved to a less busy interface.

So I say lets give 90% of the computing world what I guess what I am saying is not specific to this distro (a distro release is hardly news unless is something like Mandrake, Redhat, (insert market share measurable linux here), or an innovation.

Re:No thanks

[N3WBI3]

correction:"but if at one point I could not have an **OS** that ...." should be Interface (for me it was Gnome)

Re:No thanks

[asteinberg]

know anyone who's bought a desktop that didnt come with Windows in their lifetime?

Sure. Anyone who built their computer or got a custom one built at a local "mom and pop" shop. From what I understand, Microsoft has cut down on piracy in these situations quite a bit, so generally these places will add about $100 or so to your computer's cost for Windows.

I won't even bother mentioning those Wal-mart Microtel computers...

Any one notice the resolution switcher?

[Anonymous Coward]

In screen shot 4 theres a resolution switcher ala windows where the hell has this been for the other distros?

Re:Any one notice the resolution switcher?

[dogas]

Even more interesting is the refresh rate switcher. That's certainly a sight for sore eyes.

Re:Any one notice the resolution switcher?

[MsGeek]

Lycoris does that.

Re:Any one notice the resolution switcher?

[e_n_d_o]

The current RedHat beta also introduces a "resolution switcher"... I agree, it's about time!

Re:Any one notice the resolution switcher?

[Jaysyn]

Mandrake Linux 8.1 has a rez switcher in Mandrake Control Center. No I haven't been using Linux very long.

Jaysyn

Re:Any one notice the resolution switcher?

[G-funk]

Unfortunately, the biggest problem with various distros, is most of them suffer from the worst kind of Not-Invented-Here syndrome :(

We need a distro that just selects the best parts of others (say apt from debian, installer from redhat, etc etc), and start from a "best of breed" (god forgive me for using that phrase) linux and work from there.

Re:Any one notice the resolution switcher?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isnt it e.g. in the gnome-control-center in Debian?
And I've seen a windowmaker dock for it also.
Redhats new x configurator..

Re:Any one notice the resolution switcher?

[falser]

and start from a "best of breed"

Does that mean we get to call it Linux BOB(TM) ?

Re:Any one notice the resolution switcher?

[Kynde]

In screen shot 4 theres a resolution switcher ala windows where the hell has this been for the other distros?

CTRL-ALT-KP_MINUS and CTRL-ALT-KP_PLUS ?
Been around in X for quite some time.

Or am I missing something?

Re:Any one notice the resolution switcher?

[Karn]

Yes.

You're missing the fact that if you change color depths in X, it must be restarted (this is not required in Windows or MacOS X).

And the fact that if you do change your max resolution, you also need to restart X (this is not required in Windows or MacOS X).

And you're probably missing the fact that most people don't like panning their desktop.

What would be nice is to be able to change MAX resolutions on the fly in X, as well as bit depth.

For example,

If I want to play Half-life under Wine:
* Edit /etc/X11/XF86Config
* Change DefaultDepth from 24 to 16
* Restart X
* After I'm done, I have to change DefaultDepth from 16 to 24
* Restart X

The time it takes me isn't much and I don't mind because I understand what's going on, but to people used to other GUI environments it seems backwards.

Re:Any one notice the resolution switcher?

[SomeOtherGuy]

We could call it "Linux Cannibal V1.0".

All kidding aside...I think that was the best question of the day. You would think someone would piece together a distribution that included all of the varied "little things" that all of the other distributions have created over the years.

Re:Any one notice the resolution switcher?

[Anonymous Coward]

use crtl-alt-+ or minus - it's an X feature, regardless of distro. some distro's let you select multiple resolutions when you configure X...if you do, then you can use this method to switch between them.

If you really want to have something to click on to change it, search for gtkuickres (or something really similar) - i used it on a toshiba laptop where I can't enter the three key combo - I use it to switch instead. If you use gnome, you can dock it - that is, stick onto your task bar...I use kde myself, so it floats on the screen, but it doesnt take alot of space...

I use windows sometimes, and would kill for a crtl-alt-esc option - in linux, this turns the mouse pointer into a skull and crossbones - click on a window and BAM! It's toast. This feature ALONE makes linux rock for me.

Is this the way to win new users?

[fmita]

I realize that Linux is all about choice, and users can choose to have their distro look like Windows if they want, but is this really the way to win new users? To the average joe, an OS's GUI is its most recognizable characteristic. So doesn't it kind of compromise part of Linux's uniqueness? I know this argument has been made before, but what happens to the Lycoris or Xandros user if he or she ever has to sit down and use Blackbox or something of the like? MacOS and BeOS both have/had GUIs that were part of their personality. Linux should, too. I'm all for new users, but I'm beginning to wonder if this isn't taking it too far. Distros aimed at new users should be user-friendly, but perhaps not so much like windows.

Re:Is this the way to win new users?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would the user have to sit down in front of Blackbox? They use their own computer and probably don't fuck with the default install.

It isn't like they are running around using other people's Linux distros and prancing all over town logging in to other peoples machines.

Your argument makes no sense.

And possibly Red Hat?

[I Want GNU!]

Yes, Red Hat is good, but Mandrake one ups it. And look at the publisher of OSNews -- David Adams. This man founded Akopia, which was acquired by Red Hat. Red Hat is good but this site reeks of bias and who knows what other special interests have stakes in it. Maybe his link with Red Hat didn't affect the article, but theoretically (of course), what if a big name in a major operating system advised the government on, say, software security? Would that smell fishy?

Re:And possibly Red Hat?

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy has left Red Hat earlier this year. I don't see any "bias" towards Red Hat over there and I frequent quite a lot. In fact, they were pretty harsh on redhat on an article about a UI issue recently. Get your facts straight first before posting uninformed comments.

Re:And possibly Red Hat?

[nicku]

apparently you havent seen the Red Hat Null beta. The slick package management, up2date, the consistant desktop. Mandrake doesnt come close. Mandrake's icon set is butt.

Not very original

[Anonymous Coward]

Real original interface... Can we say "I can't innovate so I'll just copy somebody else's interface and put in a new icon set and call it my own."?

hmmm...xXx

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome to the Xander Zone!

Re:hmmm...xXx

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you mean the Xander Xone?

Rip on it all you want, but . . .

[AriesGeek]

I'm personally sick of my parents complaining about how slow their computer is, even though they only use it for e-mail and web browsing. I have been wanting to get them off of Windows 98 for a long time now, but since they are so computer illiterate, I have been afraid to. This could very well be the OS that will get the away from Windows. We'll see.

The point is that this isn't necessarily the right distro for us, but it could very well be for our parents/grandparents/sons/daughters/alien sex fiends.

As usual, just my dos centavos.

Re:Rip on it all you want, but . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

So, you're installing Linux to increase the speed of the machine? Without doing any hardware (read: RAM) upgrades?

Hope you weren't expecting an inheritance. If you were my kid, I'd take you out behind the woodshed as soon as KDE stars swapping to disk while running a screensaver on 128MB of memory.

Re:Rip on it all you want, but . . .

[heffel]

If all they do is email and web browsing, they should have no trouble with using Linux at all.

My wife is as computer illiterate as it gets,
and she uses the computer for exactly those 2 reasons only.

I gave her an account on my Debian box,
set up icons for Evolution and Galeon on the
GNOME panel, and she has happily been a Linux
user for quite some time now.

We used to dual boot all the time because she thought Linux was "too difficult", once I showed her she just had to click on an icon to read her email or browse the web, we haven't gone back to Windows for the longest time (she actually prefers Linux now).

I had to set her pop account on Galeon, but I had to do that on the Windows partition as well.

Heffel

Re:Rip on it all you want, but . . .

[Dr. Smooth]

How exactly do you make your parents' computer run faster with Linux+X? I have _never_ installed Linux and X on a machine and ended up with a faster, more responsive machine than I had under Windows. This goes for machines across the power spectrum, high-end machines as well as low-end.

You give your parents an OS you wouldn't use?

[Moderator]

You would give your parents an OS you wouldn't use? C'mon! That's like giving them food you wouldn't eat.

My mom uses NetBSD. l33t!!!

Re:Get some PRIORITIES!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure in your spare time your out there saving those lives, shall be call you clark kent or just random moron? Get a hobby and get off your fixation with global suffering, cause theres jack and shit that you can do about it and jack left town.

Completely missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

I can see it now--there will be a deluge of posts here from people debating whether Linux should look like Windows, how wildly configurable the UI should be, etc.

But this completely misses the point. The thing that's keeping Linux off the desktops of all those millions of Windows users is the lack of compatibility with the programs that those users want to run. Got a way to run all of MS Office, including all macros, keyboard shortcuts, etc.? How about Quicken? How about the stack of games the user or his/her kid has at home? How about the one text editor that the user finally found that he or she likes (and without having to spend hours reconfiguring a Linux editor to mimic it)?

All the pretty UI work in the world won't make any difference at all to users if the system won't run what they think is important.

Re:Completely missing the point

[billstr78]

You're absolutly correct. Sort of. Correct me if I am wrong, but doese'nt WINE give emulate a windows environment and allow the execution of many win32 apps? Also, many newbs and kids still in grade school have a shot at starting out on the alterternatives like OpenOffice or the KOffice suite if they are activly developed and contributed to by companies like Corel.

Inovate, Don't Imitate.

Re:Completely missing the point

[dioxide]

You're absolutly correct. Sort of. Correct me if I am wrong, but doese'nt WINE give emulate a windows environment and allow the execution of many win32 apps? Also, many newbs and kids still in grade school have a shot at starting out on the alterternatives like OpenOffice or the KOffice suite if they are activly developed and contributed to by companies like Corel.


yes.. but its so friggin hard to make a lot of programs work, it isnt feasable to expect anyone not in the scene to do it themselves.

Re:Completely missing the point

[lemkebeth]

I have a problem with GNU/Linux just coping the look from another OS (Be it Windows, Mac, whatever).

It pretty much say to me that the people who do GNU/Linux development have no creative streak (other than perhaps with creative coding of source code). Copying another OS's look is the lazy way out and also can land you in court.

Why don't you do some real human interface work and develop a new look?

After all, are you just trying to turn GNU/Linux on the desktop into a Windows clone with a different set of underpinnings?

Re:Completely missing the point

[cornice]

I mostly agree with you but there is still room in this world for a Windows clone that works better than Windows - more stable, more secure, more free. There are plenty of distros that are not Windows clones. There are projects that are inventive, that do ground breaking work. I don't blame anyone for trying to fill this particular niche. It's a big niche if you do it just right.

Re:Completely missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

Precisely! It can look like Windows all it wants, the fact is, Linux != Windows, it doesn't run Windows binaries, and there will be an infinite number of places where the "it's Windows, really" delusion/illusion falls flat on its face.

Frankly, I'm unsure that sending someone who is used to Windows this distro is any good -- they get confused, think Linux is just like windows, find out it doesn't quite work like they expected, doesn't run half their programs, emulates the other half with half-assed versions from vendors that truly don't give a shit, and then decide that "Linux sucks."

When I switched to Linux from Windows 2000, I ran Blackbox with bbpager and the "operations" theme. Was it entirely different? Yes. And no shit, it's a different OS, with differing apps. What did you expect?

Xandros claims to target Windows users. But if you really want Windows, go run the real thing, please! If (when) you're truly ready to try something different, cast away your previous ideas about what a computer can do and how it should respond to you, and try out a different way of interacting with your machine!

Re:Completely missing the point

[Disevidence]

If its so bleedingly obvious, why does everyone seem to miss it.?

Re:Completely missing the point

[Jaysyn]

Yeah, no shit. I've managed to get one game running out of the 10 or so I've tried. And I think it was out circa Win3.11 days.

Jaysyn

p.s. I'm not bitching, it's almost as fun to figure this shit out (Linux) as it is to play the games.

Re:Completely missing the point

[teslatug]

Seriously, is it that hard to have an editor like UltraEdit available in Linux?? And no, VI and EMACS are not like it, they're not that easy out of the box.

Re:Completely missing the point

[Osty]

Why don't you do some real human interface work and develop a new look?

Because real human interface work ("research" is a better term) is expensive and time consuming. Independent programmers and teams of programmers tend not to be able to afford that kind of thing, and Linux software companies don't have the cash to spare. Sun made some effort with GNOME, but I'm not sure what ever came from that.

Re:Completely missing the point

[dead sun]

I think the point is to make something presentable. If it runs everything the user wants, but behaves like Win95 I don't think the end user is going to be as happy either. There are alternatives to many apps out there that are pretty decent. And really, most home users, the desktop sitting there in the family room user, probably don't care much about full macro support for their word processor. That's businessy stuff. They want something that will let them do what they need, most likely web and email with some light word processing and maybe some other stuff. Important stuff like solitare or minesweeper.

That said, the screenshots on that page looked absolutely god-awful. I wouldn't let that theme sit there for a second. I personally don't care if it looks like windows or not, but the screenshots looked like the desktop was a cold, lifeless thing, not something I would want peeking out around my apps. If you're pushing pretty UI work like you say won't make a difference, at least do that well. I think that without both usability and a bit of aesthetics you're going to lose users. Not many Joe-users I know want to their desktop to look like its going backwards, regardless of how progressive it may really be under the hood.

Re:Completely missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

you misspelled 'innovate' and 'alternatives' and 'actively'

hope this helps.

Re:Completely missing the point

[IamTheRealMike]

LOL, that's a good pick of apps you've got there.

Codeweavers/Transgaming Wine does every single one of them. It does Office, it's in beta testing for Quicken, it plays games, and it runs TextPad which is imho the best Windows text editor.

Windows compatability gets better every single week. Just read the kernel cousins!

Re:Completely missing the point

[James Durie]

> Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a
> revolving door

That's easy!

Just make sure someone is coming through before you slam it.

James

Re:Completely missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

If its so bleedingly obvious, why does everyone seem to miss it.?

Because they think the only apps anyone actually needs are ls, ps and pwd.

Props to the Badger.

Re:Completely missing the point

[Anonymous Conrad]

Windows compatability gets better every single week.

Does Microsoft give Office technical support for WINE installs?

Why run it in an emulator at all when you could run the real thing?

If you're willing to shell out for the Office suite, why aren't you willing to buy or use the OS?

And Win2k *is* stable.

Re:Completely missing the point

[lala]

Well... True but still untrue...
You can run either Office(CodeWeavers wine) OR games (TransGamings wine).
I am sure there is a way to have both installed at the same time, but I wouldn't ask my mother to do that.

Re:Completely missing the point

[CurlyG]

Hmm, obvious troll, but here goes anyway, just in case someone that's not already totally cynical about these issues is reading...

Does Microsoft give Office technical support for WINE installs?

No. But it doesn't charge for it either. If you want the benefits of *nix without the enslavement of The Microsoft Way, and you *must* have 100% compatibility with your colleague's MS apps, it's a no-brainer. (Anyway, have you personally ever actually tried to get any of the 'support' that's offered with MS consumer products?)

Why run it in an emulator at all when you could run the real thing?

Just because you must run Office for some reason doesn't mean you have to pay for software that you don't want or need, particularly when that software is deficient in ways that are significant to you.

If you're willing to shell out for the Office suite, why aren't you willing to buy or use the OS?

Why would I buy a product that I don't want, and that can't do the job I want satisfactorily? Would you buy an Intel web-cam just because you've got a Pentium CPU on your mobo?

And Win2k *is* stable.

If by that you mean that it's more stable than its predecessors then yes, there's no doubt at all. If, however, you mean that it's capable of staying up under load for months or years at a time, of having its major services patched on the run without a reboot, and of having its source-code analysed line-by-line by a customer until an unreported bug is found and cured... well... do I have to draw a picture for you?

Re:Completely missing the point

[Anonymous Conrad]

Maybe I *am* cynical. Or maybe I haven't been brainwashed that WINE on Linux is the universal panacea :-p

This story's about *desktop* installs. Win2k makes a very good desktop. It does everything you'd expect of a desktop machine. You can get all the usual suspect GNU utilities ported to it. I don't need my desktop to stay up under load for months or years. I can patch almost everything without reboot, barring a handful of shared libraries or in-use drivers. I know it runs Office as well as anything because Microsoft will have QAed Office on it. I don't expect to have to trawl through the source line-by-line if there's a problem - that's why people pay MS for their software. It's not commercially sensible that I have to maintain the source of the OS I'm using in work time when we can shift that burden for a few hundred bucks a seat.

I haven't *needed* to use MS support since 1994. We had a Win3.11 network problem. They were very helpful.

Re:Completely missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh... I don't know UltraEdit, but if you want a simple and powerful GUI editor with nice features you can try SciTE, based off the Scintilla editor component (GTK+ based)

Head on to www.scintilla.org

For the record it is the base of the PithonWin environment in ActiveState's Python distro, and I found it rather useful... it's not vim, ok, but a lot of people don't need that amount of power.

(I do, so the first thing I install on Win boxes is gvim ^____^ )

Re:Completely missing the point

[MeNeXT]

Yes!! Great point!

Where are my moderator points when I can use them?

Re:Completely missing the point

[TandyMasterControl]

Does Microsoft give Office technical support for WINE installs?
No of course not. And you won't be missing anything not having it.

Why run it in an emulator at all when you could run the real thing?
You will be able to run Office from a central app server thanks to X, with one installation for multiple users. This is already possible with Codeweavers for a fee. Soon it will be free.

-why aren't you willing to buy or use the OS?

1. • Lock in ?
   
   
   • Reboots?
   
   
   • Horrendous fucking Licensing Terms and Costs?
   
   
   • Nazi auditors tossing your MIS offices upside down?
   
   

I think those are all the reasons any sane person would ever need.

Re:Completely missing the point

[ZaMoose]

"Patch almost everything without reboot"? Errrm, SP3? Office SPs? IE updates? Media player? Anything that's from Microsoft? Last I checked, every bloody one of those required a reboot...

Non-MS software can usually be "patched" sans-reboot, although I've noticed a distrubing trend in games to force/reccommend a reboot after an install/patch procedure.

Re:Completely missing the point

[lemkebeth]

Unless you happen to know Human Interface design yourself anyway.

You could also ask someone who is a designer to pitch in on a part time basis.

In any event it isn't so much the money as employing the people that makes it expensive.

In other words I challenge the Free Software zealots to come up with said designers or learn it themselves as this is a direct challenge to their ideology. I can imagine some Free Software advocate screaming "Free" everything. Well this is their chance to prove it.

Re:Completely missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

> (I do, so the first thing I install on Win boxes is gvim ^____^ )

Same, w00!

Specialized Linux in what sort?

[I_am_Rambi]

I have been told that RH is specialized in file serving world. I have also been told that other Linux distros are specialized in other areas. How will Corel Linux be specialized?

Re:Specialized Linux in what sort?

[Anonymous Coward]

Corel Linux will specialize in releasing one distro and summarily disappearing from the entire Linux scene. Xandros will specialize in digging up the bones of Corel Linux and try to appeal to Windows users for desktop use. RH will continue to dominate the corporate Linux server market, and will more than likely get the lion's share of the Linux corporate desktop market. Slackware will continue to be loved by purists who value efficiency and speed. Debian will continue to be loved by militant Free Software types. Mandrake will continue leeching from RH and polishing turds, which is what they do best. Who else? Oh yeah, Gentoo will continue to make assholes out of their users by brainwashing them into compiling everything from source for that 0.2% boost in performance and being compelled to inform everyone on /. in every single Linux story that Gentoo is the one true way if you are leet and hardcore. Free, Open, and Net BSD will simply continue to rock.

Re:Specialized Linux in what sort?

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot SuSE, Connectiva, and a few others. Take some time, think of something witty, and get back to us.

Seriously.

[Moderator]

Seeing how the rest of the OS is "borrowed" from Windows, I'm surprised they didn't install the Internet Explorer Skin as the default.

