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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."
In screen shot 4 theres a resolution switcher ala windows where the hell has this been for the other distros?
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?
Viv
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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.
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
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.
The first ever Ultimate Frisbee video game: here (now
I just wanna know if Xandros will have the cute little plastic Tux included in the box like Corel did!
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.
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?
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
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.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
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'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
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.
If not now, when?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Wiwi
"I trust in my abilities,
but I want more then they offer"