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Ximian Desktop 2 Reviewed
Bruha writes "Lewt over at Warcry News Network has written his review for Ximian Desktop 2 targeted at the home users that are looking for a good desktop solution. He mentions this is a good product that could be bundled with Redhat or Mandrake to provide a one stop solution for the desktop user where they dont have to install any extra software to fully surf the web. Which you do with KDE/Gnome installs of most distro's."
I learned more about this product by spending 20 seconds on the ximian.com website than by reading this entire "review". Are the /. editors even bothering to read these stories before they post them these days?
Mandrake??? Ximian currently doesn't support Mandrake for XD2, only for Evolution 1.4.
If anything, he should have said SuSE, who is officially supported.
Either way, you are right that the distros do a great job already. However, I have installed Evolution 1.4 via Ximian's network software installer and found it to be an absolute dream.
I assume XD2 is the same, but I am a Mandrake user, so I haven't tried it.
If both systems are Linux Standard Base, then I don't see why it shouldn't work, though.
Geez, something really stinks here.
First, a really lame and pathetic review gets posted to
Then, the same guy that submitted the story makes a lame comment about the review, and gets modded up instantly.
I'm beginning to wonder if someone at
What an abuse of power.
I do not understand the point of buying ximian if gnome2 is just as good. Is there any goodies that are not included in vanilla gnome?
What about FreeBSD and Unix support? So far it looks like a mandrake, suse, and redhat only product. Not even debian support is included.
http://saveie6.com/
On all those screenshots there are many "holes" in the words, as if the layout engine had trouble figuring out glyph sizes. What is that caused by? Did they get signs wrong in the kerning tables or something?
That is a valid concern. Ximian is not right for everybody - if you do a lot of tweaking to your system, lots of upgrades and whatnot, then you would probably be better off without it. If you are running IT for a business, Ximian has a lot to offer - simple install, consistant, bundled with many third-party applications. That last point is a big time saver when rolling out numerous new desktops.
As far as distribution support, that's like trying to hit a dozen different moving targets all at the same time. Better to settle on a common target and leave it to the administrator to take care of his/her distro's idiosyncracies.
(Score: -1, Stupid)
I've been using XD2 since Tuesday and, to be honest, there's not much more to it over Redhat. The fonts are much better, the menus are better-organized (although picking up programs is a bit hit-and-miss as some Redhat wouldn't recognize Ximian does, and the other way around), everything just looks better, and the software is more 'up2date'.
That's not to say I'll be switching back to plain Redhat anytime soon - I really like XD2. It's just not a huge leap. Think the difference between RH8 and RH9.
I'd had to say I agree with the comments from "A look at Ximian Desktop 2" @ lwn.net. LWN look
.rtf. Contrary to the Ximian marketing and PR until OO can perfectly edit and decode MS Office docs its simply not ready for Enterprises that need to constantly exchange MS docs with other companies.
While this type of lockin and setup is fine for the home user I don't see this fitting into the corporate environment at all. First off OO simply CANNOT import all word docs correctly. Basic text is does fine, but as soon as you add a bullet point or any other basic formatting OO chokes on it. Sure the person who recieves your editted file can do some tabbing and fix some messed up spacing but how unprofessional is that? I wouldn't return a MS word doc that I had editted in OO to anyone using Word. I'd make sure and tell them I only do
Another point which someone at lwn made as well was the lack of "corporate management tools" to go along with Ximian. This is something that I think KDE is starting to have and shipped with Windows 95 eight years ago. You can't just call something enterprise ready and then not measure up to the products that were released almost a decade ago. Looking at the local security policy tool in Windows XP shows just how featurless XD2 looks in comparison
So basically you have a word processor and office suite that can't reliably exchange docs with the most widely used Office suite and you have a desktop that has none of the management features that Enterprises need. Like I said this isn't what you need to play with the big boys.
Another thing I question is with the advent of Gnome 2.2 is there even a need for a Ximian desktop anymore? As someone who has used Red Hat 8 and up I just don't see the value in letting Ximian take over my already excellant desktop.
In the end I think Ximian is fine for home users and possibly small businesses who dont' need to exchange docs with the outside, but its not the Enterprise Windows Replacement just yet.
I continue to be a fulltime desktop linux user and strongly belive in its future, but when you compare reality with what XD2 offers XD2 really comes up lacking. Possibly its just one of those beginning milestones where we can say "see look how polished linux is", but beneath the surface there are still a ton of issues that need to be addressed before you can expect to just plonk a linux desktop in front of a someone and expect them to be able to function just as well as they did with Windows and MS office.
* Fulltime RH 8.0 and OpenOffice user who wishes MS Office formats weren't hidden.
Come again? I'm using KDE 3.1 and Konqueror right now as I write this; I didn't install Flash or Real or even Java at first. It ran just fine without 'em (unless I wanted to view a Flash site or run a Java applet of course - the same deal as with any other browser).
I've used nothing but Debian for years and I've only had dependency issues in two situations:
- First install on a new system, when apt is still trying to get a working base config.
- Installing packages from unstable, which is always caveat emptor.
Not that apt is perfect or anything - some people will happily tell you it shits roses, which ain't the case. But I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to manually mung a package or any other files apt controls. Files which control apt - sources.list and whatnot - I do change every now and then, but mostly as mirrors appear and disappear.Not that it doesn't have a bit of a learning curve. Apt sometimes isn't smart enough to figure things out on its own and needs intervention. But in those cases you can nearly always use apt's (or dpkg's) public interface to solve its own problems.
So
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
I'd been waiting for XD2 impatiently - after all, XD 1.4 was such a big step over what was bundled with Red Hat at that time. So when XD2 finally came out I immediately installed it.
.openoffice directory tree before it'd work again. The help browser would not work either, which is a pain since I find that a preferable way to read man/info pages. Additionally, the Ximian menus seem to be missing a LOT of programs (in comparison to Red Hat).
My impression, summed up in one sentence: I've now gone back to a stock Red Hat install.
Slightly more information:
The bundled fonts were certainly superior to Red Hat's. I do like Ximian's file selector. But that's about all that struck me as being better.
On the downside, my RHN applet suddenly refused to work - not sure why since it didn't look like Ximian did much with my Python packages. Also, after I tried to back out of Ximian's version of OpenOffice I found that "regular" OpenOffice wouldn't work - I had to delete my
Ximian's shining jewel, Evolution, no longer seems to be a superior e-mail client. Mozilla Mail or Thunderbird are just as fast and work better. As Mozilla has been adding features, Evolution seems to be removing them.
Final summary: I'm not sure why this took a year to produce. It's just not worth it - there's not much value added in XD2.
#DeleteChrome