Re:Seriously.

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that you mention the IE skin, I'm surprised Bamm Gabriana hasn't officially released his Windows XP IE skin. It's been gathering dust on his site since August 19. There's no noticeable bugs in the skin, so I don't understand why he doesn't announce it already.

No offense...

[Wakko Warner]

...but why is it that every Linux Desktop Environment invariably looks like Windows 98?

- A.P.

Re:No offense...

[VivianC]

...but why is it that every Linux Desktop Environment invariably looks like Windows 98?

Simple, so you don't have to retrain every secretary in the office on how to find a word processor. A better question might be "Why does every Windows OS look like Apple's from 1985?" Have we really reached the apex of GUI design?

Re:No offense...

[emmons]

They don't, unless you consider this or this to be like Windows 98. The only similarity I see is that it has windows, menus, buttons, images and text. (If it didn't, it wouldn't be much of a window manager would it?)

KDE and GNOME can look like windows if you want, but they don't have to. By default those two resemble it, but that's because that look is most familiar to people and in general its a decent design.

Re:No offense...

[Cliffm]

Those are some gorgeous desktops.

Re:No offense...

[Foaf]

like windows 98 but with shittier fonts. Those screenshots didn't exactly scream "use me!".

Re:No offense...

[Anonymous Coward]

I especially like the WindowMaker screenshot background: "Leeter Than You".

WindowMaker was my WM of choice before KDE came along. Sorry WindowMaker, but you just don't play well with KDE.

Re:No offense...

[gmhowell]

Not the secretaries: the execs. Secretaries, janitors, fry cooks, etc. are trainable. Executives OTOH...

Re:No offense...

[asteinberg]

...but why is it that every Linux Desktop Environment invariably looks like Windows 98?

Keep in mind that the primary advantage of Linux is definitely not beautiful looks. When I mention Linux to people, the reasons are usually more focused on its stability or, perhaps even more importantly, its cost. The fact that you can get an OS that comes with tons of software preloaded for half the price of a far more stripped down one like Windows is pretty significant.

So, with that in mind, why make it look like Windows 98? Well, Windows 98 is what the majority of computer users are used to, so why not make it something that won't take a lot of adjusting for them. Plus, what exactly is wrong with the way Windows 98 looks? (Remember, the main problems with Windows are its instability and its expensive cost, not its ugliness - I think it's a pretty nice looking, easy to use operating system). It makes sense to model a GUI after Windows.

And then of course, that other advantage of Linux comes into play - customizability. If you don't like the standard, you can definitely change it. KDE is pretty Windows-like, but there are tons of other Window managers that are quite unique-looking, and you can set up KDE to look more like Mac OS (with a menubar at the top) if that is what you prefer. Personally, though, I don't think the single menu-bar makes a lot of sense, despite what all those "UI-experts" claim. Yeah, sure you get the advantage of being able to move your mouse to the menu really fast, but if you're going for speed, you should be using keyboard shortcuts. Generally the menu is for more obscure functions that you only use once in a while. And it just seems to make a lot more sense to have a menu contained in the application - Mac's approach seems to discourage multitasking, by forcing you to pick one window that has to be on top.

Re:No offense...

[Anonymous Coward]

They are... One wonders, though, if there are matching gtk themes to the window maker screengrab.

e17... One day. I'm still using e16 and bluesteel.

Re:No offense...

[asteinberg]

You make some very good points. Indeed, Windows' stability has increased to a great extent with 2k and XP, perhaps to the point where stability will cease to be an issue. Still, the majority of Windows users are still probably using an older version of Windows with their 2-3 year-old desktop machines, and are in no rush to buy a new computer. If they wanted to get a more stable operating system, they could pay for a Windows XP upgrade (and add more memory to handle the increased load), or they could get a copy of Linux for significantly cheaper (free, even).

As for users who plan to buy a new computer, unfortunately they do not have a whole lot of options. If they get a computer from Dell, you're right, the "Microsoft tax" isn't very high. However, a surprisingly large percentage of people (I wish I had the actual numbers, but I recall it being far higher than I would have expected) buy custom-built machines from neighborhood computer stores, where, assuming the store does not use a pirated copy of Windows, they would likely have to pay a lot closer to the full cost of the OS. Not to mention paying for any additional software the vendor would like to load on, like Office. With computers frequently costing under $500, this can still make up a very significant part of the cost. Of course, if Microsoft ends up freeing their OS, then Linux will be in a lot of trouble, but I don't think we're at a point where we can consider Windows completely free yet. Oh, and as far as small and large businesses are concerned, here the Microsoft tax becomes even more significant. These businesses have to pay for hundreds of Windows licenses (or perhaps there is some kind of expensive "business license" - I'm not sure, but either way it still applies). A single license is all it would take to get Linux on as many computers as the business needs. There have been many case studies about how Linux can save businesses large amounts of money.

Finally, you suggest that the best three arguments for Linux are flexibility, openness, and security. While these are clearly crucial advantages, their importance is not very apparent to Joe User who wants a new desktop OS. He does not notice the flexibility and will likely stick with default settings, he does not care about openness if Microsoft's closed protocols are so widely supported anyway, and while we may be able to scare him into worrying about security, the truth is there is no critical data that needs to be protected on most home users' machines, and they are not going to be running any servers. Unfortunately, I think the importance of these advantages is not significant enough to a typical home user.

Offhand, I can think of a couple more things that have not yet been mentioned by either of us that might be more persuasive - the first is the whole concept of EULA's. While most users don't really understand the significance of EULA's, it seems like it would be pretty easy to show them that they are "selling their souls to the devil" - most people don't like having to agree to pages and pages of fine print, and a rights-protecting license like the GPL might be attractive to them. Also, I'm not sure if this has been significantly improved with 2k/XP, but I know that most 9x users would be happy to hear that they don't have to worry about rebooting their machines with every change they make. I recently helped someone format their hard drive and reinstall Win98, and it must have taken at least 9 or 10 reboots before we had the machine at a good state. I mentioned how you never have to deal with rebooting in Linux and he seemed quite interested. Of course, I don't think he was ready for Linux, and Linux isn't ready for him, so I didn't install it (for one, he uses AOL, which he could not do with Linux - not to mention the fact that I did not want to have to be his personal tech support bitch for the next year).

Re:No offense...

[Anonymous Coward]

A Wesley Willis sig. Holy shit.

Re:No offense...

[Zork the Almighty]

...but why is it that every Linux Desktop Environment invariably looks like Windows 98?

Because if you show people an OS with a more efficient interface AND it doesn't crash, they will just freak out. That's why Macs have such a low market share, as soon as people see one, they go running out the door screaming for help.

I'm sure someone can do something good with THAT...

Re:No offense...

[Anonymous Coward]

no offense but
win98 is better than Linux.

Re:No offense...

[Bartab]

Blackbox looks like Windows? Could have fooled me.

Re:No offense...

[evbergen]

They are, but somehow I don't believe that anybody uses those for day to day work, or even play. I couldn't help thinking "what's the use, other than the visual experience that you'll be able to endure about 5 minutes". It's nice as an artwork example, but completely useless as an example of a well designed GUI.

Re:No offense...

[josh crawley]

---"Have we really reached the apex of GUI design?"

I think so... The idea of windows are the beginning idea. You need to multitask,
so you need to minimize and maximize windows. Next, you need the ability to see
minimised programs, either in a bar, or in a icon. Third, the GUI must be fairly
'moldable', so that you can plug in chuncks to add functionality. There should
be standard parts, like a clock, program menu, a pager for multiple desktops
with ability to move windows around (like E). Perhaps also including a task bar.

Next, a program that can control the functions of the computer should be made.
Perhaps this is only a gui for rewrite of a /etc/conf text and re-runs the
daemon, but I think it's needed. Full support should be in there for the GUI (X
and gui). There should be a hardware viewer, along with the ability to modprobe
drivers next to hardware. Servers should have a decent gui for interface (Swat,
for example). Along with server control, there should be a simple networking
viewer. This determines local computer, the connection medium(s), close
computers and the gateway. Then you should be able to, using a gui, configure
your computer for basic routing. ALso should be a setting for "Internet
connection sharing", so your users wouldnt have to know weird ipchains/iptables
commands.

Still when I think of the next type of gui, I see some sort of mind-computer
connection, along with all the hardware doing visualtions for us. I see that in
about 25-30 years at the minimum. Still, in the terms of gui creation, I think
we've found many ways to be more effective. Problem is getting programmers to
listen to us.

Re:No offense...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hats off to Wacko for demonstrating how broken is Slashdot's moderation system. I suspect he could have written "looks like Windows 3.1" or "looks like DOS 6.2", either about as accurate as the win 98 comment, and still have scored an 'Insightful'. Of course, the next post will be adamant that Linux will never succeed because its desktop doesn't look enough like Windows, and also be moderated highly.

Fix the moderation system.

Re:No offense...

[Jason Earl]

You are absolutely correct in what Microsoft should do faced with the growing competition from Linux, OpenOffice, and the rest. Microsoft should drastically reduce their prices, cotton up to OEMs like Dell, and generally do a better job of pleasing their customers.

However, if you think that this is what is actually happening, then you are smoking crack. I completely agree with you about the question of stability. For the most part Microsoft's newest OSes are stable enough, especially for the desktop.

Your belief that Microsoft is lowering prices, however, is completely false. The vast majority of home users stick with whatever OS (and software) their computer came with. There never really was an upgrade market for home users. Corporate users, on the other hand, are finding that Microsoft is pushing them inexorably towards software leasing. That way Microsoft gets paid no matter if they write new software or not. The new corporate licensing schemes are far more expensive than their predecessors for all but the most gung-ho bleeding edge Microsoft users.

The reality of the situation is that Microsoft has got to keep growing their business or their stock price is going to head even further south, and they are going to have to do so without being able to grow their market share. For years Microsoft's server revenues have grown at the expense of Novell and commercial UNIX, but Linux has finally cut them off. Further gains in the server market are going to be much smaller than in the past. Microsoft also can't count on too much growth in the desktop software. The first world countries are saturated, and the second and third world countries have massive piracy rates or are looking seriously at Linux. No matter what happens those folks aren't going to pay Microsoft prices for software any time soon. And don't even get me started on the XBox or any of the other businesses that Microsoft is dabbling in.

So where is Microsoft going to get the growth that they need to keep their stock prices up? They are going to get it by squeezing the customers they already have. The new licensing plans are just the beginning. You see, Microsoft management and employees simply have too much of their money tied up in Microsoft stock. If growth and revenues flatten out then their stock price will suffer.

I agree wholeheartedly with the rest of your piece. The race is no longer about stability. The battle now is between Microsoft's more familiar (and more consistent) GUI and their wide array of applications against Linux's price and flexibility. I just happen to think that Microsoft is going to turn up the burner a bit on price, at least for corporate users.

Re:No offense...

[Arandir]

Sigh... Why is it everyone thinks *NIX desktops looks like Windows?

Windowmaker, Blackbox, Enlightenment, XFCE. No comparison. Let's move on...

IceWM. Okay, there is a resemblance. I suspect it's deliberate. Let's move on...

The big two desktops on *Nix: KDE and GNOME. What exactly makes them look like Windows as opposed to Mac, OS/2, BeOS, CDE, etc?

As near as I can tell, it's because they have icons on the desktop, a panel on the bottom, a root menu on the panel, and window decorations with min/max/close buttons. But that's like complaining that Fords look like Chryslers because they both have hoods, trunks and steering wheels.

Looking at OS/2, Mac, CDE, BeOS, and QNX, I find that they all have those same elements. Some of them had them before Windows did. Some of those elements even predate DOS!

Re:No offense...

[Anonymous Conrad]

I mentioned how you never have to deal with rebooting in Linux and he seemed quite interested.

Why? How often is he ever going to have to reboot it again?

Software install reboots are required to upgrade shared libraries or system services that are in use. Period.

He'd have to install something major to need another one.

Re:No offense...

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh. It's "Sorry, KDE, you just don't play well with WindowMaker" for me.

Sure I use KDE Apps from time to time but I haven't found a comfortable way for KDE to handle 20+ windows (mostly rxvt and Mozilla) while conserving screen space and keeping memory usage to the minimum.

YMMV.

That wmaker's screenshot is definately 'leeter looking than mine, though. Mine's too plain. Time to goof off and play around with the visuals.

Re:No offense...

[perlyking]

yeah... like XFCE :-)

http://www.xfce.org/snapshots.html#TOP

Seriously though I agree, this just looks like a bad attempt at copying windows and looks worse than normal KDE into the bargain.

Re:No offense...

[mpe]

The reality of the situation is that Microsoft has got to keep growing their business or their stock price is going to head even further south, and they are going to have to do so without being able to grow their market share.

Which is something they cannot do indefinitly anyway. It's only a matter of time before Microsoft falls over, unless they radically change their business model.

Re:No offense...

[Patoski]

Second is cost. MS is making head way into this field, but not as rapidly as before. One thing with MS that adds cost to the bottom line is constant upgrade cycle. MS has responded to this. There will be no interim release of Windows XP in the next year or two. They're skipping the traditional "minor release" and going straight for the money shot in 2004/5. This will significantly improve their life cycle projections in the business world. Buying software for 4-5 years is much more attractive than 2-3 years.

While this may be true for for the low margin consumer market it really doesn't matter because Microsoft is making this money up by milking their corporate customers. Whether MS puts out any new software releases or not the new enterprise licensing agreements dictate that you send MS a check every couple of years or lose your preferential pricing agreements. MS now wants their big customers to rent their software instead of buying it.

MS basically has expanded to a point where it has very few avenues for new growth and need to squeeze their big money customers to keep their profits rising year after year. You can only do this for so long before you make your customers very upset (something MS already did last year w/ their licensing fiasco). Make no mistake about it, lots of MS customers are not happy at all with MS' and their new licensing tactics.

Re:No offense...

[edremy]

Still, the majority of Windows users are still probably using an older version of Windows with their 2-3 year-old desktop machines, and are in no rush to buy a new computer.

Actually, no. The numbers are basically dead-even, at least according to the Google Zeitgeist: 49% of users are Win98/95, 46% are on XP/W2k/NT. (ME's not listed, probably buried in Other.) We've gotten rid of 98 (in favor of W2K) on our campus with the exception of a few old laptops that won't run anything else and other schools I know of have done the same.

Re:No offense...

[arkanes]

Except for the horridly ugly gnome/tk style widgets. Spit. Love the menu and title bars, though.

Re:No offense...

[Schnapple]

Actually something I've noticed with XP is that most stuff that required reboots before now don't anymore. I use W2K at work and XP Pro at the house and things I install on both will require a reboot on 2K and not on XP. Sometimes I'll reboot XP just to be safe (God, that's almost depressing). I think it has to do with the "DLL-Hell" curing aspects of the Fusion notion in Whistler products (like .NET server).

Re:No offense...

[Jason Earl]

Generally speaking any company with the kind of revenue and profit margin that Microsoft has is going to seem pretty healthy. However, Microsoft is somewhat different than most companies. The reason for this is the amount of money that Microsoft and their own employees have invested in their own stock. For example, if Microsoft had to expense their stock options, then they would actually be losing money. What's making the difference is that Microsoft has been able to keep their numbers positive enough that the investment community is more than happy enough to keep the price of Microsoft stock up. Microsoft then uses their stock options to pay their employees. Since this doesn't cost Microsoft any money (on paper anyway), they come away smelling like a rose. Every once in a while they announce a big stock buy back (usually when their stock is a little soft) and things are good.

This is part of the reason that Microsoft isn't paying dividends right now. They know that the second that they start acting like an established business and not a high growth start up that investors will start treating them more like Sears and less like the high flier that they always have been. In the long run this would be good for Microsoft's business, but it would clobber their stock price in the short run, and since most Microsoftees are heavily invested in Microsoft stock that is not an option that they are likely to take lightly.

The fact of the matter is that Microsoft could destroy Linux if they were focused on business goals and not on the stock price. Instead of raising prices on corporate customers they could be lowering them. The fact of the matter is that no one really wants to switch. Switching is hard and costs money. However, the savings possible with Linux (especially on the server side) are simply too great to be ignored. Instead of lowering their prices and hanging onto these customers Microsoft is raising their prices on corporate customers. Once again the problem is that Microsoft has structured their whole business around their stock price, and eventually that is going to bite them.

This is not even mentioning the real threat to Microsoft's business either. The real threat is that individuals and companies will start using less expensive office suites. Both HP and Dell are now bundling PerfectOffice, and OpenOffice is looking pretty good. Switching to Linux is hard, switching to PerfectOffice or OpenOffice is much easier, and it saves far more money.

Re:No offense...

[PainKilleR-CE]

However, a surprisingly large percentage of people (I wish I had the actual numbers, but I recall it being far higher than I would have expected) buy custom-built machines from neighborhood computer stores, where, assuming the store does not use a pirated copy of Windows, they would likely have to pay a lot closer to the full cost of the OS.

In my experience (having bought all of my computer parts in mom & pop shops, though putting them together myself rather than having them put one together for me) most shops go through MS' OEM program and sell the OS for about half the cost of retail price, with the proper hardware purchases. Some of them will fudge a bit (sell you Windows at OEM price with almost any hardware, rather than just the stuff required by the normal MS agreement), but most, at least in larger areas, tend to shy away from anything that might have the slightest chance of getting them busted. Then again, I saw more things that looked like possible piracy back in the Win9x days before we had product activation and all the rest of this crap.

Also, I'm not sure if this has been significantly improved with 2k/XP, but I know that most 9x users would be happy to hear that they don't have to worry about rebooting their machines with every change they make. I recently helped someone format their hard drive and reinstall Win98, and it must have taken at least 9 or 10 reboots before we had the machine at a good state.

2k improved some things in this regard and XP improved some more. It still takes a reboot or two to get XP up and running, but, for the most part, there's little you would install after that which requires a reboot. There are a LOT of software installs that tell you to reboot, yet don't actually require it to work properly (because they were written for 98/Me or even 2k), and there are a couple of hardware items that require a reboot. Network cards, specifically, do not require a reboot, as XP will just restart the network stack (2k did require a reboot for this). I probably wouldn't have noticed that one if Intel hadn't released 2 or 3 driver updates for my NIC since XP was released. My SBLive requires a reboot as well, but I think that might have something to do with Creative's driver installation routines rather than with an actual requirement of Windows (it seems that the SBLive doesn't perform quite as well under XP as it did under 2k, I suspect that Creative is yet again trying to get users to upgrade to the newest hardware by not supporting it correctly under the newest OS, the same type of thing (only much more drastic, my old card barely worked at all; at least for the majority of things the SBLive is still as good a card as it was under any other OS) happened when moving to 2k).

Personally, I'll always have issues with certain things under each version of Windows, but I can't complain about stability or having to reboot to do this or that. My 2k and XP machines generally run for weeks or months at a time without a lockup or a requirement for a restart (though occasionally a Windows update will prompt to reboot, I'd like to see them do as much as possible to limit that). They're not servers, though, so that kind of uptime isn't necessarily a requirement, I just feel it's a waste of my time to go through the process that I face when I shut my computer down every morning and boot it up every evening (or vice versa at work). I shouldn't have to leave my computer or sit and wait just to get my email when I get home and get some music going. Instead the thing runs and Ill have messages waiting in IRC and my email and everything's ready to go when I am, instead of me waiting on the computer (of course, with XP's boot time it's not nearly as bad as it used to be, but I still don't want to wait for the damned thing, or for Outlook to connect to the email server and download 12-16 hours worth of email).

Re:No offense...

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone remember the really, really old (I'm talking 5-6 years old) E theme with the rocky/correded metal look?

What about the drake?

