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

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: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 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.

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.

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.