Ximian's Back

An anonymous reader writes "Joe Barr at LinuxWorld has a hands-on look at the new Ximian desktop and he seems to like it a lot. The story is currently running on Linuxworld.com"

Comments

On the Mark

[robburt]

I am really glad to see that Ximian not only makes good off the shelf products for Linux, but they're now doing a great job of being really current with their technology!

Looks deadly

[Vendekkai]

Saw the screenshots, it looks great. Let's just hope that it's low on resources, as well.

Re:Looks deadly

[BrokenHalo]

Let's just hope that it's low on resources, as well

It's not particularly low on resources compared to blackbox or whatever, but Gnome 2.2 still stacks up well compared to 1.4. I don't have exact figures to hand re. memory footprints, but it is definitely more responsive.

Can't say much about Ximian's implementation, though; since I abandoned RH and mdk distros some time ago and went back to Slackware, I've been using all these goodies in the excellent Dropline distribution of Gnome for a long time now.

Re:Looks deadly

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never understood Ximian's reasoning about the their desktop. What good is a separate desktop if you only can install it on one distribution. I understand the need from a logistical point of view, but there would be a huge demand for a platform independent (within linux, at least) desktop. Someone with a polished, user-based desktop could steal that part of the market out from under Redhat, and still allow people to have Redhat support. Lindows/Lycoris/Xandros/Corel are going about it the wrong way, trying to maintain a whole distribution, when peole need to realize that X is separate from the kernel is separate from the window manager is separate from the applications. It's a whole different paradigm than the One Microsoft Way, that we are used to. But it wasn't so long ago when people believed that the OS and applications were differnt too. It used to be, even in the windows world, that the web browser, the word processor, the spreadsheet, the media players, the email client, the file compression, etc. didn't have to come from the same company that gave you the disk drivers.

Ximian Connector ?

[Aliencow]

Anybody has experience with that Evolution plugin and Exchange ?
It would really be fun to have instant messages and calendar sharing and all on my laptop at work without installing windows...

Re:Ximian Connector ?

[Anonymous Coward]

The underlying transport for MAPI and DCOM is DCE RPC -- an "open systems" protocol from Sun and other UNIX vendors that Microsoft also adopted.

Problem is there's no complete DCE RPC implementation for Linux. Fix that and some smart person will get MAPI working.

Hmm

[captainclever]

I used Ximian desktop for Gnome 1.3 a while ago, and it was quite pretty. I've tried many different WMs and what-not, and I still like KDE the best.

Yeah so it uses more memory than most, but if you've got it, flaunt it.

Even if it...

[botzi]

...looks gorgeous, I won't "migrate", cause unfortunately a couple of hours erlier I found my true love ,;oP...

It's nice to see that every 3 hours we have a new Wm or Desktop reviewed on Slashdot;o)))....

So, when ?

[noselasd]

The natural question now is , ofcourse, when will Ximian release Ximian Destop 2 ?

Re:Necessary?

[TheRaven64]

Exactly. I've run Gnome 2.2 on my FreeBSD box for a while, and from the review it looks and sounds exactly like what you've had by doing a 'portinstall gnome2' on BSD (and presumably an apt-get or emerge under Linux) for a while.

All the new features he was ranting about seemed to be Gnome 2.2 features. What does Ximian actually add?

Let's hope they improved Nautilus

[Anonymous Coward]

I currently use Nautilus in GNOME 2.2, and it's major suckage.

I can't edit a launcher, I can't create a new text file (ala 'touch'), and I had problems with creating a new "folder" as well. I wasn't able to move any files into the new folder i created, and trying to move some files into the new directory using a terminal gave me some wierd NFS error, even though I was using a local reiserfs filesystem! OK, so this is just a bug, it was still annoying because Nautilus didn't tell me what the heck was wrong. It just told be "Sorry dear user, I can't do it. I'm not gonna tell you why, but I will pesent you with the choice to try again, skip this file or just cancel. Oh, and if you skip this file, you skip all of them. Goodbye!". Well not literally like that, but it comes close.

The more I use GNOME, the more I hate the "less (features) = more (work)" philosophy. It would be good progress if they would focus on letting users perform certain actions in a more efficient (less time consuming, less handling) manner.

I hope Ximian Desktop addressed the extreme lack of usability features and hopefully GNOME 2.4 has too.

I like GNOME from a visual point of view, but in terms of usability it still lacks.

Why the emphasis on a polished desktop?

[PurpleFloyd]

It seems to me that instead of creating wonderful eyecandy (which this certainly is), the Linux community should focus on creating standards and moving away from antiquated systems like X. I would much rather have a windowing system that didn't have 20-odd years of cruft, but instead had native support for things like antialiasing and an X compatability layer.