[J0ey4]

Am I missing something? I don't want to start a stupid flamewar..."my distro is better than yours!", but I didn't read anything in that article that Mandrake doesn't do at least as well, and usually better. Not to mention that 9.0 is right around the corner....I am a full time grad student and researcher...have been Windows free for years...and when I get home at night I just want my distro to work, be highly customizable, and not have to dick with config files....and the only thing I have seen that rivals Mandrake on the desktop for that is the latest Redhat....and I don't like the direction they are taking with the bastardized Gnome/KDE....good for the masses but not for me.....who is this author that he is already proclaiming this Xandros to be a top competitor for the desktop.....?

don't mod me down too much...:-)
cheers,

J0ey4

Re:What about the drake?

[Joe Tie.]

What struck me was the instalation system. I think rpmdrake/urpmi is good, but it's still not friendly enough that I feel comfortable recomending it to average user. My main beef is in upgrading specific rpms, which I think could really use some work on the gui level. It's close, but to me just dosn't seem to match the usability of apt with the synaptic front end. Debians apt repository combined with a well done gui I belive will enhance the new users experience to a very large degree.

KDE altering issues aside, only having one control panel should be a very good thing for the new user as well. It seems like people migrating from windows would have a lot easier time finding the options on their setup as well.

Re:What about the drake?

[Arandir]

If it's anything like Corel LinuxOS, then it will have one HUGE advantage over Mandrake: It won't install a crapload of software by default.

I'm serious. Mandrake isn't as bad as some distros (*cough* SuSE *cough* *cough*), but the default install is still bloated. A brand new user is intimidated by that much software.

If Xandros follows the Corel lead, then they will install usable but bare bones system and put an icon on the desktop for the user to install more software later.

Re:What about the drake?

[unclebulgaria]

I havent installed Mandrake since version 8.1, however, from what I recall (in fact from what I know), you could select packages either by their general type (such as development, games ect) or you could select them by individual package (although you may have have to install in "expert" mode when it prompts you). You also could do a text based installation, but I never used it.

not supposed to be a troll...

[papasui]

but it might sound like one. I think its great that theres a desktop push to provide some competition for the big guns in the computer market. Yet those screenshots look almost exactly like Windows + IE with some different widgets. It looks like Windows without the windows applications. I'd like to see some innovation instead of everyone bashing the Windows OS and then providing a clone that acts like it.

Re:not supposed to be a troll...

[Anonymous Coward]

almost no one but some mac heads bash the windows GUI, most people bash the stability or MS's business tactics but the GUI is quite good. Besides the reason to copy it is a matter of avoiding retraining costs.

Re:not supposed to be a troll...

[Anonymous Coward]

the "clone" is to show folks that microsoft aint the only ones that can do gui...they weren't the first, and they were never, and still arent, the best.

It may look like 98, but i assume it's normal x, which means you get cool features like multiple desktops, built in vnc (sending output of apps to other x servers, and also being able to receive "screens" from other x servers on your end, etc).

When I get a distro, I almost never leave the theme on the windows98 clone...and, you can make the setup "behave" like a mac, if you prefer, which many think is superior and always has been.

Here's a better hint.

[asteinberg]

When showing off a new distro, keep the settings at their default. I know what Mozilla looks like already, what I want to see is how the distro sets it up. If Pinball is so much better, then maybe your hint should be targetted at the developers of the distro - especially with a newbie-friendly distro, I doubt those newbies will be downloading custom Mozilla skins. I'll take the screenshots as they are, thank you very much.

BTW, I realize that might have sounded overly harsh, I didn't mean it that way.

Oh, and as a side note, what's wrong with the Modern skin included with Mozilla? I've always been a big fan.

Re:Here's a better hint.

[whizzmo]

When showing off a new distro, keep the settings at their default. I know what Mozilla looks like already, what I want to see is how the distro sets it up. If Pinball is so much better, then maybe your hint should be targetted at the developers of the distro - especially with a newbie-friendly distro, I doubt those newbies will be downloading custom Mozilla skins. I'll take the screenshots as they are, thank you very much.

The point is not that you know what Mozilla looks like, it's that the target audience of this distro may not. Thusly, I would show them the nicest, prettiest skin I can dig up. Remember, this website may be all a newb ever sees of your distro. Might as well make it as appealing as possible, right?

Oh, and as a side note, what's wrong with the Modern skin included with Mozilla? I've always been a big fan.

Nothing. I'da been happy with that, too.

Re:Here's a better hint.

[asteinberg]

The point is not that you know what Mozilla looks like, it's that the target audience of this distro may not. Thusly, I would show them the nicest, prettiest skin I can dig up. Remember, this website may be all a newb ever sees of your distro. Might as well make it as appealing as possible, right?

I understand where you're coming from, but still, I think that if Mozilla really looks that bad by default, maybe the makers of Mozilla should consider changing the default skin, or maybe the makers of the distribution should configure it to come shipped with a better skin. I wish I had an actual statistic for this, but I'm fairly certain that the majority of newbies would never even consider changing the way anything on their computer looks - even their desktop - let alone changing their browser's skin. While you and I may love customizability, most newbies don't care (or don't know any better) and just stick with the defaults.

Well...

[NamShubCMX]

I'm not sure I love the look, but it seems I found the distro I'm gonna install on my parents' box...

windows 98

[ottothecow]

looking like windows 98 is fine for someone who WANTS to change and needs a nice learning curve

but, this is so close that an average user might just look at it and think, "this looks a lot like windows, it must be a cheap knockoff and probobly crashes even more" and then the same person might look at osX and think "this is pretty cool looking and I have heard a lot about this and its nothing like the windows gui, it must also crash a lot less"

maybe if there was a newbie installer that gave the user a 5 minute or so period in several different gui's in which they were assigned a few simple tasks to complete (open a word proccessor, find some settings, go to a web pate, etc.) then they would have something to base their choice on in a friendly manner

Re:windows 98

[Anonymous Coward]

"this looks a lot like windows" -- true.
"probobly [sic] crashes even more" -- true.

You have successfully summarized Linux on the desktop.... congratulations, detective.

but...

[emmons]

Aye, but he's not the man who founded OSNews, nor is he the man who's currently in charge. In fact, he didn't even write the article- that person is Eugenia Loli-Queru of BeNews fame.

So no, nothing fishy here.

Re:but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the person who founded OSNews, in 1997 (LONG before he joined Red hat) IS David. :D

The story is that the site was going really bad and was left out for years, they were serving less than 700 hits/day, and then Eugenia came aboard last year and took care of the site and redesigned it and re-branded it, and now they serve about 55,000 pages per day or something...

Re:but...

[Anonymous Coward]

BTW, OSNews *still* belongs to David. He is the one who takes care of the ads, while Eugenia takes care of the content.

Re:but...

[emmons]

Ok, but my point still stands.. the poster is trying to make a conspiracy theory out of nothing. Eugenia isn't covertly trying to boost RedHat's stock price or anything through this article. The only mention of RedHat is "Comparing this distro to Lycoris Build50 beta or the latest Red Hat Null beta, well, it does not look as sexy or good-looking". I don't see any terrible bias in that, do you?

You can configure it.

[Mustang Matt]

I used to have my system setup so I could hit control,shift,+ or - and go up or down between my programmed modes.

Great fun.

Re:You can configure it.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not the same, for the love of pete. (What most people talk about, that is.. I don't know what the Xandros thing does)

What people refer to is not only changing the visible resolution, but having the desktop itself change sizes to follow the resolution.

ie, if I zoom in from 1600x1200 to 640x480, the desktop should be 640x480, too.

Re:You can configure it.

[nice]

In my experience, most distros have X set up like this by default if you select more than one video mode when configuring it. I've been using it for years and am quite satisfied... but then, I don't know if one can change refresh rates with a similar technique and it's not very verbose if that's your thing.

Re:You can configure it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I had something similar that my distro set up while installing/configuring X.

I'm glad these controls aren't esoteric and undocumented.

Re:You can configure it.

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, I actually much preferred changing the resolutions without having the desktop res change too.

Re:Get some PRIORITIES!

[TheWanderingHermit]

You're right. All these terrible things make any interest in computers or anything else in normal life worthless.

Why don't we all just go sit in a corner and cry -- would that make you happy?

Life goes on. It always has. It always will. While this may seem unimportant to you, in the overall picture of humanity, we too close to the situation to know what effect (if any) the WTC attack or Xandros Linux will have on the future. The world can stop everything and do nothing but respond to tragedy, or we can keep going with life and keep building a world that eventually has a chance of healing these wounds.

In the meantime, I worked with many social workers and psychologists when I taught emotionally disturbed teens. Would you like me to recommend someone you could start seeing regularly?

Re:Rip on it all you want, but . . . Lycoris?

[mauryisland]

If you want to get them away from Win98, there's another good Linux option: Lycoris I've installed it for a few users who've only known one version of Windows or another, and they're doing very nicely with it. The CEO of the company, Joseph Cheek, impressed me early on with his web page dedicated to Linux that was *very* technically astute. Lycoris, however, is based on Caldera instead of Debian, so that could be a problem for some /. folks.

Yet another GPL violation

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like Corel when "Corel Linux OS" was in beta distribution, Xandros has decided not to distribute the source code. The most ironic part of this, is that the Xandros web site is structured to force you to recognize and agree that several packages are covered by the GPL before you even download the ISO image! It would be nice if they knew how to read (and follow) what they are forcing others to agree too.

Re:Yet another GPL violation

[Anonymous Coward]

Xandros has NOT distribute anything via money to anyone YET. So, there is no GPL violation YET.
On a previous OSNews article, Michael Bego, Xandros CEO, said that they will open source EVERYTHING, except some of the very specific in house apps they have built for their OS.

Re:Yet another GPL violation

[goingware]

Xandros has NOT distribute anything via money to anyone YET. So, there is no GPL violation YET.

I can't comment on Xandros in particular because I haven't checked it out, but it is not necessary to charge money for distributing something to have a GPL violation.

Even giving away something for free is a GPL violation if you don't provide source.

However, my understanding is that you don't have to give away the source up-front, you only have to provide a written offer to provide the source for some number of years. You're allowed to charge a nominal amount of money for the distribution media.

But note that even if there is some delay you have to distribute the exact source for everything you distribute in binary form, even "beta tests".

Sometimes Unix apps are ported to windows by using the Cygwin DLL, and then given away for free, even with all the source code. But the Cygwin people are always very careful to ensure that people who do this provide the source code to the same version of the Cygwin DLL they link with; they have to give the source away themselves, it is not sufficient to provide a hyperlink to Cygwin's website.

Re:Yet another GPL violation

[Anonymous Coward]

Xandros has NOT distributed anything via money to anyone YET. So, there is no GPL violation YET.

How do you manage to be so informative and "YET" so wrong? Feel free to quote the section of the GPL which gives an exception to providing the source code. You won't because there is not one.

What is it with these reviews of commercial stuff?

[dbarclay10]

Seriously. I've been seeing this more and more. NewsForge and linux.com, in particular, are pretty bad for this.

You see a review, and it says something like: "the big players in the Linux "purely-desktop market" are Lycoris, Lindows, ELX and the much awaited Xandros".

Good god! Mandrake, anybody? What they really mean is "the big players who may actually give us money to review their products are Lycoris, Lindows, ELX, and Xandros".

Absolutely pitiful. I see gobs and gobs of sites reviewing commerical *nix software these days, COMPLETELY IGNORING the more stable, mature, full-featured, robust, and easier-to-use open source/free software alternatives.

OSNews hasn't been as bad for this, in my experience, but I'm going to be watching very closely from now on.

For people who hate windows

[geek]

Ya'll seem to like it's look and feel a whole lot. Are we to assume no one has an original idea in the OSS community? Every desktop is a knock-off of another. How many times will OSS reinvent the wheel?

People are supposed to take this stuff seriously? Come on

Re:For people who hate windows

[Drakonite]

Just like how the windows and macOS were based on the NeXt look way back when? In case you aren't aware of your history, most big computer GUI innovations were stolen from a companies that are no longer around, or have left the GUI business... (Mouse and the GUI concept from Zerox, current GUI designs almost always based on NeXt...) I agree with you completly though. We need new ideas.

Re:For people who hate windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Idiot. First things first, it's Xerox. Second, in case you aren't aware of your history, NeXT didn't even have a product until 1989, five years after the Macintosh was introduced, and four years after Windows 1.0.

Re:For people who hate windows

[spitzak]

Maybe when you stop complaining when every single little attempt to innovate in Linux (like doing point-to-type) is met with "that's user unfriendly because it does not match Windows!".

Re:For people who hate windows

[minus9]

That has to be the most unoriginal comment in this entire thread.

Re:For people who hate windows

[Drakonite]

Oooohh... so sorry for my spelling mistake at 3 am. And maybe I should make a timeline to help clear things up for you? Xerox makes gui ---> Apple copies idea from Xerox ---> Microsoft copies idea from Apple ---> NeXT creates a better way of doing a gui interface ---> Apple, Microsoft, and others, copy NeXT's designs into their products. I hope in some small way I have help to de-ignorant-ify the ACs who so quickly troll ./

2 Requests for the Xandros Team

[mbourgon]

1) Work on those taskbar icons. Y'all can do better.
2) PLEASE let there be an easy "Internet Sharing" wizard.

Re:2 Requests for the Xandros Team

[mcrbids]

ipchains -i input -s 192.168.0.1/24 -d 0/0 -y -j MASQ

There. Done. "connection sharing" wizard.

We're getting there

[The Bungi]

I think just a few more tries and we'll have the Windows look and feel down pat! Go Xandros!

I mean, if you're going to copy a GUI at this point, might as well copy OS X, fer sakes.

My thoughts on Xandros

[asteinberg]

Of course, my only knowledge of this distro is entirely based on what the article says, but I'd like to mention a few comments/questions that came to mind when reading the article...

it successfully installed Xandros on my 3 GB partition on my hdc10 after a 20 minutes installation process via my 4x/32x DVD drive

If that 20 minute figure is true, I must say that's pretty incredible. Does anyone else find it a bit suspicious? I would've thought that installing all the packages alone would take at least a half hour, not to mention going through all the configuration questions. Can someone verify that it really is that fast?

KDE 2.2.2

I realize the article goes on to say that they are considering a jump to KDE 3.x before the final release, but I think it's odd that a beta distribution would still be using KDE 2.2.2. It seems that they could save themselves a lot of time by making the switch to 3.x as soon as possible, instead of putting that off until closer to the release. Clearly, 3.x is the way to go - it may have a few bugs at the moment, but considering that the distro is still beta, that the bugs will likely be fixed before it is released, and that I have heard almost entirely praise for 3.x (even to the extent that people claim it is faster!), this decision seems like it should be a no-brainer.

The OS by default booted on 1024x768 resolution, but via the Xandros Control Center I could easily change it to 1280x1024x16bpp@85Hz.

Wow - this is a really sweet feature. Something that X has needed for a while now (yes, I realize you can change resolutions with ctrl+alt+num_plus, but this is definitely not intuitive, and does not work as some might like - with virtual screen sizes and whatnot).

Xandros have made some changes to the konqueror's source code.

It seems like their changes should be welcomed by ex-Windows users, and I'd say they look pretty nice. On a side-note, does anyone else feel that Konq's Midnight Commander mode could use some improvement? The original MC clone that I used was on a Windows machine - Windows Commander, and I must say I have yet to find a Linux-based program that I like as much. Of course, maybe that's just because I haven't looked very hard.

Also, the "About KDE" is not there anymore on the KDE applications, but there is an "About Xandros" in place.

Uh oh, this could be trouble. Remember what happened when Red Hat did this recently...

Xandros Update can use both DEB and RPMs packages, and it can connect to both the debian mirrors and automatically download binaries, or connect to the Xandros Networks ftp site for OS updates (even kernel updates).

That is cool, but how well does it work? This seems like it is destined to lead to even worse dependency-hell than most of us have come to expect from Red Hat distros. Why not just go with exclusively DEB packages, given that they tend to work so much better? (hmm, I could get in trouble with that statement...insert joke about debian's datedness here)

there is a CD-burning app includ[ed]

I wonder which app they included for this? I haven't been able to find any easy-to-use CD-burning apps for Linux with features that can compete with Nero for Windows. Specifically, I have yet to find anything that can copy audio-cd's on the fly, which seems like it is one of the main uses for CD burners (for backup purposes, of course!).

Anyway, I hope this distro turns out good, I can't wait til someone comes out with a distro that's simple yet solid enough for me to feel confident recommending it to all my friends/family. While there are many distros that come close, I still would hesitate before recommending any of them to a computer-novice friend.

Re:My thoughts on Xandros

[Drache Kubisuro]

i'm wondering if they've fixed core generic IDE-SCSI issues... or whatever causes this: excruciatingly slooow system response when 1) ripping audio, and 2) burning. if i'm on dialup, i can kill tcp/ip etc goodbye for that duration...

Re:My thoughts on Xandros

[BJH]

Activate DMA on your drive. If it's /dev/hdb, then:

# hdparm -d 1 /dev/hdb

should do it.

Max 20 users?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't download the Open Circulation version of Corel LINUX OS Second Edition because the max limit is 20. Can one of you 20 slashdotters, who are logged in now, log out so I can log in? Thanks in advance.

Re:Get some PRIORITIES!

[jasonditz]

thousands of innocent civilians will die.

How is that unprecedented? That happens almost every week somewhere or another.

Now a Linux distro meant primarily for the Desktop that doesn't suck, that would be unprecedented!

More importantly though, what do thousands of dead bodies give a "good god damn" about?

Re:What is it with these reviews of commercial stu

[Anonymous Coward]

OSNews is **NOT** an Open source news site like Newsforge is.

Their editors have said that many times!
They report on all development, OS and other geek news. No matter if they are closed source or not. Very frequently they put news about .NET and Windows as well, as frequent they do for Linux. They say that on their contact page.

SuSE is as good as Mandrake, even better

[Anonymous Coward]

I have both SuSE and Mandrake on my computers.
I think SuSE is better than Mandrake. SuSE has more apps, better configuration tools. The only disadvasntage of SuSE is that it is not possible to download iso images. No problem, though. SuSE Professional disks without printed books cost only $50 ($80 with printed books). They also have a standard edition which is cheaper ($25 without books, $40 with books)

Re:SuSE is as good as Mandrake, even better

[Anonymous Coward]

The price unfourtunatly is a pretty big impediment in my opinion. It's hard to get already nervous people to make the leap when the only price is the time it will take them to install. But when they have to pay to install something they're not even sure if they'll want on their computers, I think most people will just choose another distro. And once they've gotten used to the one they downloaded for free, why bother relearning things with another. Which is really a shame, as I too think SuSE on the whole provides a slightly better experience than mandrake.

And yes, before anyone brings it up, I'm aware of the ftp install option. But downloading an iso is an option for someone on a dialup, installing from ftp is another story.

Re:SuSE is as good as Mandrake, even better

[Anonymous Coward]

Well for the curious, there are refunds.

All things considered SuSE is a fair deal. For $80 US SuSE gives you seven cds of software, genuinely readable documentation--and their support in my experience has been courteous and sincere, if overtaxed. Without the support and the manuals, your only out $50. For somebody on a tight budget, that seems like a lot just to try something out. And if you know Linux you know you can just download isos from so all kinds of distros. But seven discs!! Nobody on dialup has that kind of patience. If you spend any money on software at all, SuSE will give you a pretty good bang for your buck. It's a good distro to get started on.

This is just gnome

[Anonymous Coward]

with the foot turned into the word "launch"

Re:This is just gnome

[Anonymous Coward]

and I though corel linux was originally based on KDE

PRIORITY desktop distribution from Xandros

[htb]

You really should install Xandros' PRIORITY desktop distribution.

The following features are installed by default:

WTC images as the default wallpaper to constantly remind us of our need for prioritization and perspective.

Sally Struthers Dock-app counter that ticks off the number of starving people in third-world countries.

