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

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.

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.

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

[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

[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

[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?

No offense...

[Wakko Warner]

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

- A.P.

Re:No offense...

[Foaf]

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

[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...

[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.

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

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:Any one notice the resolution switcher?

[dogas]

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

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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.

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

[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

[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: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?

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: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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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

[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.

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.

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: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:Also check out:

[laymil]

ln -s /bin/umount /bin/unmount

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