Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Interview With Ximian's Nat Friedman

Posted by timothy on from the dances-with-monkeys dept.

Sheepish writes "OSNews features a long and interesting interview with Nat Friedman, of Ximian fame. Nat tells all and talks about the upcoming Ximian Desktop 2 and its differences from Gnome 2, the difficulties of developing the MS Exchange Connector, Linux as a desktop, Mono and plans for Gnome integration, the hundrends of OpenOffice.org changes made to make OOo like a Gnome2 app, and how Ximian feels... about Apple's business. Four screenshots of Ximian Desktop 2 are included too."

3 of 258 comments (clear)

  1. UI Consistency by Rura+Penthe · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm pleased that XD2 is striving for complete UI consistency. This is something I've always felt was lacking in the overall user experience for linux. Having a coherent set of human interface guidelines ala Apple's materials for OS X can do nothing but help.

  2. Maybe I'm in the minority by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful
    I think since RedHat has made a concerted effor to make their distro much more "desktop friendly" the whole Ximian desktop loses a bit of it's shine.

    I recall back when Ximian first started to come out with some slick looking stuff they were much nicer, asthetically speaking, than any linux distro out there. With Bluecurve and the maturation of Gnome 2.xx it seems the need for Ximaina is greatly diminished.

    By the looks of things here I see no need to upgrade from RedHat 9.0 with the exception of getting Evolution 1.4. (And actually if it's faster than the butt slow 1.2 version that would be a good upgrade, now that I think about it.)

  3. Re:Most scary Ximian OOo change by chetohevia · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Well, given that you don't actually lose the data, it's reassuring.

    Since .doc ends up being the underlying file format, the dialog is just needlessly alarming, and they just took it out.