Integrated calendar and scheduler, including timed reminders for planned WTO protests.

globally-aware MUD client (GAMUD). Create one of seventeen politically-aligned characters for debate and discussion at the UN round table!
___

Seriously, just because I have an interest in this industry doesn't mean that I'm "squandering my finite, precious time on this earth playing video games." And I should think that the souls of those victims have a good deal more to do than to watch me eat breakfast- they're too busy laughing at your incredibly large sense of self worth, for instance.

Re:PRIORITY desktop distribution from Xandros

[EugeneK]

+1 funny
"get some priorities" is SUCH an old troll..didn't think anyone could make a good reply to it; but that was good.

Re:Rip on it all you want, but . . . Lycoris?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have installed and used many different Linux distros through the years and I must say that Lycoris is the worst I have ever seen. Nothing in KDE worked right! That is (or was, maybe it is better now) the most broken piece of crap I have ever seen that dared to call itself Linux. KDE errors were everywhere...click on an app and guess what? The app is not there but the menu entry is. Yes I did a standard install before any one asks. Horrible, horrible distro please go away now.

The little penguin...

['57]

I just wanna know if Xandros will have the cute little plastic Tux included in the box like Corel did!

Re:The little penguin...

[Anonymous Coward]

uh oh.

you didn't know that penguin was made of hesbestos?

you're rectum may swell, shrivel, crack, bleed, and implode within the next couple days.

wish i warned you earlier.

sorry :(

Re:Rip on it all you want, but . . . Lycoris?

[lemkebeth]

How about getting a Mac for them?

Unless of course you are dead set on getting them a GNU/Linux machine in which case I pity you as although GNU/Linux is a nice server OS it isn't the best in the usability department for a desktop OS, yet.

Considering what they do, I would just get them a Flat Panel iMac.

Re:What is it with these reviews of commercial stu

[leviramsey]

Good god! Mandrake, anybody? What they really mean is "the big players who may actually give us money to review their products are Lycoris, Lindows, ELX, and Xandros".

Mandrake, Red Hat, and (to a lesser extent) SuSE all provide some emphasis as a server. I'm pretty sure that Xandros et al don't ship with any server software.

I think this shows us exactly why redhat

[Anonymous Coward]

is suddenly putting focus in the desktop. Xandros is (except for a few cosmetic uglinesses) an almost successful clone of the windows UI. It is some *serious* competition for Redhat (and Microsoft) in the desktop market. It's not going to appeal to the Unix power users or eye candy lovers, and certainly won't be most people first choice on the server, but Xandros is going to be a heavy hitter on the "we want to get out from under Redmond's thumb" corporate desktop IT buyers lineup.

Why is the Windows interface so heavily copied?

[httpamphibio.us]

I think the Windows interface is highly functional, but I don't understand why nearly ever new linux GUI I see looks almost exactly like Windows. Why not do something different?

Re:Why is the Windows interface so heavily copied?

['57]

Probably so that average Joe User - who may not even know that there is such a thing as Linux - won't have such a *difficult* time trying to navigate the GUI.
So the Windows look-alike effort, I would assume, is GUI training wheels ?

Re:Why is the Windows interface so heavily copied?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it is easier to copy somebody else work than to inovate on your own. Everybody seems to be copying windows as much as they can, I wish someone would try to comeup with something new. Whether you like it or not, Apple came up with a semi new interface for OSX. All linux companies can do is rip off the windows explorer.

Re:Why is the Windows interface so heavily copied?

[spitzak]

We have tried and all you guys do is complain that "it doesn't match Windows and therefore is not user friendly".

I would dearly love to see point-to-type be the default on a "novice" system. I would also REALLY like to see them stop raising the windows when you click on their contents.

This would be a HUGE breakthrough, I think similar to the invention of insertion mode-always back in about 1980 or the treatment of Newline as an insertable character, both of which made huge differences to the ability to use text editors, and both (I know because I was forced to write 4 freaking pages in a manual about how "insert mode" worked in 1984) were considered considerably user-unfriendly and geeky.

I do think there has to be some differences from Windows. User interface design has pretty much been frozen now for 7 years (since windows 95). Innovation does not necessarily mean "3d desktop" or "mind reading interface", it means remembering the forgotten ideas of ten or fifteen years ago, realizing what was good, and trying to introduce it to a public that has been brainwashed by never seeing anything other than a Mac or Windows.

Re:Why is the Windows interface so heavily copied?

[IamTheRealMike]

There is a very simple reason why many Linux boxes superficially resemble Windows, and that's because GUI research is practically dead. The purpose of an UI by the way is to make you work faster, not to look sci fi. As it happens the Windows style task switcher with app button UI is pretty efficient, and it's also what everybody is used to.

You can make your Linux box resemble nothing else. Just install an "alternative" WM like E, FluxBox and so on. Often, people who take the time to learn them find they work faster, but most people don't want to break the habit of years to gain a modest increase in user efficiency. So we have interfaces that resemble Windows.

As for Apple, I've seen many posts saying "It looks just like Windows, Apple is so innovative", or some such bull. The MacOS user interface is now a blend of the old MacOS UI (designed 10+ years ago) and NeXT (ditto). It's absolutely not new, or innovative, unless you class high colour themes innovative. It's also useless for ex Windows users, it requires a huge amount of effort to get used to its quirks. If you've just spent $1000+ on a new Mac then of course you will invest the effort required to adapt, it's either that or admit that you've thrown out a lot of money due to lazyness. Having used Macs but never bought them, I can testify to just how irritating it is to learn new habits for no real gain in productivity. So please quit it with the Mac trolls, OS X is largely irrelevant for the "common user", as computers are at saturation so the type of person this distro is aimed at anyway needs to be broken in gently.

Contributions from slashdot?!

[krokodil]

http://www.xandros.com/linux.html :

As a software company in the Linux space, Xandros benefits from and recognizes the phenomenal contributions of the following groups (to name a few): The Linux Kernel Archive, The GNU Project ... Slashdot .

I wonder what Slashdot contribution is: first posts of idea bewoulf clustering?

Why Win9x style?

[gotr00t]

One of the very minor reasons why I switched to Linux some time back was because I didn't like the look of M$ Windows. It was ugly, blocky, and generally gave me hardly any options to customise the widget and window decoration, which is what I like about KDE. It allows me to do that, plus a lot more stuff which Windows dosen't even hint at. Purely at a desktop OS stance, I feel that they made a bad choice going for the Win9x look, as it looks repulsive and just gives a bad feel to the distro, as it appears to be a cheap ripoff. Many people have labeled KDE a Windows Desktop clone, which I do not believe, as it is FAR superior to the Windows desktop. It supports applets in the panel, and the panel looks much better when it's in normal mode, and not small mode (like in the screenshots). This distro only heightens their claim. A good solution is not to try and clone the Windows desktop, but rather to make something better than it.

Re:Rip on it all you want, but . . . Lycoris?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm with you - I put Lycoris on my mum's PC a few months ago, and she's had no great difficulty with it. She's definitely a computer novice who only ever used Word + Outlook; she took the shift to Lycoris + OpenOffice + Evolution completely in her stride, and Yahoo Messenger was the "killer app" for her (hope she doesn't find out that the Windows version of YM is that much more powerful, *and* she could use a Web cam with it...).

Highly recommend Lycoris, although I'll take a peek at Xandros and RH 8 as well in case they're even better.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

SuSE has this.

[Anonymous Coward]

I ran an FTP install of SuSE for about 2 days once. It has such a resolution / refresh rate setting tool.

SuSE... it was such a nice desktop, but it locked my machine every time I left X... so back to Debian I go.

Grammer?

[zoid.com]

"Starting by describing the installation, well, it was the best I ever saw on a Linux distro (the installer and other parts of the OS are based on Corel's Linux - Xandros bought the rights last year). "

Best I have ever seen?
Best I ever saw?

which sounds better?

Re:Grammer?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's GRAMMAR! ...wanker

Re:Grammer?

[Hanul]

She's from Greece. Forgive her some minor mistakes. English is not her native tongue.

Re:Grammer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just in case you missed it...

the subject of your post was MISSPELLED.

Ass.

LSB?

[phatvibez]

I would like to bring up a VERY good point that
someone else made in a comment at osnews...

"they aren't following the LSB's recomendations for file system organization fully, the /disks folder shows that."

this definetly has to be the worst decision they could make...

while most other distro's are trying to become standardized and avoid fragmentation xandros seems to be running in the opposite direction.

Re:LSB?

[spitzak]

I don't mind that but I don't like the fact that their file browser shows a fake hierarchy just like Windows. I consider this very confusing because the same directory can appear twice (ie MyDesktop on Windows). Also it does not match the arrangement that is revealed by file open/save dialog boxes.

These designers have to make a rule that the browser shows exactly the real hierarchy so there is never any confusion.

Of course the default hierarchy is confusing. There are a two ways to fix it:

First, make the program open already navigated to somewhere other than root, such as to your desktop or to the "My documents" type of folder.

Second, ignore the LSB and make it make sense to the user. In their example "/disks" makes sense, but why aren't the MSDOS disks in there? They should be, though they can name them C: if they want (this is a perfectly legal Unix filename).

Re:LSB?

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one that thinks of lesbians when reading the acronym LSB?

Hmm... maybe its all that damn porn clouding the mind.

Thoughts on a more modern GUI

[mkldev]

I'm probably going to get modded down for this, but.... :-)

It occurs to me that what the Linux community needs is not another hacked-up KDE knock-off, but a real ground-up GUI. By GUI, I don't mean an X11 WM, I mean a complete GUI. Some lessons can be learned from Mac OS X's graphics system.

Point 1: Dump X11 entirely. It's a lot easier to write libraries to display X11 apps in a different environment than it is to make X11 into a modern graphics environment. Its development began 18 years ago (released 14 years ago), and frankly, its age shows, both in performance and in functionality.

Point 2: OpenGL compositing a la Quartz Extreme. Windows become patterns mapped onto a plane. 3D graphics are tightly integrated into the same screen model.

Point 3: With the exception of bitmaps (which you map as a pattern), draw all the 2d windows using 3d primitives, say as a variant of splines that have thickness, located just in front of a 2d plane.

I'm not sure how hard this would be, but the basic thinking behind this idea is to take a traditional PDF or PostScript-style bezier curve model and map it into 3d primitives so that it can be rendered in hardware.

I suspect that such a design may go farther than is practical given current graphics hardware speeds, but if someone were to write such software, eventually the hardware would catch up and such a thing would then become practical, assuming it isn't already.

Point 4: Do not use a client-server model. It made sense in 1984. It doesn't make sense in 2002. Most people don't have graphical terminals connected to big centralized servers these days. A client-server model can easily be grafted onto a local model if it is designed correctly. By contrast, local communication via a client-server model tends to cause a speed penalty.

Before you ask, no, I don't have the time to design such a system, and it would be a conflict of interest if I did. That having been said, I certainly think it would be cool if someone pulled it off.... :-)

Re:Thoughts on a more modern GUI

[Ramadog]

A person coming from windows might not see any piont in the client/server model. I like the looks on people faces when I try explaining that the underlying windowing system and the desktop are 2 separte entities and don't even have to be on the same machine. They can not understand it.

I know people that use both linux and solaris everyday. They find this very usefull. These people do see a point in this model. To those that use and like it it makes sense now in 2002 not just as in 1984 as you said.

Re:Thoughts on a more modern GUI

[rhysweatherley]

Those who don't understand X are doomed to re-invent it ... poorly.

Point 1: Dump X11 entirely. It's a lot easier to write libraries to display X11 apps in a different environment than it is to make X11 into a modern graphics environment. Its development began 18 years ago (released 14 years ago), and frankly, its age shows, both in performance and in functionality.

X11 has great performance. Unfortunately, few toolkits use it well. It works best when you think of it as a stream: you send asynchronous requests to the display server and it handles them, responding with asynchronous events. As soon as you make a request to the display server that requires a synchronous response, performance is gone.

Point 2: OpenGL compositing a la Quartz Extreme. Windows become patterns mapped onto a plane. 3D graphics are tightly integrated into the same screen model.

Point 3: With the exception of bitmaps (which you map as a pattern), draw all the 2d windows using 3d primitives, say as a variant of splines that have thickness, located just in front of a 2d plane.

Berlin was doing this. Ain't exactly taking over the world at the moment. 99% of all apps don't require anything more fancy than 2D drawing primitives and a few icon pixmaps. For every canvas-based, client-side, anti-aliased app I've seen, I've seen 10 boring apps written by people who understand X11 that perform 10 times better.

Point 4: Do not use a client-server model. It made sense in 1984. It doesn't make sense in 2002. Most people don't have graphical terminals connected to big centralized servers these days. A client-server model can easily be grafted onto a local model if it is designed correctly. By contrast, local communication via a client-server model tends to cause a speed penalty.

Client/server is fundamental to the design of both Unix and X11. Try this: administer your parent's Windows or Mac machine from your home 100 miles away, as though you were sitting right there. Can't do it? Now try this: install Linux. Ssh in and type linuxconf. There's a reason why this works in Unix systems: clear separation of client from server.

The speed penalty only happens because people don't use X11 asynchronously, or they try to use it in raw bitmap mode instead of learning what all those pesky XDrawLine, XDrawString, etc functions do.

Re:Thoughts on a more modern GUI

[Anonymous Coward]

Point 2 and 3 are ok, but I don't fully agree with point 1.

Yes X11 is slower than perhaps a native application, but do you know how much slower it is? Have you actually benchmarked it? Just because something was written between 14 and 18 years ago does not mean it is outdated or invalid. Should be ditch C because its a product of the early 70s? Maybe we should phase out Java because it's development started in the early 90s -- almost 10 years ago. We have C# now which can embed the byte-code and native executables in one format and the C# language is actually a standard unlike Java. How about Linux. Its based on an older idea of a monolithic kernel. Do we even need to teach much of calculus anymore with Computer Algebra Systems and computers so readily available?

Again, I'd like you to state the untollerable slowness and hindered functionality that makes X11 so obsolete.

Re:Thoughts on a more modern GUI

[mkldev]

I should probably start by clarifying something. There must, to some extent, always a client-server model for anything remotely resembling a window system, insofar as you have a window server program providing access to the display, without which you'd only be able to run a single app. However, with shared memory regions, the use of message passing in the traditional sense can be limited to events (mouse click notification, foregrounding of windows, etc.) rather than moving all the graphics data through sockets.

I guess my point was that a complete client-server model has a lot of problems, the largest of which is speed. I can think of two good reasons for such a model:

The first is if you have data on the server that you're trying to work with, and if the data is substantially larger than the traffic generated by passing around all that X11 traffic. Yes, it happens, particularly in scientific fields, but no, it isn't typical use.

The second is if you have an application that is closed-source and only runs on your Solaris box (for example), but you want to use it on your local machine.

In both cases, with the exception of the memory usage, this can be done equally well by running the application on the server machine, then provide a tap at a higher level in the API for inserting a VNC-like protocol to send the graphics data to the display machine.

The advantages to such a model are numerous. First, you get the remote accessability when it is needed without penalizing local use (much). Second, because it occurs at a window server level, you get some nice optimizations for free because of the design decisions implicit in my earlier description.

For example, since you would have the window's complete description in the display machine's memory, an application wouldn't need to redraw parts of a window when it gets brought to the foreground. It could just send a refresh message up through the API, which would be sent across to the other machine, which would dutifully refresh the window.

Of course, there are cases where you'd want to do a full refresh, but these are less common than needing to simply change a window's visibility. As a result, your data traffic, even for client-server-style communications, should drop.

Re:Thoughts on a more modern GUI

[spitzak]

I agree with most of your points except about client-server. Client-server is actually one of the fastest ways to get things done because it is naturally multi-threaded. Check up on what the most advanced graphics cards have on them before you say that client-server is obsolete (hint a "graphics processer" which is (in X terms) a SERVER!!!)

Basically a correctly designed client/server requires many ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE fewer context switches to get data on the screen. Not a measly 2 or 3 like people claim kernel servers give you, I'm talking about a reduction of 10000 times in system overhead. The reason is that it is trivial to batch requests together.

The known problem with client-server is latency. This has to be addressed anyway if you want any kind of remote interaction, even if it is supposed to be an add-on like VNC. Also everybody doing network programming is well aware of latency, and latency between the program and the screen ain't so bad if there is also latency between

The other problem with X is incredibly bad design such that many of the calls require a round-trip synchronization with the server. If you want to draw in arbitrary color c you must send c to the server, wait for it to respond with a "color cell" n and send n as the current color, and then you are ready to draw a thousand line segments in that color. But if you want to draw 1000 line segments in different colors, suddenly you have 2000 times more system overhead than before! Of course you could cache the colors, but that just shows the bad design of X so that you have to write complex stuff on the local end to talk to it. Any sensible design would take the original color c directly to set the color. (of course my description is simplified, but X is loaded with this crap).

PostScript was originally designed to be a 3-D system with perspective projection (I'm not sure if they intended to do depth buffer, probably not). 3D projections should not be much overhead if you have a bit that detects it so you use the 2D pipeline when possible. Some hardware will do a 4x4 perspective matrix multiply as fast as a 2x3 PostScript matrix, so it may not matter.

Variable-width splines are best handled at the near end. A more efficient communication would be to send the outline of the resulting fill area.

Pixmaps (what I think you meant by "bitmap") should be 3D as well, drawing them should be transformed through the 3D projection so that each pixel is a 1x1 square in the input coordianate space with z=0. All 3D graphics hardware can do this easily, it's what texture mapping is.

"Windows" could be off-screen images that you draw, using the normal graphics, and these are then mapped through 3D transformations and comped on the screen, giving you not only overlapping with transparency but the ability to distort windows arbitrarily without messing up programs that assumme they can read the bits back.

Re:Thoughts on a more modern GUI

[BlameFate]

Yes, but I can ssh into my Mac at home from my mac in work.

Re:Thoughts on a more modern GUI

[Anonymous Coward]

part of X perceived slowness/latency is due to a bug in xfee which cause motion events to be delivered with great latency when the pointer is outside the grab window.

i've tested a modified kwin with a workaround and at least the opaque drag performance was way better.

Re:Thoughts on a more modern GUI

[renoX]

> X11 has great performance. Unfortunately, few toolkits use it well. It works best when you think of it as a stream: you send asynchronous requests to the display server and it handles them, responding with asynchronous events.

Asynchronous request are good for performance, but bad for responsiveness.
A Berlin-like scheme where the server can show the pop-up etc should have better responsiveness.

> 99% of all apps don't require anything more fancy than 2D drawing primitives and a few icon pixmaps.

What's your point ?
The idea is to be able to have real transparency, independency of resolution GUI not especially fancy effects.

As for Berlin not taking over the world: why are you using Linux?
It is not currently taking over the world!

> client/server is fundamental to the design of both Unix and X11. Try this: administer your parent's Windows or Mac machine from your home 100 miles away, as though you were sitting right there. Can't do it?

AFAIK remote GUI can be done in Windows with VNC, so it shows that you can have fast,responsive local GUI and remote GUI at the same time.
Just don't use X11.

Re:Thoughts on a more modern GUI

[cgenman]

Your heart is in the right place, but there is something fundamental that you are missing. A GUI can only be as clean and understandable as the information it is trying to convey. Putting a pretty GUI on linux just serves to point out how totally non-intuitive most of Linux is for the home user.

I think it is time for a radical fork. Desktop Linux.

Desktop Linux would put everything you would normally find on the first level of your hard drive into a "system" folder in a "linux" folder. That linux folder would also hold the configuration and kernel utilities that are normally hidden from anything but a command prompt call. It would assume root status for specific actions of the local user if prompted by dialog box, and would auto-mount any drive it was given. There would be no remote administration utilities. A more crash-resistant low level format for the hard drive would have to be chosen, as would many, many little utilities. Nothing would require the command line. And of course, (the impossible) binary compatibility with existing Linux apps would have to be preserved.

