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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."

5 of 258 comments (clear)

  1. 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!!"
  2. 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/
  3. Get with the times... by moreati · · Score: 5, Funny

    Quote: KDE has way more options (the clock properties dialog has five tabs!),
    Actually it has 6 in KDE version 3.1: General, Timezones, Plain Clock, Analogue Clock, Fuzzy Clock.
    For some reason I find that amusing. If you're going to drop some FUD, at least get your facts straight.
    I'm guessing 3.2 will have 12 or 24 depending on it's mode.

    1. Re:Get with the times... by Nat+Friedman · · Score: 5, Informative


      I was looking at 3.0.3, which only has five tabs. Good to hear the tab momentum continues apace in new versions of KDE :-).

      (Also, I wasn't really trying to FUD; just to illustrate the different value systems.)

  4. Re:File Dialog by Nat+Friedman · · Score: 5, Informative

    We don't have a fundamentally new file selection dialog, but we added some quickbuttons to the stock Gtk one that jump you to your desktop, documents or home directory. This makes it a bit easier to use.

    Owen Taylor is allegedly developing a new file manager in Gtk 2.4 that should be much easier to use, and that we expect to see adopted across GNOME very quickly.