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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"
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it looks like windows on the bottom-part (task bar) and Mac on the top part (menu)... it must be... linux!
ahem... certainly not designed with normal people (i.e. those still operating on 800x600, like my parents only until a few monthes ago) in mind.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
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...
From the Conclusion of the article, it appears that the reviewer actually liked Ximian desktop. But unfortunately, he hardly gives any solid examples of why it is actually good or usable. ... like My computer, trashcan etc. cannot be deleted. Download behaviour of Galeon has changed etc.
The article is like, OK It is customisable, from GUI-apps that too (Standard with any desktop I would assume),detected all my Icons from previous gnome, looks good(?) . Only solid piece of info I got that is that it adds a program bar to the top of the desktop along with the default start menu at the bottom. And yes, most of the old bugs apparently have been fixed.
But in the "bad and ugly" section the reviewer gives real examples
Unfortunately the conclusion of the article (ximian is goog) goes barely supported. though the author does call it a "first look"
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
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.
This review is pants, it just talks about features of GNOME 2.
However, I've seen Michael Meek's OpenOffice slides and XD2 has:
* A rocking OpenOffice.org which blends totally with GNOME 2
* printers:/// so that managing print queues can be done in Nautilus
* a CUPS admin tool which isn't a web page
* tight integration with network sharing (I've heard rumours about nfs:/// working again, but most sources say that XD2 is Samba biased)
http://ximian.com/products/desktop/ just came up, but the server is kinda slashdotted atm...
.. is going to be Evolution 1.4 and Ximian's OpenOffice.org for GTK2.
/.'d, but by all accounts this could be out very very soon. And even if you don't like the desktop, Evolution 1.4 and OO.o Ximian Edition will knock your socks off.
That, coupled with GIMP 1.3 (the screenshots only appear to show GTK1 GIMP 1.2), will mean that GNOME (specifically GTK2) has all the productivity applications to finally get a consistent look across everything, something Linux has not been able to do until now.
Unlike KDE, they are not all being provided by the KDE project - Mozilla, for example, is GTK2 native now.
The real coup for Ximian will be getting GTK2 into OO.o - if they can do this, then the last minor inconsistencies will only be in applications like mplayer, realplay and xmms, and we've all expected media players to look different for years.
(Though, you could go get RhythmBox..)
Ximian's starting to look
Not so sure that's a good indication of smartness. As you said, Ximian is Gnome, and the programs were already in the menu. Hey, Redhat has always been smart enough to keep your menu settings, when upgrading from distribution to distribution. Even Windows does this.
Personally, I got the idea this Barr character does not have a clue. He oohs and aahs about programs like File Roller, which is included with Redhat 9 anyway. And...uh...spends a lot of time talking about how he changed his theme to Grand Canyon, which comes with Gnome also.... It was basically a review of Gnome 2 and Redhat 9.
Yes folks, the time has finally arrived. You know those annoying people who use Windows, and think they are Leet because they put the Taskbar up on the side of the screen? Now we got 'em in Linux. The geeks will have to find something more forbidding and difficult to move to, in order to maintain the technology separation from Joe Six-pack.
...