No, I don't think it is possible either, and I rather think the better idea is to help invest in OpenBE or another desktop-oriented Open Source project.

Linux, not surprisingly, still isn't a desktop-oriented OS project.

Re:Thoughts on a more modern GUI

[sjmurdoch]

X11 has great performance. Unfortunately, few toolkits use it well.

Could you please tell us which toolkits use X11 well - this would be very useful for future reference.

I've seen 10 boring apps written by people who understand X11 that perform 10 times better.

Again any examples - preferably open source - I would like to try them out and see how they work?

Re:Thoughts on a more modern GUI

[infiniti99]

The problems with X that people have are really not the fault of X11, but instead XFree86.

Want to know the number 1 reason a Linux box freezes? XFree86 !

Ever seen X-win32, or other X servers for Windows? That's what I want on Linux. What this gives us is an abstraction of display layer and X server, which means that X would probably never have the power to bring the system down.

Instead, the graphics / display layer would be handled by DirectFB (http://www.directfb.org/). I can go on about the many reasons why this is a better model:

1) With the Linux Framebuffer (and DirectFB), we use the kernel for our graphics driver, which is something we should have been doing all along. Ever tried to combine XFree86 and svgalib? or the framebuffer? It's shaky ground, and most often results in a loud *BOOM*. With the kernel managing all of your video and actually knowing what the hell is going on means much better video stability.

2) On a similar note, DirectFB also uses whatever mouse you have setup in your kernel. No config files, it just works.

3) The Linux Framebuffer does not require root access to use. Rather, you just chmod your /dev/fb device. Easy! Why are we running around with XFree86 as setuid root?

4) Applications can access the local video directly for fast graphics access, and if they want they could use X also. This is the opposite of the current design, which is that you are always remote and you have to "ask" for local priveledge. Does anyone else find it totally backasswards that Quake requires X11 to run?

In short, don't dump X. But I say reorganize this whole display layer mess. We really can have our cake and eat it too. Just look at X-win32... and MacOS X....

DirectFB is really looking cool. I'm actually using it right now for my X display (and I'm only running X apps, so I'm not really gaining any accel at the moment). All in all, the DirectFB desktop is still not yet ready for prime time, but I'll be waiting :)

Re:Thoughts on a more modern GUI

[Anonymous Coward]

As for Berlin not taking over the world: why are you using Linux?
It is not currently taking over the world!

Maybe not your world, mate, but I use nothing else.

AFAIK remote GUI can be done in Windows with VNC, so it shows that you can have fast,responsive local GUI and remote GUI at the same time.

VNC? Fast? Responsive? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAhahaha... ha...
Obviously you've never used it over a 33.6Kbps modem. I've used X over one, and as long as you're not doing something stupid like running Mozilla under Enlightenment, it actually works reasonably well.

Re:Thoughts on a more modern GUI

[Wiwi Jumbo]

Client/server is fundamental to the design of both Unix and X11. Try this: administer your parent's Windows or Mac machine from your home 100 miles away, as though you were sitting right there. Can't do it? Now try this: install Linux. Ssh in and type linuxconf. There's a reason why this works in Unix systems: clear separation of client from server.

Actually, Remote Assistance works wonderfully on WinXP.

Re:Thoughts on a more modern GUI

[Wiwi Jumbo]

X11 has great performance. Unfortunately, few toolkits use it well. It works best when you think of it as a stream: you send asynchronous requests to the display server and it handles them, responding with asynchronous events. As soon as you make a request to the display server that requires a synchronous response, performance is gone.

I'm sorry, perhaps I don't quite understand this, but are you saying that if I click on a icon to select it (say highlighting it blue or something), that's something that X11 isn't good at?

Re:Thoughts on a more modern GUI

[mbourgon]

Please don't mod on this - yeah it's offtopic, but the best forum to ask is /.

What are the downsides to DirectFB? I'm looking at the site now, and some of the FAQs and the like are down. I believe that DirectFB is part of ByzantineOS, in which case one downside is that DFB requires a Vesa 2.0 card, which apparently my Dimension l500c doesn't have(?!). Granted, it's a 3-year-old machine (and I now date myself), but what's considered modern enough?

What other advantages to DFB are there?

Many thanks. So much for my +1 on that other thread...

Re:Thoughts on a more modern GUI

[tuffy]

As for Berlin not taking over the world: why are you using Linux? It is not currently taking over the world!

Berlin doesn't have any significant apps yet, AFAIK, which really puts a damper on adoption. Linux and XFree86 actually had plenty of programs available for them when they were built - which is why we're still using X11 now.

AFAIK remote GUI can be done in Windows with VNC, so it shows that you can have fast,responsive local GUI and remote GUI at the same time. Just don't use X11.

VNC isn't particularly fast, and it can't compensate for the "1 user per computer" paradigm that many OSes are built with. For example, using X11 clients, several people can all use GUI applications from a single remote computer; VNC would realistically only allow one person to use the desktop at a time because it's basically a KVM-over-ethernet.

In any case, a replacement for X11 is likely to have its client-server capabilities anyway. But without apps, nobody's going to bother to switch no matter how much better such a replacement might be.

Re:Thoughts on a more modern GUI

[Anonymous Coward]

"Windows" could be off-screen images that you draw, using the normal graphics, and these are then mapped through 3D transformations and comped on the screen, giving you not only overlapping with transparency but the ability to distort windows arbitrarily without messing up programs that assumme they can read the bits back.

Mac OSX (Jaguar) does this now...

On OSX each window is an offscreen buffer in system RAM (and if there is room it's cached in video RAM). 2D drawing into a window is done in software only (there is no hardware 2D yet, possibly because graphics cards aren't up to Apple's standards for precisely antialiased 2D graphics). A "window server" process composites the desktop together, using the graphics card's hardware texture mapping abilities. This means transparent and distorted windows work extremely well.

The only major drawback to this system is that window resizing can be very slow, since you need to re-allocate the offscreen buffer each time the window changes size.

Re:Thoughts on a more modern GUI

[Glanz]

>

So well said!

The only problems I have had with Linux, and especially BSD have been directly related to X-Free.
I am glad you posted that!

Re:Thoughts on a more modern GUI

[infiniti99]

Pro:

From what I understand, DirectFB provides something similar to what DirectX does on Windows. Basically there are a set of operations that DFB can do, and it will try to do them in hardware if possible, otherwise it will fall back to software mode. The Linux Framebuffer does not provide an abstraction like this by itself, which is why we need DFB.

Con:

Limited driver support. You can use any card that has a kernel fb driver (even VESA, with software rendered transparency and everything :) ), but you'll only get acceleration if DFB has support specifically for that card. From what I can tell, only the Matrox has near-full support. The rest are lacking.

Re:Thoughts on a more modern GUI

[renoX]

I'm not saying that VNC is fast, I'm saying that you can have a very fast & responsive "single node" GUI as BeOS and implement on top of it a remote GUI layer as VNC does.

When you have a remote GUI, it won't be as responsive as a local app anyway, so why not add the burden there instead of paying it also for local application?

I'm not saying that the "remote GUI functionnality" should be optionnal: I use it everyday at work, I mean that it should be at the right place so that we could have fast local GUI and export display.

Re:Thoughts on a more modern GUI

[mkldev]

See my follow-on comments to another poster. It's nearly impossible to completely eliminate the client-server paradigm. I was primarily referring to the notion of doing so over a socket-like mechanism. A better design would involve using message passing/sockets/foo for as little as possible and doing 99% of the work through shared memory and similar.

Re:Thoughts on a more modern GUI

[mkldev]

The only major drawback to this system is that window resizing can be very slow, since you need to re-allocate the offscreen buffer each time the window changes size.

That doesn't necessarily have to be the case. It depends on the design used for the backing store. If it were practical to completely represent the screen as a series of operations (for example, a list of 3D primitives and operations on them) instead of as a pixel buffer, the problem disappears, and the application has only to modify the data as appropriate to fill up the rest of the larger window. At that point, the only time you need to resize is when your buffer can't hold all the primitives. (Yes, this is a little far-fetched. :-)

Re:Thoughts on a more modern GUI

[Ian Bicking]

VNC isn't particularly fast, and it can't compensate for the "1 user per computer" paradigm that many OSes are built with. For example, using X11 clients, several people can all use GUI applications from a single remote computer; VNC would realistically only allow one person to use the desktop at a time because it's basically a KVM-over-ethernet.

VNC can be made faster if you tune it for a particular environment. The server and client find a lowest-common-denominator of communication, so you can increase the efficiency of either side without losing backward compatibility (and if both server and client support high level graphical descriptions and toolkit integration, you should see speedups).

Of course, VNC cannot make Windows multiuser. But VNC does not impose any single-user paradigm on a computer. It is entirely possible to have multiple VNC clients connecting to multiple VNC servers on the same computer, each as a different user.

VNC, as it is, does not integrate terribly well with the native user paradigm -- it won't start up new sessions when a user first logs in, for instance. This is not a big problem, just one that no one has bothered to solve.

In any case, a replacement for X11 is likely to have its client-server capabilities anyway. But without apps, nobody's going to bother to switch no matter how much better such a replacement might be.

Any realistic plan to recreate a graphics system involves porting the major toolkits -- at least GTK and Qt. GTK I know has a significant abstraction layer which hides Xlib from the program entirely. By porting GTK you will have ported most GTK applications -- and people are doing just this (the Win32 porting effort, and the handheld efforts). I believe Qt is similar (especially since it's already cross-platform).

Yes, several older toolkits would be left out. That is not a significant problem.

Re:Thoughts on a more modern GUI

[Anonymous Coward]

I should probably start by clarifying something. There must, to some extent, always a client-server model for anything remotely resembling a window system, insofar as you have a window server program providing access to the display, without which you'd only be able to run a single app. However, with shared memory regions, the use of message passing in the traditional sense can be limited to events (mouse click notification, foregrounding of windows, etc.) rather than moving all the graphics data through sockets.

The MIT-SHM extension provides for a shared, server-side cache for bitmaps, pixmaps, etc. Use of server shared memory dramatically cuts down on the data you have to transmit through the X protocol. If you really need maximum performance, and your client app and X server are running on the same machine, then you can bypass the overhead of sending data through X entirely by using DRI. It's fast enough that some 3D games like Quake and video applications run just as fast under X11 w/ DRI as they do under Windows.

The first is if you have data on the server that you're trying to work with, and if the data is substantially larger than the traffic generated by passing around all that X11 traffic. Yes, it happens, particularly in scientific fields, but no, it isn't typical use.

The second is if you have an application that is closed-source and only runs on your Solaris box (for example), but you want to use it on your local machine.

In both cases, with the exception of the memory usage, this can be done equally well by running the application on the server machine, then provide a tap at a higher level in the API for inserting a VNC-like protocol to send the graphics data to the display machine.

Ugh. VNC is orders of magnitude slower than X11. I can't believe that anybody who is so concerned with performance could honestly suggest the VNC approach as an alternative.

The advantages to such a model are numerous. First, you get the remote accessability when it is needed without penalizing local use (much). Second, because it occurs at a window server level, you get some nice optimizations for free because of the design decisions implicit in my earlier description.

Like I said, if you don't want to penalize local use, make use of MIT-SHM and you'll be 75% there. If you want to bypass the X protocol & Xlib routines for rendering windows on a local machine altogether, then use DRI and you're 100% there.

For example, since you would have the window's complete description in the display machine's memory, an application wouldn't need to redraw parts of a window when it gets brought to the foreground. It could just send a refresh message up through the API, which would be sent across to the other machine, which would dutifully refresh the window.

This is exactly what you get by using X11! The X server even gives you a choice whether you want to save the contents of partially or fully hidden windows (thus optimizing speed like you want) or to disable it to save server memory. The option is usually called "Save unders". In contrast, you don't get this by using VNC.

Of course, there are cases where you'd want to do a full refresh, but these are less common than needing to simply change a window's visibility. As a result, your data traffic, even for client-server-style communications, should drop.

Yeah, no shit. This is something the X developers realized and worked on back in the late 1980s.

Re:Thoughts on a more modern GUI

[captaineo]

Have you actually benchmarked it though? I have done kernel traces of X interacting with client programs. The read()/write() overhead (copying data across the socket) is insignificant compared to the "extra round-trip" problems that spitzak describes.

Re:Thoughts on a more modern GUI

[migrate-HOWTO]

Actually, things could be much better than X.

If you talk to the MetroLink guys (btw, they wrote much of what is X and have been its commercial maintainer for years), they would tell you that the most efficient thing to do would be to scrap X and write directly to Frame Buffers.

Two experienced people 6 months (which means 3 for 9).

Re:Thoughts on a more modern GUI

[spitzak]

It's not clear that OS/X is doing 3D texture mapping or any kind of transform of the off-screen window images. I certainly don't see them using it: the "genie" effect appears to be a pixel-skipping effect that does "affine" transforms rather than the perspective transformation you would expect of a 3D system, and the miniature dock icons do not update, both of which would be easy to do if this could 3D texture-map the offscreen windows.

The resizing could be sped up to avoid reallocation by 2 things: first clip all windows to the size of the screen and don't store data outside that. Then when somebody tries to resize, the first time they need more memory than they are allocated it should allocate a screen-sized area. Then it never needs to be resized. Also don't reallocate when the window gets smaller. Then at some "garbage collection" step you can reallocate all windows to match the current size. It may make sense to always keep the full-screen-size buffer around.

Re:Thoughts on a more modern GUI

[captaineo]

I am 99.99% certain that OSX 10.2 (Jaguar) uses hardware texture mapping to blit/composite offscreen window buffers to the desktop. (previous versions of OSX did NOT use the hardware like this; it is a new optimization in Jaguar). Any Mac website should have the details.

I am not sure why they wouldn't use better filtering for the window-scrunching effects. I haven't used Jaguar myself yet so I don't know if this has changed. (obviously bilinear filtering would be very expensive in pre-Jaguar software mode).

Thanks for your ideas on resizing... I think OSX does actually perform eager allocation when enlarging windows; the slow resizing that most OSX users complain about may simply be due to the software 2D rendering... One complicating factor is that, as far as I know, OSX requires that ALL pixels in ALL open windows be stored all the time, even for portions of the window that are outside the screen. (I assume this is to eliminate the need for "damage/repaint" events; however the memory costs are quite substantial...)

Re:Thoughts on a more modern GUI

[spitzak]

You may be right, I only just got Jaguar and was basing my observations on 10.1.

I don't see how you can avoid damage events as without them a hostile program can easily wipe out the system by asking for huge windows. It also seems they are necessary for resizing the windows anyway. An examination of the Cocoa objects may show whether they are needed, I doubt it is possible to support them without exposing the "repaint" method in the base class of widget.

Gah! Multiple desktops

[bilbobuggins]

A note to all Linux interface designers:
Most users have a trouble enough with one desktop to worry about - stop putting a desktop switcher in the taskbar by default!

Multiple desktops are cool _if_ you know what you're doing, but even experienced users take some adjusting at first, and if you have trouble w/ computers as it is then the desktop switcher just serves to take up space and scare the sh!t out of you all at the same time.

that being said I'm psyched about the gui resolution control

Re:Gah! Multiple desktops

[phatvibez]

I don't know if this is totally true, and i have two examples...

1) when i introduced linux to my little sister, then 12, loved mulitple desktops...she also loved being able to customize the desktop...

2.) my wife loves kde, she LOVES virtual desktops. now...she is a med student so she isn't stupid, but she is completely computer iliterate she's the basic...email, web browsing, word processing person

yet she (without coaching) was able to us the kmenu, find what she wanted (konqueror, openoffice writer, kmail)

i have always been impressed on how my sister and my wife have taken to linux with very little explaining or coaching.

besides, virtual desktops are like a staple of all UNIX interfaces! it's like a tradition!

Re:Gah! Multiple desktops

[back_pages]

There is no reason why one desktop is inherently more intuitive than multiple desktops. In fact, among my computer illiterate friends, they look over my shoulder and say that multiple desktops make much more sense than a single one.

What is the intrinsic value of a single desktop anyway? All the windows stack and you can only use one full screen application at a time. With multiple desktops, each one can have a dedicated purpose and you can switch between many full screen apps instantly (if mousing off the edge of the screen switches desktops). That is far better than any Alt-Tab (or variation) through open windows.

A single desktop vs. multiple desktops is really an arbitrary paradigm that Windows users have adopted. The Start button could just as easily be on the right side of the screen and double-click could be a simultaneous left & right click. Convention is not synonymous with superiority.

Switch User ala Windows XP

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know how they accomplish this under Linux... i.e. log a user out of X but all of their X programs still run and they can come back to them later after another user uses the gui?

Also, anyone know where I can get a utility that allows me to switch res. and refresh rate in X (and I mean actually resize the desktop, not just switch modes by configuring the X server).

Re:Switch User ala Windows XP

[Anonymous Coward]

>Does anyone know how they accomplish this under Linux... i.e. log a user out of X but all of their X programs

you are not logged out actually, it just saves a session and it opens a new session on another "screen". For example, they just automate the ALT+F4 and ALT+F5 keys.

>Also, anyone know where I can get a utility that allows me to switch res. and refresh rate in X (and I mean actually resize the desktop, not just switch modes by configuring the X server).

Your distribution should come with some such tools. I know that Mandrake, SuSE and Lycoris and Xandros does. Please note that in order to change refresh rate and real resolution, you need to quit X and re-login X back. XFree does not support on the fly changing of refresh and res. This is how both Xandros and Lycoris does it.

Re:Switch User ala Windows XP

[Drache Kubisuro]

xnest ! super fun goodness for the happy person. i don't know that it could run fullscreen on top of the prior session, but it certainly runs well in a window!

Geez... does it have to look like Windows?

[jerkychew]

Look at the screenshots. The icons, the property boxes, even the fonts all look like they came straight from Win9x. Explain to me why this is good.

Now, I understand the point of this distro is to bring Linux to the desktop, and if the UI is familiar, average peeps will be less scared of it. But where's the innovation? If it looks and feels just like Windows, why switch from Windows?

I'd rather see a desktop that has its own unique look and feel, yet is still user friendly. Why is this so difficult? I've just started playing with OS X, and it seems to be really sweet so far. If you're going to rip off another product's UI (And yes, this is a blatant copy of Win9x), why does it have to be Windows? I would LOVE to see an Aqua clone on X86 that's marketed to the average user.

Does it run on FreeBSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeBSD is the OS of choice for kernel programmers. Does this new desktop run on FreeBSD?

Looks more like Windows then Linux :-(

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF? The distro looks like Windows! I despise these distros trying to look like Windows more and more. I am very dissappointed with this. While I am happy they are making strides with the ease of use, I am not happy with the fact that they're trying to make everything "look" like Windows.

You Posted This drivel Yesterday

[D iz a n k Meister]

Here

You can read my response here.

You should also read this and this.

Give it a few years

[Strudelkugel]

My guess: 3-4 years from now there will be Windows, Mac, and Red Hat.

Everything else will be hobby desktops. Cherished by the clubs that form around them, but never selling in volume.

Re:Give it a few years

[Rewtie]

A few years? How about NOW. The last LUG I went to ended up being a big bitch session about which distro and which mw was best. No, I don't think we need to wait for years to end up with "the big 3"... we're there now.

Re:What is it with these reviews of commercial stu

[dbarclay10]

I'm not saying they should be an "open source news site". That'd be silly.

No, I'm saying they're doing reviews while completely ignoring a HUGE part of the market they're doing these reviews for.

Tell me, when you want an office suite, and you're looking for reviews, won't it seem a _tad_ odd when the only ones you can find reviews for are ones that charge money?