Also, where are the easy configuration tools? Redhat is especially guilty of thinking that the user either wants everything configured either automagically or manually, but doesn't want a simple way to manage most devices in their system. Some basic standards on the locations of config files are desperately needed (just having /etc to dump everything into is not OK, as some packages put things in their own directory, some put them in the root, and some are crazy and keep them somewhere else entirely). Linuxconfig used to be good for setting up most components of a system, but it was only good for Redhat, who dumped it around 7.0, and not replaced. Debian has no central config system; this is slightly more acceptable as it is an "expert's" system, but I would still like to see some system that would shape itself to my configuration and run the configuration tools from the .deb package, if nothing else.

There seems to be a lot of great work going on in the kernel level, and a lot of great work in the desktop level, but we're still stuck on 20 year old tools in the middle. How would you like to use CDE instead of Ximian or KDE3? Yet we submit willingly to using outdated technology in the middle, for essentialy no reason at all. If Linux is ever to become a desktop powerhouse, it must be equally refined, with a good kernel, a good set of system config tools, and a good desktop. Just having two out of three is not good enough.

Re:Why the emphasis on a polished desktop?

[73939133]

and moving away from antiquated systems like X.

Antiquated in what way? X11 is a client-server system, just like Windows and Macintosh. Like Windows and Macintosh, it supports antialiasing, direct rendering, 3D graphics acceleration, alpha blending, etc. Unlike Windows and Macintosh, it has been designed from the ground up for asynchronous server operations, separate address spaces, and separate graphics processors. Unlike Windows or Macintosh, it uses a well-defined, efficient, binary communications protocol. Unlike Windows or Macintosh, it also has extensive standards for inter-client communication and distributed clients.

I would much rather have a windowing system that didn't have 20-odd years of cruft, but instead had native support for things like antialiasing and an X compatability layer.

Looks to me like Windows and Macintosh would do well to move away from their cruft. Windows pretends to use a frame buffer library even though that doesn't correspond to reality at all. And Macintosh's DisplayPDF system is really crufty--a slight variant of the 20 year old DisplayPostscript system.

One can doubtlessly do better than X11, but none of the commercial or open source projects seem to be even trying.

Why emulate windows?

[prichardson]

I noticed in the screenshots that there's a taskbar on the bottom. Dare I ask why? Emulating an OS that most people who have used agree is confusing and not intuitive. Windows hasn't kept the location of its network settings constant since, well, forever, I think.

Linux GUIs seem to have the same idea that change is good. One thing that made Mac OS nice was that until OS X it didn't change very much. Linux will never be popular if it can't offer a lot of things that windows doesn't. Linux should try to keep its GUI the same, then it will offer something windows doesn't.

its too bad Miguel wasn't broad minded.

[Anonymous Coward]

Their goal was to accelerate the adoption of Linux as a desktop platform.

A worthwhile goal would be to accelerate the adoption of OPEN SOURCE OSes as a desktop platform.

Instead, he's being narrow-minded.

The hunt for lib files

[zakezuke]

One of the most annoying aspect of linux, for me anyway, is the hunt for a chain of dependencies. You want a particular application, it says you need such and such... you go and find such and such, and you find out you need something else... and so forth and so on.

For me, my choice to use Ximian way back when wasn't so much for the neeto eye candy, but because they had already collected all the libs I needed for some application I wanted to actually use. To that end, I found it to be most spiffy. One massive download later, I had a slew of applications all ready to go.

Now if you are a seasoned geek, it may not be your glass of tea. If you already know what you want to run or have no interest in eye candy, or are a typical control freak who wants to do things their own way, hey that cool.

But keep in mind that part of this linux movement is making an OS that your grandmother would be comfortable using. This is something that both apple and BeOS understood very well (engage flame retardent underpants)

How easy it is to forget that goal.

Re:nostalgic

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with much of what you've posted, but not the statement:

Users who wouldn't be running 800x600 in the first place.

There are several distributions that are taking aim at the non-technically advanced users. Ximian is one of them.

I'm sure you've followed the complaints about Ximian brutally "dumbing down" the user interface. This wasn't done for the sake of "technically advanced users", because those were the ones screaming and yelling to leave their favorite tweaks in. For example, the "simplification" in Galeon for saving links.

Even discounting that, there are times when 800x600 is appropriate. For example, I've often run into issues with gimpy graphics cards that only appear to support 800x600 resolutions. There are other less typical cases, such as trying to run on an iOpener. And finally, some of us don't have the greatest eyesight anymore, and 800x600 is a lot easier to see.

There are valid reasons for working in lower resolutions, and dialogs written for larger screens are a real pain - the buttons are hidden off at the bottom of the screen, and it's a hassle - more so if you try working in the "virtual" mode where a larger screen is emulated by sliding the desktop around.

Well, since you've flamed the prior response (not mine), I won't bother wasting karma on this...