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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."

7 of 258 comments (clear)

  1. Most scary Ximian OOo change by twener · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Quote: "- Uses MSFT file formats by default, reflecting the reality of most of the documents you will receive. No longer tells you you're about to lose all your data when you save in an MSFT format. "

  2. I'm salivating by esconsult1 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The reason why I bought an iBook to admin my Linux servers was because of immature user interfaces.

    I was left salivating after viewing the screenshots and reading about the far reaching changes that were made, especially integrating OpenOffice with the rest of the desktop.

    And they're looking into migrating several hundred thousand desktops, especially in Europe. Damn!

    Goodbye Bluecurve, Hello Ximian Desktop!

    --

    Newsfollow.com

  3. Ximian Desktop on Red Hat? by Chicane-UK · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Well I gotta be honest and say.. from the shots I have seen, and from what I have read, I can't really see what the Ximian Desktop offers Red Hat users over the superb BlueCurve front end on the most recent versions.

    Antialiasing, clean & well organised style, custom icons, and specially developed management tools. I really really rate what Red Hat have done, and I could never see myself paying for something like Ximian Desktop to replace BlueCurve.

    --
    "Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
    1. Re:Ximian Desktop on Red Hat? by MS_is_the_best · · Score: 3, Interesting

      When the first Ximian Desktop was released it was certainly better than Redhat's Gnome. With XD2, compared to Redhat 9, I think the difference is smaller.

      Nevertheless I still like what Ximian does. Their Open Office and Gnome patches are still good. I will just wait for Redhat to include them. This because running a distro and Ximian Desktop and upgrading packages from different sources gave me a lot of nasty problems in the past (Redhat explicitly tells to uninstall Ximian in their release notes). However I do not know how that will be with this release...

      If you read the interview it was clear that the main advantage for using Ximian will not be for the home user, but for large corporations. Better application management/more consistency and real user problems solving.

      Nevertheless I think Ximian is a nice open source company, providing the communuity with good patches and Evolution and help adoption of linux. So props to them anyway!

  4. Rock on, Ximian... by rainmanjag · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's kinda strange... OSS with it's release-early-release-often idea almost makes it seem like improvements come so slowly, because they flow in a discrete trickle rather than the major leaps that come much further apart (emphasis on "seem")... Ximian's been working behind a black curtain for so long, it makes XD2 seem like such a gargantuan improvement...

    Though significantly delayed, XD2 was released when Ximian got everything right... and they have... finally I have a desktop environment that I can proud to show to my consulting customers as a viable option...

    -jag

    --
    http://starboard.flowtheory.net/
  5. No mention of when the source release of XD2. by mgpeter · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Hopefully the week of the June 9, they will also release the complete source code to everything they use to build XD2.

    I have 1 Gentoo system at home and 2 Built from scratch machines, and it would be soooo cool to have a ebuild for Gentoo, or at least a Garnome type build script. Especially for their OpenOffice.org version.

    After reading this interview I really Can't wait.... Even tried their ftp site, but the XD2 directory is not browseable by an Anonymous Coward!

  6. Just wondering... by ElGuapoGolf · · Score: 4, Interesting



    Just wondering, but has Ximian made a KDE version of their new industrial theme?

    Ya see, the beauty of the KDE/Gnome thing is that some KDE apps you can't live without, and some Gnome/GTK apps you can't live without. Gaim and K3b/Kmail spring to mind right off the bat.

    I like KDE themes like QTCurve and Keramik/Geramik because it makes the GTK/Gnome/KDE applications look the same. If using this Ximian desktop means that my KDE apps will look out of place, then it doesn't really seem that appealing.

    A theme like this seems like it'd be simple to do, so I'd be very curious to see if Ximian has really done a complete job of it.