Perhaps a better example would be, what the heck, Unix-based desktops. How would _you_ feel about a site that reviewed software from a little-known newcomer while completely ignoring software from vendors that has been proven and established?

Umm

[bogie]

that's been around since Corel put it there in their original Corel Linux. I've been pointing that out to both users and distros for years now how easy it was to change to resolution and refresh rate in Corel linux and yet to this day I've been ignored.

That's one thing that drives me nuts about the linux distros. Clearly each one of them has one or more features that they do better than any other distro. Yet for each distro they all go their own way and going from distro to distro you end up getting 50 different apps that do the same thing. As another example, why isn't Mandrake's font importer used in every linux distro? It's been around forever and is the easiest way to get your windows fonts on your linux box.Even Debian who just NOW is starting to work on a GUI installer when working gpl GUI installers based on Debian have been around for years. The day Stormix and Corel came out is the day Debian should have been picking the best GPL pieces out and using them.

Unfortunatly this appears to be the "linux way" at least when it comes to desktop apps and config tools. And Yes IMHO we are reinventing the wheel over and over by not cherry picking and then using the best GPL apps. Is my view oversimplied? Yes. But is foolish pride preventing say Redhat from using some of Mandrake's better GUI tools? Who knows.

I thought one of the benefits to the GPL was code Darwinism?

Re:Umm

[Bartab]

The day Stormix and Corel came out is the day Debian should have been picking the best GPL pieces out and using them.

Uhm, Debian is not a business. The only 'customer' worth anything are the people working on the distribution themselves, and for the most part (even now) a fancy gui installer is not a priority.

When you're buying redhat, or mandrake, or one of those other rpm based crappy distributions, your handing over of money gives you certain rights to moan and bitch about the priorities of development for the distribution, but for things like Debian, or Gentoo, or any of the others that don't even attempt to be a business, submit your code or keep your yap shut.

Re:Umm

[Anonymous Coward]

His point still stands. If better alternatives to what is included in any given distro exist, why shouldn't they just include them?

Seems that the distro maintainers suffer from some of the "Not Invented Here" syndrome that affects large corporations.

Re:Umm

[evbergen]

I thought one of the benefits to the GPL was code Darwinism?

Oh, and you thought that when an individual of an evolving species picked up a nice feature, all the other members instantaneously picked it up as well and implemented it in exactly the same way? You think evolution happened in a straight line?

I think what you're seeing is very healthy behaviour. Everyone thinks that he can do slightly better than the other guy who has already done it. Of course, only 5 % will be right in that assessment, but who cares as long as in the end it does improve the state of the art.

People should be cautious not to suffer too much from a 'not invented here' syndrome, but reinventing the weel once in a while isn't bad at all if that makes a better mousetrap.

Re:Umm

[kigrwik]

> Even Debian who just NOW is starting to work on a GUI installer when working gpl GUI installers
> based on Debian have been around for years.

No GPL-based GUI installer available for "production" meets the requirements for Debian: *mostly* the 11 architectures Debian supports (all spinoffs concentrated mostly on i386), but some other things too, like being able to scale between newbie and guru. Most GUI installers cater to the needs of the newbies, or the ones that don't need absolute control, but some people need more and they can find it in the current installer.

Debian users have different expectations from Debian software than the users of other distros.

In particular, NO ARCHITECTURE IS SUPERIOR TO THE OTHERS, it's true for the installer, for X, and for pretty much everything else. So an installer either works for all architectures, or it's not the official installer. See the amount of work done to port PGI.

I hope that makes it a bit clearer.

Re:Umm

[jantangring]

> I thought one of the benefits to the GPL was code Darwinism?

But this is darwinism! Traits don't jump around between species. Eyes have evolved independently several times.

What you are asking for is genetic manipulation, overriding evolutionary mechanisms, moving genes from one species to another.

Re:Umm

[egghat]

I have to agree wholeheartly.

Look at PartDrake from Mandrake -- Good tool, noone but Mandrake uses it.
Look at HardDrake from Mandrake --> Good hardware detection (one of the main problems for Linux), noone but Mandrake supports it.
Look at apt4rpm --> wonderful stuff from Connectiva, noone but Connectiva uses it.

This is a real shame.

But the thing I miss most: Something as userfriendly as Mandrake based on .deb.

Bye egghat.

Re:Umm

[henben]

Oh, and you thought that when an individual of an evolving species picked up a nice feature, all the other members instantaneously picked it up as well and implemented it in exactly the same way? You think evolution happened in a straight line?

Well, think of a piece of code which produces a useful feature, such as a resolution switcher, as a gene. Then if it has selective value, it should spread throughout the population of distros.

It's not a bad analogy for how things could work. Sadly, the distro population seems to be acting as if it's asexual rather than sexual.

Re:Umm

[evbergen]

The thing is, I think that software projects should be more viewed as the individual members of a population than the species as a whole. I.e. there's lots of parallel development, and relatively little change within each individual project.

A member can develop a feature (gene), but it does not get to other members (projects) until they are replaced by a new generation of offspring. Luckily a new version is sometimes enough, but often a new generation (rewrite or a completely new project) *is* what's needed to adopt revolutionary features developed elsewhere.

Of course you're completely right that this is nonsense when it comes to trivial things like resolution changers. But it's also natural that projects don't just copy *implementations* of trivial features if their maintainers think that those are badly done or don't fit their standards in other ways.

Re:Umm

[Anonymous Coward]

As inconsistent as John Peel might be, he can probably spell.

Re:Umm

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, it's clear now alright. More elitism, that's all it is. "Oh, we don't need a GUI installer..GUI installers are for NEWBIES!" You think they couldn't have a GUI installer for the x86 platform, and leave the text-based installer on the other 10 platforms? That doesn't sound too technical to me. The reason they don't change is because of people like you -- people who believe that Linux should be difficult on the end user because you're smart, you want lots of power, and you don't care if anyone else wants to use it. It's that kind of attitude that KEEPS people in Windows.

Re:Umm

[BJH]

No, they wouldn't put a GUI installer on x86 and a text-based installer on all the other platforms, because that defeats the purpose of a multi-architecture distribution - you should be able to move between architectures and find it the same everywhere (with exceptions for things like apmd or other programs that are meaningful on only one architecture).

Re:Umm

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, everything moves at the pace of the slowest architecture. No wonder Debian is now years behind other distros.

Re:Umm

[psamuels]

Oh, it's clear now alright. More elitism, that's all it is. "Oh, we don't need a GUI installer..GUI installers are for NEWBIES!" You think they couldn't have a GUI installer for the x86 platform, and leave the text-based installer on the other 10 platforms?

You didn't really understand a word he said, did you? Good thing you're posting anonymously, it would be a shame to make a fool out of yourself in public. In Debian, all architectures are equal. If a package doesn't compile, or has serious bugs, on only a specific architecture, that is a release-critical bug and can, if not dealt with, keep the package out of the next release - for all architectures. (Of course, some packages just don't make sense on some architectures - the X servers on S/390, for example. Those are the exceptions, though.)

So, given that philosophy, you think it is ok to spend a lot of effort polishing a GUI installer that only works on one or two architectures? Apparently the Debian developers don't think so. They are busy writing their own installer as we speak, and it does have a GUI frontend for people who need that sort of thing.

I know you aren't a Debian developer - they don't allow anonymous cowards - so you're not really in much position to complain about the work they do on their own time, NIH or not.

Speaking of which, what's the deal with GUI installers in the first place? Are there really people out there who will gauge the usefulness or merit of an OS distribution by whether or not they can use a mouse to click on pretty icons during a process which should only be necessary once in the life of the computer? (This ain't Windows 98, folks, no need to reinstall every 3 months.) Certainly it is not intended to make the installation process objectively easier or more flexible - nothing about a GUI is inherently necessary for this. Is it just the perception that users' minds are so calcified that they will immediately write off any interface not involving pictures and mice as "too hard" without actually seeing if this is so? Is it the desire to create a "slick" first impression instead of spending the same effort trying to improve aspects of the OS which will affect the user far more in the long run? Is it merely to cater to the habits of trade rag reviewers who are too lazy or pressed for time to actually try anything beyond the initial installation, so that their reviews effectively become a mere beauty contest for installation widgets?

*thwack* Oh, sorry, you caught me on a cynical day. (: Fortunately, you being an AC and all, it's not like I was actually flaming a real person.

Moderators: it's not flamebait, it's an actual flame. I suggest Offtopic.

Re:Umm

[zmooc]

Certainly it is not intended to make the installation process objectively easier or more flexible - nothing about a GUI is inherently necessary for this.

The GUI is the first impression users get of a distribution. Many of them are used to work with familiar elements like windows, textboxes, buttons etc. and will find the lack of those rather annoying or even difficult to work with. A GUI may not be inherently necessary for making the installation process objectively easier. But for users that are mostyly familiar with GUI's, a GUI is simply the easiest to work with. And almost always a GUI does a much better job at presenting information in an understandable way simple because everybody is familiar with the elements that are used to present it; dropdownlists, radiobuttons blabla.

Re:Umm

[egghat]

Ooops. 92 postings, excellent karma and all this with a typo in my sig. How could this happen ;-)?

Perhaps everybody thought that a typo in "inconsistent" was kind of a strange joke ...

Bye egghat.

Re:Umm

[kigrwik]

This is partly true, but when you'll do some
serious developing, you'll learn that the ability to test some piece of software on multiple architectures is priceless.

Lots of bugs are uncovered because they explode in some archs, whereas they're just screwing up silently on others. (stack corruption, out-of-bounds writing to memory...). Remember to switch compilers, too, as they all make different assumptions.

Now, Debian made a choice, and their choice you must respect. Remember that bugfixes coming from those other arches (XFree, anyone ?) will benefit you too !

Re:Umm

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not partly true... it is true. When you do some serious developing, you'll learn that adding too many things on the critical path means that the project never gets done. Patronising twat.

Debian is a classic case of too many cooks spoiling the broth. The Linus doesn't hang around waiting for the most obscure arch to get up to speed... they just get on with running, testing and developing it and let the other arches move at their own speed.

And no, I don't need to respect their choice.

Re:Umm

[kigrwik]

(are you a troll ? Or just a frustrated user ?)

Nevertheless, I'll bite, because the Newbie/Guru question is a recurrent and important one.

The two most difficult problems the ones who hack the Debian installers are:

1. multiple archs, problem known, best luck to porters.

2. flexibility vs ease of use
This is actually the hardest part, because it
does not have a technical answer. Debian installers have always been very flexible (need something special ? Alt-F2 and open a console, now do your stuff and get back to the install process), and both butt-ugly and slightly too technical for a non-technical user.
The future installer will keep the same degree of flexibility while at the same time making it easier for first-time users, adding hooks making it possible to reuse the installer for automated installation (something like FAI) or for remote-controlled installation, or many other wild things.

Whenever an elegant solution is found that meets the needs of both flexibility maniacs and new users, it is used. But Debian will not lose flexibility and alienate its usual user base to attract new users at any cost.

Finally, to answer your completely, I'd conclude that people migrating from windows will feel more comfortable using other distros (I check out every major release of Mandrake, just to see their progress).
When/If they need the degree of control and flexibility that Debian provides, then Debian'll be there for them. But the spirit of Debian lies elsewhere. I wish good luck to the RedHat, Mandrake, ... hackers in their work to make Linux a nicer place for new users, but let me hack my Debian boxes precisely the way I want them.

Find a distro that suits you, learn it, like it, show it to others and we'll both be happy.

Have a nice day

ps: I'm not particularly smart but instead I have hard-bought knowledge, I want power and control over my own box, and I evangelize Debian to all of my friends who can appreciate it, and Mandrake to those who just need a penguin that works.

Re:Umm

[azzy]

Well I certainly don't want the wheel to be re-invented if it ends up as a mousetrap. How would I cycle around on my bike?

Re:Umm

[Anonymous Coward]

You likely never heard the expression 'building a better mousetrap'. Oh well.

Re:Umm

[LWATCDR]

If the installer comes with Sourece "It is GPL so it has to" why not spend time porting it to the other architectures? It does seem to be a bit of Not Invented Here attitude. I do have to commend Debian for there support of all 11 architectures. Over all Debian has there way of doing things and that is there choice. If you do not like them do not use them. I use SuSE not because I hate Debian but because I like SuSE. All though a nice GUI based Debian could swing me over to them.

Re:Umm

[malarkey]

You are so right. I agree 100 percent.

And that is one of the biggest reasons linux isn't making more headway. The designers aren't customer-driven. They are designing for what they are looking for. And this is why some of the other distros have some of these neat tools, because they are focused on customers.

Is it time to get some *gasp* marketing people involved in Linux development, to nudge developers into putting features users want into the distros?

Re:Umm

[Anonymous Coward]

You have how many other distributions that offer a GUI installer? Yet, you want to bitch about the lack of one on Debian?

I use Debian, and I don't need or want a GUI installer. The current installer is fine. If the Debian developers decide a GUI installer is something they need or want, then they will develop it.

Re:Umm

[Ogerman]

No GPL-based GUI installer available for "production" meets the requirements for Debian: *mostly* the 11 architectures Debian supports (all spinoffs concentrated mostly on i386), but some other things too, like being able to scale between newbie and guru. Most GUI installers cater to the needs of the newbies, or the ones that don't need absolute control, but some people need more and they can find it in the current installer.

Right on, man. I fully expect the GUI debian installer to be the best around once completed. All those whiners who claim the Debian project is elitist are gonna wind up with their foot in their mouths. Maybe this will also put an end to some of the worthless Linux distros once even an idiot can install Debian.

Re:Umm

[Anonymous Coward]

> I think what you're seeing is very healthy behaviour. Everyone thinks that he can do slightly better than the other guy who has already done it. Of course, only 5 % will be right in that assessment, but who cares as long as in the end it does improve the state of the art.

It doesn't improve the state of the art if no one else uses it but older, discontinued distros.

The state of the art improves if _other_ distros pick up on it and incorporate the changes. Otherwise, the changes just sit there getting covered with dust.

NIH is an attitude that could use some adjusting.

Re:Umm

[Anonymous Coward]

> You have how many other distributions that offer a GUI installer?

All the commercially-available ones (except Libranet).

Re:Umm

[alienw]

.deb is no better than RPM, and is much less popular (how many people use debian, anyway?). If you are thinking that APT is somehow tied to .deb, you're wrong. Mandrake has an apt-like tool called URPMI, and it works quite well.

Re:Umm

[CentrX]

PGI (from Progeny) is being ported and updated.

Re:Umm

[ichimunki]

GUI-based Debian? Do you mean you are so concerned with the install that it matters whether it is GUI-driven or not? And really, Debian seems pretty GUI-like to me... especially compared to Gentoo's "installer". Or do you mean that once you get the system installed that there still isn't a lot of GUI support for system and package administration? My biggest problem with Debian is that it will probably be two years before they have a stable release using Gnome2 and KDE3.. which means that everyone else will be using Gnome.MONO and KDE4 by then. ;)

No flame intended. If I had a mission critical situation where "mature" software was needed moreso than bleeding edge, I would use Debian 3 without hesitation.

Re:Umm

[Anonymous Coward]

but some other things too, like being able to scale between newbie and guru.

If that's a reason for keeping a GUI installer out, they should get rid of their current installer because it sure as hell doesn't scale down to the newbie level. I got through Slackware when I had to download and rawrite floppies, and I didn't know ls. FreeBSD has a badly designed installer where you can't tell whether you're going forward or backward unless you've done it before, but I got through it once the installer stopped crashing and giving me kernels that wouldn't boot. Debian is like hitting a brick wall. You get asked about all sorts of specific chip numbers, you have to type in Linux-specific device paths, et cetera. If you don't already know every single piece of trivia, you're screwed.

Re:Umm

[109 97 116 116]

We should all be happy that each developer thinks they can do better then the next. In the open source world pride is the main driving force to improve the things that already work, where in the non open source world the almighty ching drives most innovation.

Re:Umm

[Haeleth]

As what you'd presumably describe as an "idiot", ie someone without the time or inclination to learn all the intricacies of the myriad text files scattered round the file system in random places which allow the experienced user to set up their machine how they want it, I can assure you that I can already install Debian. I just can't get it to load X. Nor can I figure out how to get rid of that damn picture of Tux with a beer that pollutes the boot screen.

Nor, indeed, on either of the two attempts I made, did I manage to get through the package selection process in the current Debian installer without exiting it completely by accident before I'd finished.

That's why I just downloaded Redhat 8, which promises at least to give me what I need with the minimum of fuss.

I'd have thought that a Debian devotee of all people would appreciate free choice and diversity. Apparently not. How disappointing.

You are partially correct

[Monkelectric]

Will it run 8-5, M-F, without downtime?

Yea w2k is MS's golden child, but MS Office is still the red-headed step-child. Office is unstable on any OS and thats where the opertunity for linux is.

Themability is unimportant

[Sanity]

If the initial theme is good - nobody should need to change it. I recently installed the Redhat 8.0 beta, and decided to stick with the default theme which is attractive and consistent, my only minor gripe being that it would be nice if they found a matching theme for Mozilla (they managed to do this with Xmms).

I have long believed that the obsession with themability is a huge red-herring, and is totally unnecessary in a desktop OS. Select an attractive consistent theme for the various themeable applications, and 99.9% of users won't need to change it.

Re:Themability is unimportant

[Darren Winsper]

What about the people who do want to theme? Why not allow it and ship a decent default? After all, if I'm going to stare at my computer for ungodly amounts of time, it's nice to be able to make it look pleasing.

Re:Themability is unimportant

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently installed the Redhat 8.0 beta, and decided to stick with the default theme which is attractive and consistent,

Best not say things like that on slashdot. There are many members of the KDE tinfoil hat squad here, and they have a habit of pouncing. Red Hat 8 is evil... evvviiiilll.... I say! They have changed the holy KDE and are now subject to Jihad.

Re:Themability is unimportant

[PainKilleR-CE]

If the initial theme is good - nobody should need to change it.

The initial theme can only be good enough for a certain percentage of users. There will be some percent that have minor problems with things such as eyesight or motor control which can be solved by changes to the theme, without the need for extensive accessability features. There will always be people that like something completely horrid for their desktop, but so long as it's their (and only their) desktop, who cares? Make the default as good as can be, but don't lock people into it, because everyone has their own way of approaching their computers.

I have long believed that the obsession with themability is a huge red-herring, and is totally unnecessary in a desktop OS. Select an attractive consistent theme for the various themeable applications, and 99.9% of users won't need to change it.

I agree that consistency is important, whether themeable or not. Still the obsession with themability goes far beyond the desktop OS, it reaches into everyday lives. The more someone uses a computer, the more likely they are to want to customize that environment. People customize their physical space, they should be able to customize the visual space of their OS' environment. The key, though, is presenting a solid first-time experience to get and keep users. Furthermore, user settings need to remain individualized for applications that provide customization independant of desktop-level modifications. If I change my media player's skin, another user logging into my computer shouldn't be able to change MY settings, and MY settings shouldn't be forced on THEM, they should see the default settings or their own customized settings, depending on circumstances.

I believe the real problem with themeability in general is that it gives developers an excuse for bad UI disign. Many themeable applications come with some fairly bad default UIs, and the most common excuse is 'if you dont like it, you can change it'. Certainly there's always going to be some percent of users that want to change things about their interface, but the default should never be so bad that most of your users immediately search for an alternative interface, if not a completely different program.

Re:Themability is unimportant

[Sanity]

What about the people who do want to theme?

What about the people who would rather that the developers spent their time on more important things?

Re:Themability is unimportant

[Darren Winsper]

They can either pay the developers, or quit bitching about somebody who developed the theming system in their own time, using their own money for their own enjoyment.

How would you feel if I told you to stop playing a game you loved to instead play a game you find painfully dull?

