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

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.

[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.

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?

[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?

[falser]

and start from a "best of breed"

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

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

[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

[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.

No offense...

[Wakko Warner]

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

- A.P.

Re:No offense...

[gmhowell]

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

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...

[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.

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.

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.

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: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?

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?

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[account_deleted]

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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

[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

[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: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

[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.

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: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.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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.

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.

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>