Re:Rip on it all you want, but . . . Lycoris?

[lemkebeth]

:scratches head;

I was trying to be helpful.

Oh well, at least this time I'm not in negative territory. :sigh:

In any case, the post I was replying to said s/he was trying to get them off Windows 98 as they complained it was slow and and they only used Email and the web. For that sort of thing, any user friendly OS will do but, most GNU/Linux distros aren't it.

This is the sort of thing an iMac is designed for.

Re:What is it with these reviews of commercial stu

[dbarclay10]

Xandros et al do provide typical Unix daemons. "server software" in other words. They just don't focus on it.

Say, like, Mandrake.

Re:Rip on it all you want, but . . . Lycoris?

[MsGeek]

Heh, ripping on Lycoris with your Anonymous Coward mask on...

Anyway, Lycoris is a spiffy little distro. I am enjoying the hell out of it. In fact as I speak I am installing the Beta build.

You are going to find teething problems with all the desktop distros. However, Lycoris has their stuff more together than most. It installed like a dream on every box I've put it on. And it does seem scarily like Win2K in places...it's designed for smooth transitions for Windows refugees.

There is going to be some hella-cool news coming from the Lycoris camp real soon...keep your eyes and ears peeled.

Re:Get some PRIORITIES!

[brsmith4]

This sounds just like the dude that visited my university with a big sign that said 'You make me sick...'. The guy was some X-ian, right-wing fundamentalist that criticized people for who they were and what they believed. This is an interest site. We are interested in nerdy shit like xandros and legos and bullshit. Get a grip. /. was set up to discuss this stuff, not dwell on the deaths of these thousands of people. If you wont get on with life, maybe you need some therapy.

Good and bad

[Anonymous Coward]

It's good to see more choice, especially one that is easy to understand for the regular PC user who is trying to stay clear of Redmond.

It's too bad that this distro does nothing my RH7.3 doesn't already do just as well.

If anything I'd like to see more competition between distros to heat up the race for people switching to Linux from Windows but we do need to address issues like user-friendly apps (try a good free Linux movie player lately?)

Keep up the good work though. My name is Jack McGroen and I've been Windows free for 5 months.

Re:Get some PRIORITIES!

[Afrosheen]

" More importantly though, what do thousands of dead bodies give a "good god damn" about?"

I dunno...faster respawn times?

*cue snare hit and duck*

thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week. Don't forget to tip your waittress.

my god

[mikerackhabit]

This is a Linux distribution to watch out for, and it would straight compete with both Lycoris and Lindows.

Umm, yeah. It's good to know that we've been 'straight competing' all this time. Here I was thinking we were just in normal competition.

Hardware Support

[Anonymous Coward]

The real problem with this, lycoris and others is hardware support. They are all limited by what others have done to support the hardware. Hardware vendors ALL support Mircosoft so there is no question that the latest handy dandy gizmo will work on my Windows box, but, too many times to my grief, when I try to install any linux distro I find something that wont work. This is mostly with new machines. Older machines dont tend to have this problem so much but the point is that until the various Linux vendors can get the hardware vendors to support Linux to the same level as they do MS Linux on the desktop will be a non starter for most people.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Will making an excellent UI attract developer

[Nic33]

Some posts seem to be similer themed: It looks great (or..eww it looks like windows) but still won't run the programs

But I say that the easier Linux gets for the end user, and the more attractive it becomes, the more developers it will attract.

But I'll probably stick with windows until it happens.. So I guess I'm still part of the problem, not the solution.

Re:Will making an excellent UI attract developer

[Graymalkin]

Just because the interface is attractive looking doesn't mean it has any attractive functionality. Who cares if it looks like Windows if developers don't have any consistancy in their apps? If all of the menus look like Windows but follow no standard convention what good is the software?

Traditionally UNIX apps have always had a dozen different conceptions of interfaces. Take ten command line apps with even a maginally similar function and none of them will use the same command flags or command format. Too many open source developers carry on this ridiculous tradition with their GUI apps leading to confusion and inefficiency. There's more to good GUI development than merely looking like Windows. Despite its problems at least apps on Windows act the same way.

"I hate Windows...I am afraid of Linux"

[Newer Guy]

Hmmm..
I wonder how many of people feel that way.....
Here's one more likely: "I hate Windows..I have never heard of Linux".
Maybe this distribution will help both of these phrases.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Why is Apple's interface so heavily copied?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since there key elements that make up a decent GUI, the general expectation is that they will most likely appear similar.

If you want to do some background on how/why, etc. Study Apple's Macintosh (or Microsoft's) Human Interface Guidelines.

You know what they say... "...seen one breast, you've seen them both!"

Sick of This Babyish SHIT

[Anonymous Coward]

Why cant somebody design those "hi-tech" interfaces what we see in spy movies or even the interfaces that some games use.

Instead we see a trend of the BLUE SKY and a M$ like start bar. It like a user-interface for pre-schoolers. Dont get me started on Aqua!!!

Most respondents HBT.

[Anonymous Coward]

All those horribly trolled...YHL. HA Terrible D.

OOo helps linux ...

[Moritz Moeller - Her]

..by spreading open document formats, by making the switch to linux painless, by establishing confidence in good open source software.

Re:What is it with these reviews of commercial stu

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't believe you

Google site:newsforge.com

mandrake about 180
lindows about 94
elx about 29
xandros about 22
redhat about 114
debian about 118
slackware about 47
gentoo about 31
suse about 135

Those numbers reflect readers choices and interests--except for Lindows, which has received far too much attention. But if you've been following the stories you'd know that they've been raked over the coals by the editors, reviewers and readers. Lindows has thrown money into pr, and the community has responded with wariness, criticism and derision. Newsforge has acted as a mediator between the community of Linux users and those who seek to profit from a wider adoption of Linux. You really think the folks over at Newsforge are just puppets for the marketroids? No, the penguinistas are holding their own.

Interface ripoff

[Erik K. Veland]

How long until Microsoft's lawyers are all over this? Did they really have to rip off Windows interface almost to the pixel? This is just begging for trouble.

And why rip off the worst interface from the start? Couldn't they take some cues from Mac OS X, combine it with some features from classic Mac OS and have a nice interface?

Look at all that wasted space in the settings dialog for instance. Yeck!

Linux Movie Players

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer videolan and aviplayer they are REALLY good. Xine is not bad, either. Mplayer plays A LOT OF formats (more tham MS Windows Media Player) It is run from the command line, it does not even need X to run!

If I were a windows user switching to linux..

[neurozic]

..I would want it to have that darkish look you see on hacker tv-shows :D Not a bad ripoff of the boring default windows skin you've tried so hard to get rid off.

Re:If I were a windows user switching to linux..

[Qrlx]

That would be cool. I want one where the computer is part of this 1960's ergonomic console like on Star Trek, where you had to take panels off of furniture once in a while. I want a computer as big as my living room, with integrated furniture and space-age martinis.

Where's all the discussion?

[extrasolar]

I don't want to poke anyone in the ass but people, its like you don't know it all anymore. There are a thousand things that everyone is urging to know and you can answer this stuff for us. Such as...

• Do you think GNU/Linux is ready for the desktop?
• What exactly is the economics of free software?
• Is it really easier using a graphical user interface?
• What about the Mac? Somehow this Linux-related article failed to mention the beloved Macintosh next to the words easy, desktop, and computer.
• Isn't GNOME a better desktop than KDE? These slashdot posts are like votes to determine which desktop is better. Whichever desktop wins the election gets to be in the next release of Red Hat Linux.
• What exactly does the newbie think about the GNU/Linux OS?
• Do you think Bill Gates is happy or sad about the GNU/Linux phenomina?
• Can someone please remind us on what the Free Software Philosophy is all about?
• What would Richard Stallman think about these recent distributions? Is he really a communist?
• What do the Libretarians think?
• Should we go to war with Iraq?

I think we better not leave these urgent questions unanswered. Because if we fail to discuss these things in each and every Linux-related article, someone somewhere might think these things are unimportant.

What a horrible possibility.

MC clone

[Anonymous Coward]

The original MC clone that I used was on a Windows machine - Windows Commander, and I must say I have yet to find a Linux-based program that I like as much.

whoa, let's straighten something out here.
both of these (windows and midnight commander) take after the original Norton Commander which debuted in 1986.

HOWEVER, the greatest DOS filesystem enhancement tool was XTree which was released a year before Norton Commander.

Sweet!

[Erpo]

When you reboot, everything is in graphical mode, you don't see any kernel or init messages going on, but rather the Xandros logo animating in the screen while loading the OS. I should point out that in the beginning you get three options, to load the OS in normal mode, safe mode or expert configuration mode (just in case something gone wrong you can actually see the text messages from the booting procedure).

Finally, a linux distro has (by default) hidden those hundreds of lines of text that come up every time the system boots. For the average linux newbie, they do nothing but create confusion and panic. "Was that an error message that just flew by?" "What does that mean?" "Hmm...2645 bogomips? Will I need to remember that later?"...and so on.

I'm not saying they're not useful; in fact, they can be a life saver. Without all those printk's and init messages, it would be awfully hard or even impossible to diagnose and fix many problems. There's just no reason for them to be there when everything's working properly.

Re:Sweet!

[Qrlx]

You are right. I can find out what I need to know by pressing ESC when Windows 98 boots. One line, saying like "press ESC now to see what's happening" would be fine, and everyone sees pretty clouds.

Sometimes I watch that UNIX shit go by on the screen and I think that in the old days, no one would ever see that shit go by because the cold electron gun in the display took like three minutes to warm up.

Re:Sweet!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, please. I'm always amazed how the /. crowd can have such poor memory. Anyway, Caldera had the first fully graphical boot process starting with their 2.2 version that came out in early 1999, along with the first fully graphical installer. In fact, it was the *only one* with such features for some time, IIRC.

Xandros is not the first distro with a graphical boot. Crap, even SuSE had a graphical/non-scary boot process display with their (old) version 7.3...

No!

[mindflow]

Every Linux distro seems to have the same problem. What every distribution should focus on, is to contribute to the opensource projects with functionality they think is lacking. I've used both Mandrake and Suse for quite a while, and both of them have their own control-panels with extra functionality such as resolution and frequency changing among others. Why don't they contribute such functionality as modular plugin to kcontrol or gnomes equivalent, so that a standard can be built. And secondly, why do they have to clutter with the start-menues. I prefer the default kde menu, becaus I can easily install new icons from themes.kde.org. And when I add rpm packages from apps.kde.com, they actually show up in the menu!

Re:No!

[PigleT]

"What every distribution should focus on, is to contribute to the opensource projects with functionality they think is lacking."

Bingo, so well said!

Right from the word go, the whole idea of "*the* Xandros desktop" makes me wonder why anyone would want something with a cut-down installation - these commercial distributions seem only interested in saying "this is your desktop, these are your packages, WE CONTROL YOU NOW!!", sort of thing.
At least RH tend to GPL anything they write, including linuxconf (oh boy did that go down well), as do debian of course...

Re:Rip on it all you want, but . . . Lycoris?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I tried to install lycoris on my stock Dell machine bought in may this year.

Lizard hanged. Checked the MD5Sums, everything ok. So, my experience is that it didn't install like a dream at all.

Waiting for the new Mandrake, or possibly the Xandros. /Mach

"Damn, The command prompt in NT has died again..."

[Anonymous Coward]

That's almost always a 16-bit emulation layer crash. Kill the WOW32 process in task manager and all will be well again.

And stop running ancient apps. Find modern replacements.

No more security pants?

[PsyQ]

From their "So Secure" page:

"Secure means users are less prone to virus attacks and security breeches as well as the down time, damage, and inconvenience they cause."

With Windows, I always felt claustrophobic below the waistline. Now that Xandros got rid of my pants, I can truly be free again. Thank you, Xandros, in the name of the entire office.

Re:Rip on it all you want, but . . . Lycoris?

[McDoobie]

If you wanna mail me some cash, I'd be glad to get everyone I know on a Mac with OS X Jaguar.

Unfortunately a Mac is way out of my price range at the moment. I think a nice user friendly Linux distro will fill in nicely.

Instant Colour Depth Change?

[ndogg]

Can any of them instantly change the colour depth without restarting X? That's one things that has always irked me about X.

beos

[Anonymous Coward]

make it look more like beos.

One word:

[technix4beos]

BeOS.

Any one notice the voodoo card?

[YeeHaW_Jelte]

Jeez, there was a lot of static about this Eugenia person a few days ago in the story about her review of Yast2, and man, now I understand ... how serious can you take anyone using a Voodoo 5 card, for christs sake?!

Again, one word:

[technix4beos]

'BeOS'.

Mandrake?

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I can tell, Mandrake is the most polished for-the-desktop distro. Sure, it's French, not American, but are americans really so NIHy to disregard Mandrake out-of-hand?

Time is running out for Linux

[ites]

Linux has perhaps two more years
before most new PCs will no longer run it.
Unless it can build-up a critical mass
on the desktop, where it is visible,
we are going to see the closing of the doors.
Microsoft is designing a PC platform that
will not run Linux.
Today's "open" hardware risks becoming illegal.
Only mass consumer protest and rejection
of future Windows releases can prevent this.
Which is why the battle will be fought on the desktop.
Xandros builds on Corel's excellent work.
It is time to consolidate on One Linux Desktop.

MS Office vs Windows

[Sunnan]

Frankly, I'd rather live in a world where everyone but the geeks (who ran GNU/Linux or BSD) ran OpenOffice (or free gobe, or koffice, or..) on Windows than a world where everyone but the geeks ran MS Office on GNU/Linux. Because you running windows is only bad for you (and the people you send trojans to) but you running MS Office is, because of the file formats, bad for everyone.

the apps are the desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

i agree, for most office users the applications (read MSoffice) are the desktop, they don't use the computer they use outlook or word

Best line in the review

[Qrlx]

This is definitely the best line in the review:

Xandros looks and feels quite a bit like Windows98 in places, possibly this was intentional.

I dunno, maybe it was a complete fluke that the Xandros Group came up with a Launch! button where Start is, a resizable Quick Launch area, applications tiled as buttons on the Taskbar, a System Tray, and a Clock. (A clock. Holy shit. I should have patented that.)

C'mon, people. You could have at least tried to put the Trash in the bottom right corner or something. I'm no big fan of current trends in IP law, but this is a total ripoff of the Windows(TM) desktop.

I think there might be a few improvements, like the little up-arrow at the end of the taskbar buttons to pop up another colums for when your drunken porn cruise has OnLoaded and OnUnloaded so many windows that the buttons are taller than they are wide. The four desktops thing is good if you have four monitors (which video card does that again??) But seriously, this desktop looks a whole lot like my current Windows XP desktop. Maybe I can install Xandros on the secretary's computer over the weekend and she'll never notice. :-)

WARNING!! Singularity Approaching! Open Source computer indistinguishable from Monopolist Capitalism.

Cost matters alot for consumers

[Chuck Messenger]

At this point your best argument to be made for Linux lies in three points, one of which you nailed. First is flexibility. Use that. Second is openess, both in source but more importantly protocols. Third is security.

Actually, I think cost is alot more important than you're making it out to be. What's really great about Linux is that you can stay current with all the apps you've invested your time learning -- e.g. Gimp, Open Office, etc. It's not just about the cost of Windows -- it's the cost of the whole package. Most Windows people get way out of date with their software -- e.g. my sister uses some ancient dusty old Works on one computer, and a newer one on a more recent computer. File formats are incompatible. Why this unsatisfactory state of affairs? Because it's too expensive and/or too much trouble to upgrade. With Linux, it's so easy/cheap to upgrade. There's _one_ source for _everything_ (if you use apt-get, or an equivalent). And it's all free.

Another example is PhotoShop -- yes, Photoshop is better than the Gimp. But, most people I know who use Photoshop at home have some really ancient version, which is much worse than the Gimp. Here, it's really the cost that's the issue. The same can be said for Microsoft Office -- which I very much doubt Microsoft will ever give away for free.

As I see it, ultimately, that's the major strength of Linux -- it gives cost-conscious users an easy and cheap way to stay current. In any case, that's the main reason I switched our household to Linux. (we have about 5 or 6 active or semi-active computers -- WinXP's copy protection drove the final nail in the coffin)

Textpad?

[CProgrammer98]

Beg to differ... UltraEdit is the best text/programmer editor I've ever ever used.

Stupidify is good for Joe.

[miffo.swe]

If the averege user is ever gonna use Linux it has to be a distribution out there for the newbie. If they use it and later feel the would like something harder/more configurable there are dozens of very good distros to try later on. As a beginners dist i think Xandros seems pretty good and it might even work handy dandy for regular users too.

No matter what we personally think about these distros they have a huge benefit for us who are a bit more advanced in linux. Something that many übernerds tend to forget is that with comercialism we also get some benefits as a spinoff.

A bigger userbase gives us better drivers, more comercial apps and overall better support for linux and i cant imagine that being bad. If they fsck up then adios amigos with them and we pick something else to use.

The diversity of linux is what makes it great and thats something we really should hold precious. Not to the expence of compability. Stick to the LSB and we should be just fine even with thousands of different distributions.

It's probably nice, but...

[GauteL]

.. dear god my eyes hurt!

Seriously though, couldn't they have come up with better icons than this? Even completely reusing some of KDEs or GNOMEs work would have been better. It just looks horrible.

I do understand why they have tried to make it as windowsish as possible, but having it look like a very unprofessional unpolished version of Windows does it no good at all imho.

It 'apes' Windows. Bad idea.

[Qbertino]

It tries to be a windows rippoff, forfeighting all that would make people give up the Windows Platform for Linux!
Why don't these guys have the gutts to take a perfect linux setup with added usability and all (f.e. Fluxbox WM default behaviour) cool looking Themes and just close the holes that are then left over (crappy fonts on Linux, office package, textmessage bootup and shutdown)?
Why the hell does everybody in the buisness consider M$ the reference for end user usability (which is - mind you - utter bullshit)???
Do a mac rippoff if you will - but this grey in grey Win98 copycat? I'm gonna recomend Windoze migrators SuSE 8 Pro as the Linux n00by choice. It might suck as update, but the install is grafical all the way trough to bootup and shutdown and, damn, it may be green but it shure looks cool.

Another Linux Desktop...

[blakespot]

Great, another desktop interface for Linux.

The more the better, right? ...hmm...actually...ahem...I'll go back to OS X now.

blakespot

Re:noone?

[egghat]

hey, I'm German, plz bear with me ...

Umm

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone know of a mirror for the Xandros beta? Their FTP servers are hammerd. bastards.

JPEG screenshots are silly

[hey]

... what's the point?
PNG makes sense.

Re:JPEG screenshots are silly

[Anonymous Coward]

JPG screenshots SAVE bandwidth. Hah.
Get your clues together.

Re:JPEG screenshots are silly

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, they save bandwidth but they look so bad.
The icons on the desktop look deformed.
You can't tell if the fonts are anti-aliased, etc.
If the point is to let people see what the
desktop looks like - they miss the point.

Re:JPEG screenshots are silly

[Darkstar9969]

They do look pretty tho. Desktop, is a desktop, is a desktop until you tweak and configure and muck about with it. It'll be fun to install on a free HD and play around with.

that's the problem!

[Ender Ryan]

I instantly associate that look with Netscape

That is exactly the problem! Why would anyone think it was a good idea for people to associate Mozilla with Netscape. Netscape used to be decent, but 4.x became a total disaster, devolving into a total bloatware mess, with an ugly interface to-boot. It got lost in a never-ending cycle of bugfixes and new bugs, slowly(quickly?) becoming more and more unstable, and never coming close to implementing any of the newer standards, etc.

Why the Mozilla developers decided it would be a good idea to have that skin with those icons, and especially making it the default, I don't even want to guess. I consider that to be their biggest mistake. Everything else about Mozilla I really like, except that damn skin and it being the default, it just really upsets me, especially when I hear of people who throw Mozilla away and never give it a second chance JUST BECAUE OF THAT DAMN SKIN! People don't realize right away that they can change that, and they DO NOT want to use something that they think is still Netscape...

</rant>

Re:that's the problem!

[MikeOttawa]

I went through this. I downloaded and installed Mozilla and when I looked at it I just assumed it was a recompile of Netscape 6 or whatever. I promptly uninstalled in the same day. .. Maybe I should give it another shot and change this skin!

Re:What is it with these reviews of commercial stu

[GauteL]

Mandrake is NOT into the "purely-desktop"-market. Have you seen whats included on those Mandrake CDs? Apache, PHP, postgresql, mail-servers, etc..

Mandrake tries to make a "jack of all trades" distribution, just like Red Hat and SuSE. I personally welcome the pure desktop-solutions.

Also a tiny bit like QNX (see "Launch" menu)

[Anonymous Coward]

Also a tiny bit like QNX (see "Launch" menu)

sounds like M$

[Anonymous Coward]

isn't that what microsoft does? take the best of what some other company does and put it in windows...

Re:sounds like M$

[Anonymous Coward]

You Are Very Funny Indeed! M$... What An Idea! Hilarious!

Windows XP != Crash

[shaunbaker]

When are people going to stop using the tired line, of watch Windows crash. Windows 9x may have crashed, a properly configured and maintained Windows XP box will simply not crash. I have only seen my machine crash in Windows 2000 or XP once in a year and a half and that was due to an old unstable video driver. Yes a video issue shouldn't take down a machine but that's the price you pay for Kernel level video drivers. If you want to bash Windows at least think up something true. For the desktop arena, windows crashes about as much as linux, period

Re:Windows XP != Crash

[spongebobsquarepants]

I use XP when I don't use Linux. The very reason I use Linux 95% of the time is that it is stable and does not crash. Granted, the XP OS doesn't itself crash often (but more than I'd like), but once a particular program crashes, it usually tends to keep crahing until you reboot...effectively you've crashed the OS. Also, the wonks from Redmond would like to lead you to believe XP boots faster (so who cares if you have to continually reboot!), but all they did was re-arrange the order that processes start such that your desktop pops up first, although you can't really start any apps until it's done chugging along. Also, non-MS apps tend to crash on XP very often though 1) MS's own products (eg Office) tend not to, 2) the same apps rarely if ever crash on Linux (eg Mozilla), and 3) most 'power' apps are not produced by MS.. I can say that in almost 6 months of using SuSE 8.0, I've yet to crash my machine. In the same time, XP has crashed at least once out of every 3 days that it gets used, though XP is lucky if it gets booted more than a few times a month.

Re:Windows XP != Crash

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you kidding me? I'm afraid to reboot my work PC because XP crashes on boot so often. Simply installing Easy CD Creator actually prevents the entire system from booting.

Norton Anti-Virus software-- "XP compatible" of course, still crashes the entire system. I thought the OS was supposed to protect the system from badly behaving applications?

Re:Windows XP != Crash

[Rewtie]

I think it really depends on what you've got installed on the box -- both hardware wise, and software wise. My wife's XP box hasn't ever crashed -- and she's had XP on that for almost a year now. Sure, some apps have crashed from time to time, but not the entire system. She's got OfficeXP, NAVXP, and varios kids games installed.

When I was needing to run it for the programming I was doing, it would crash at least once a week, sometimes more. Same apps installed, except for C++ Builder... go figure.

Get it in my hands

[oldstrat]

.
I respect Redhat
I like Mandrake
I can tolerate Lycoris
I WANT Xandros!!!

Of course. I want any new/revised distro and right now, but Corel Linux was the smoothest (maybe along with Stormix R.I.P.) of the installs I've ever used.

I don't care what the front end looks like, or I should say that Win-ish isn't to be feared, but there should be enough difference so that I, or anyone else using it KNOWS they are not using MSWin.
Just for safety sake. It can't be Windows and if your moving from platform to platform like I do, it's actually easier to be in alien atmosphere not in something that feels the same but puts you down a rabbit hole at odd momemts.

help?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone have a mirror for the Xandros Beta? Their ftp servers are hammerd. bastards.

Xandros Update

[brodiedreamyou.ca]

I dont really know why Eugenias problem with Xandros Update is. But as a Xandros beta tester for at least 6 months now, I can tell you it works perfect.

Basically It is a front end to apt-get, so it works just as well as apt-get does. You use a search feature to find the package name, or a word in the package discription. Then you select all the packages you want to install, and click the "install/update/remove" button. It will then fetch them all, install them, and install any dependencies (prompting you if it's alright to install the dependencies)

The slight confusion that some people seem to be having it that it also supports installing rpms and downloaded .deb files. What this means is that you can use it as a normal rpm installer, but there is no dependency installing. Same goes for if you download manual, then try to install it. So it works perfect for everything it's intended to do.

Also complaining about the selection of packages? It's the exact same selection you get with debians apt-get, cause they are useing the same package sources.

A few people of complained that xandros isn't running all the latest stable version of some applications, this is also because they install them useing Xandros Update, and debian hasen't provided .debs of those latest versions yet.

And yeah as the previous poster said, There is no way they'll change over to kde 3 for beta 1, we (the beta testers) were telling them 6months ago they needed kde3 to have a chance when they released, but i guess they didnt agree!

Font Smoothing in Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there any font smoothing technology in Linux? I've tried two Mandrake releases, and no matter what improvement they do the other GUI elements, the bottom line is still the content (word processing doc, spreadsheet, etc) that a user wants to work with. Without font smoothing, Linux is, uhm, ugly. I want to see something like ClearType in my 21" CRT if I will switch. Personally, I'd switch to Linux first instead of a Mac.

Re:Font Smoothing in Linux?

[Karn]

I just installed Redhat's Null the other day, and it does a fantastic job of anti-aliasing fonts right out of the box. In fact, the installer's and Open Office's fonts are anti-aliased as well! :)

It's spelled GRAMMAR with an A

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice job picking on someone else's language skills. Next time use a dictionary.

It's nice and all, but...

[Rewtie]

Can I play EQ with it? :-) EQ's the only thing left keeping WindowsXP on a 10gig swap drive.

Linux functionality doesn't matter

[Anonymous Coward]

People don't really care about Linux. By that I mean us (Windows users) don't care about Linux's unique abilities and ways of doing things. We just want a non-Microsoft OS that we can use without having to learn new stuff. If these folks can make a version of Linux that is just as easy to use and just as familiar to us as Windows, then more power to them! I'm more likely to try this out than the text mode nightmare that is Slackware.

Linux will always be a niche/geek OS so long as it is totally alien to the average Windows user. We don't want to read through a 20mb text manual and edit text files and set permissions to configure our desktop or change the resolution or whatever. And we don't want to use the Linux file system /dev/whatever/ or any of that other junk.

That's not pretty but it's the truth.

Re:Linux functionality doesn't matter

[Rewtie]

I think you fall into a grey area. Most Windows users are happy, and don't want to change. Some do want to change for various reasons, but don't want the hassle of having to learn something different. Some easy distros out there make the transistion very easy. The desktop environment looks and feels the same as Windows, and (to quote someone here) 'It just works.' Of course, there are tons of folks who'll do the switch just because it the geek thing to do, as you reffered to. I made the switch years ago when a friend suggested it. My fears then, which you echoed here, were resolved within a weeks time. My advice? Find a friend who uses Linux, and who won't talk over your head or belittle you for using Windows (OS Bashers are lame IMHO). Get with them, and see if you like Linux. If you don't, continue on with Windows.

olde news

[Anonymous Coward]

This is olde news, I heard at one time the company had enlightenment DR 17 as their choice for desktop WM, but Raster is not finished with it. I guess they had to take the practical choice

quit complaining -- make one yourself!

[Coolfish]

Come on people, people whining about tools not being used when they should be, and they could be because their GPL'd.

If there isn't a distro out there that takes all these great tools and puts them together, then shouldn't there be? It is afterall open source, and that's exactly the kind of thing you'd expect.... so why is no one doing it? Why aren't YOU doing it?

I'd call it The Best Linux Distro In The World, Ever (TBLDITWE for short).

Illegal Provision of Circumvention Device

[Billly Gates]

MOTION PICTURE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA, INC.
15503 VENTURA BOULEVARD
ENCINO, CALIFORNIA 91436

UNITED STATES
Anti-Piracy Operations
PHONE: (818) 728 - 8127
Email:

April 1, 2003

Via Fax/Email

RE: Illegal Provision of Circumvention Device
Site/URL: http://www.kernel.org [and mirrors, with unknown IP addresses]
Reference#: 343313

Dear :

The Motion Picture Association (MPA) represents the following motion picture
production and distribution companies:

Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc.
Disney Enterprises, Inc.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc.
tro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc.
Paramount Pictures Corporation
TriStar Pictures, Inc.
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
United Artists Pictures, Inc.
United Artists Corporation
Universal City Studios, Inc.
Warner Bros., a Division of Time Warner Entertainment Company, L.P.

We have received information that the above referenced Internet site is providing a circumvention device commonly known as Linux. Linux is a software utility that circumvents the protection afforded by the Microsoft Windows Operating Systems DRM implementation, therefore circumventing the schemes designed for consumer content protection and permitting the copy of protected contents in whole or partially. As such, Linux is an unlawful circumvention device within the meaning of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Title 17 United States Code Section 1201(a)(2)(3). Providing or offering Linux to the public on your system or network violates the provisions of Section 1201(a)(2) which prohibit the manufacturing, importing
or offering to the public, providing, or otherwise trafficking in an unlawful circumvention device. (Title 17 United States Code Section 1201 et seq. hereafter is referred to as the DMCA).

We therefore demand that you take appropriate steps to cause the immediate removal of Linux from the above identified Internet site, along with such other actions as may be necessary or appropriate to suspend this illegal activity. Failure to comply with this measure will subject you to liability as described above.
We also request that you:

1. maintain and take whatever steps are necessary to prevent the destruction of all records, including electronic records, in your possession or control related to this Internet site, account holder or subscriber, and

2. provide appropriate notice to the subscriber or account holder responsible for the presence of Linux on your system or network, advising
him/her of the contents of this notice and directing that person to contact the undersigned immediately at the email address provided above.

By copy of this letter, the owner of the above referenced Internet site and/or email account is hereby directed to cease and desist from the conduct complained of herein.

On behalf of the respective owners of the exclusive rights to the copyrighted material at issue in this notice, we hereby state, pursuant to the DMCA that we have a good faith belief that the acts complained of are not authorized by the
copyright owners, their respective agents, or the law.

Also pursuant to DMCA, we hereby state, under penalty of perjury under the law of California and under the laws of the United States, that the
information in this notification is accurate and that we are authorized to act on behalf of the owners of the exclusive rights being infringed as set forth in this notification.

Please contact us at the above listed address or by replying to this email if you should have any questions.

Thank you for your cooperation in this matter. Your prompt response is requested.

Respectfully,

Haminshu Nigam
Director
Worldwide Internet Enforcement

Re:Rip on it all you want, but . . . Lycoris?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm assuming Mr/Ms Moderator read:

... it isn't the best in the usability department for a desktop OS, yet.

...and knee-jerked out a Troll rating. Come on now. This is a valid opinion. GNU/Linux is NOT the most usable desktop OS for many folks. That's why we have GNOME, KDE, Xandros, Lycoris, Ximian, etc. etc. etc. -- to improve the desktop experience for the others.

What's the deal?

[fudgefactor7]

Ok, why is it every desktop looks just like Windows Explorer? Can't the design teams come up with something that is functionally equivalent, but is "different"? Or is it that MS got something right?

Hmm kde 2.2.2

[nurb432]

Glad to see they are keeping up to date on this thing...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:What is it with these reviews of commercial stu

[Anonymous Coward]

not to mention that mandrake "just works". I have tried lycoris and it would not install properly on both machines I tried, where as mandrake installs without a hitch. Gee let me think - pay for distro that dosn't work or dowload a working one for free ...

Mandrake + KDE3 + Codeweavers wine = pure heaven

you are all wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

ctrl-alt-[(kpminus)or(kpplus)] does not do that... it does NOT set the desktop screen res to anything different. It lets you zoom in and out, but it does NOT resize the actual screen size on the fly like in MODERN O.S.'s (read- anything not XFree86) like windows, macos etc. You still have to restart the Xserver which is stupid in itself. Wakeup XF86 Team.

Furthermore Eugenia is a dumbass. Why you morons keep posting links to a moron oh, because you protect your own .

lower price means lower revenue ...?

[Lewis Mettler, Esq.]

Your point is well taken.

If Microsoft lowers its price to compete with Linux, its gross revenue is likely to decline. Any economist or business person for that matter can tell you that if you lower your price and your sales volume does not increase sufficiently to offset that lower price, your gross is going to take a hit. And, once that begins for Microsoft it will not end.

Raise the price and loose customers to linux. Lower the price, reduce gross revenue and loose stockholders.

It is a tough call to make.

And, if the same idiots who testified before the court are advising Microsoft now they will get it wrong and harm Microsoft even more. But, my guess is they were just lying in the court room hoping to fool the court.

The key to the future for Linux on the desktop is going to be the combination of SUN at the corporate account level, Xandros, Lindows and others at the consumer level and Redhat/Mandrake and others at the developers level.

And, then you have DELL who is beat up for trying.

My guess is that IBM and HP will follow SUN's lead in regard to linux on the desktop and give it a real effort. As for DELL, GateWay and a few other Microsoft OEMs, they do not really depend upon Unix/Linux servers for a major part of their business. Maybe DELL thinks it does. But, they have been told what they can and can not do by the idiots at Microsoft.

Re:lower price means lower revenue ...?

[sgtrock]

Ok, I was with you until you started talking about IBM and HP following Sun's lead. Just in case you haven't noticed, both IBM and HP have been selling lots of Linux where there is a market today; at the server end of the spectrum. IBM is doing its best to get out of the desktop market completely because of the razor thin margins there. Why should they go back in just because there's a free desktop OS available?

Nahh, what's really needed is for a big player to quietly push some money to Codeweavers so they can finally finish Wine 1.0. Get that out the door, and a switch from a Windows OS on the desktop to Linux becomes a lot more doable. And Sun isn't doing that (at least not yet).

Re:lower price means lower revenue ...?

[Lewis Mettler, Esq.]

I would agree that a better Wine makes desktops more doable. But, look at what SUN is doing.

There are actually trying to make Unix/Linux Servers work well with Linux Desktops. We are not talking about independant desktops perhaps logging on the internet and doing some stuff but rather real business.

And, that is where HP and IBM should be taking SUNs lead. Major corporations have little interest in independant desktops that fail to work well with their servers. And, yes, they will always have servers. They may serve files. Or, they may serve the desktops themselves by way of updates, etc. Either way, SUN is focused upon that and HP and IBM remain ignorant. Or, at least they look ignorant because they ignore the need for hundreds if not thousands of desktops to connect appropriately with the Unix/Linux based servers they claim they want to sell.

We are not talking about making a Linux PC compete headon with a Microsoft PC serving a single user. We are talking about corporate information systems. SUN is focused. IBM and HP are "out to lunch". The only coordinated products they offer along that line are Microsoft based. They are stupid. There is a hugh market for corporate information systems technologies. And, you do not just look at a single PC and say "why not?". Single independant PCs are not what the corporate market wants or can even use. They need organized systems. They need systems that offer a lower total cost of ownership and support. And, Microsoft desktops and Unix/Linux based servers are just like "oil and water" as long as Microsoft has anything to say about it.

Corporate accounts and the major OEMs need to wake up.

SUN sees the need. And, they see the easy picking. And, they will pick that fruit. And, those corporations that want a lower total cost of ownership with hundreds if not thousands of PC type systems will benefit from shopping SUN. Today with HP and IBM they get screwed. And, it is due to the short sightedness of those vendors.

If you are truly dependant upon Microsoft technology, that is fine. But, many corporations only think they are. And, when they find out that substitutes are available from the top vendors in the business, they will fly.

Re:What is it with these reviews of commercial stu

[dbarclay10]

Lindows et al also provide daemons.

They just don't focus on them. Like Mandrake.

non linearity

[jbolden]

> Speaking of which, what's the deal with GUI installers in the first place?

Non linearity is the importance. A gui installer can show non linear information to the user that can be important in trying to make choices. For a simple example the Mandrake installer shows all the installation steps down the left hand column. That way the user knows:

a) What issues they are likely to need to address in this step

b) What issues they are likely to need to address in later steps

c) how to back if an earlier choice becomes wrong in retrospect

I'll choose an install I did about a year ago as a good example. I had a laptop with a broken video card so the only reasonable use for this machine was to set it up as a server. I wasn't sure where I turned powermanagement off:

1) Did I make sure not to install power management packages?

2) Did I have to do this post install?

3) Was there going to be a seperate step?

I could shoot ahead to certain places that power management might show up see what the steps were and thus knew that I didn't have to worry about this in the later steps.

Another thing I did was because the harddrive was not large was shoot forward to the "resolve dependencies" part to get an idea of how much space I had left then popped back to package selection. This non linearity (i.e. resolving dependencies multiple times) is an atypical need but allowed me to learn vital information for the package selection process.

another linux based windows clone

[Dokushoka]

The website even looks like it was designed by microsoft? Who the hell wants another windows clone? Linux isn't coming to the desktop anytime soon, when are these companies going to learn. You want unix on your desktop, buy a Mac.

Blanket reply to all dissenters:

[Wakko Warner]

Note, I said desktop environments, not window managers. I am well aware that Enlightenment, IceWM, BlackBox, and WindowMaker all look different. They are not, in and of themselves, desktop environments, though, like KDE and GNOME are.

- A.P.

Re:Here's a better hint.Customization.

[Anonymous Coward]

"While you and I may love customizability, most newbies don't care (or don't know any better) and just stick with the defaults."

Dubious assumption, considering most people customize many things in their lives. Now why is the desktop the exception to that rule? Only thing I can come up with is that most businesses frown on their employees making changes to their computers. But then windows is rather easy to break.

think long-term

[alienw]

The point is choice, really. If you like depending on one vendor for everything, go ahead. If you think the price of MS products is fair now, you're not alone. But what keeps MS from charging anything they want once they implant their OS on every desktop machine out there? What makes you think that Windows 2005 will be a few hundred bucks a seat? You do notice that you start to depend on Microsoft for everything once you start using their OS? And is anyone naive enough to think that hardware DRM and "secure platform" initiatives are designed for anything other than making Windows an inseparable part of every PC? If you believe that, simply consider the fact that the entertainment industries have been whining about DRM since 1996, but Microsoft just started to implement it.

If someone doesn't start promoting alternative platforms now, it will be far too late to do anything once MS decides to start tightening the screws.

Re:No offense... but your forgeting

[Anonymous Coward]

all that lovely phone home spyware and the additional hardware/software security schemes that the marketing boys in redmond are dreaming up. Read some other tech periodicals besides this one - you'll be hard pressed to find a single reputable source that will say the pd/legrandiam (whatever) have very little value for the honest corporate types. Although, I'm sure that companies that have something to hide will love that document revoke function the redmond boys are touting.

Linux Desktop not Good at Productivity

[Horia]

My Linux Desktop wish list :

1. a UltraEdit-like text editor with all the bells and whistles

2. a CuteFTP-like ftp client that can remember the accounts and is as *cute*

3. a SecureCRT-like SSH client with account list

4. port Trillian

5. make Cut & Paste work between all applications

By the way, until Flash, Adobe and Macromedia have some equivalent on linux, we are tied to Windows. Until then I have a partition with linux desktop and I log in from time to time to play...

So...

[Anonymous Coward]

At least this one isn't entirely based on screenshots. Right, guys? Right?