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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."
What a horrible review.
This thing was all of 10 sentences, contains no detail, and just plain sucks.
Can we have a _real_ review, by someone competent, please? Perhaps one that actually took more than 3 minutes to write, and has some detail?
Is it just me, or does this review amount to little more than "Ximian Desktop reorganised my menus nicely for me". It seems hardly worth posting on Slashdot at any rate.
It doesn't even have screenshots! I thought it was accepted here that reviews without screenshots are worthless?!
It's more like a long blurb. Where's the beef?
............. kris
"I thought I could organize freedom. How Scandinavian of me."
You do? I never have.... ALL distros I have ever used that set up a KDE or GNOME desktop for you, have a web browser, normally Mozilla/Konqueror.
Personally I snarfed the Ximian artwork/theme and stuck with my RH9 desktop. It does everything I need, and is pretty well organised. Nonetheless, for business I would definately consider it, if only for the integrated OO and printing work.
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?
Sadly, that was more informative than the review itself.
For Redhat 9 user, there is a serious problem with rpm db conflict. It has been reported here, so install at your own risk.
I searched for quite a while, trying to figure out how to change the default browser for XD2 from Galeon to Opera. I always like to write up tutorials on little things like this when I come across them, so you can find that info here.
--It's Pimptastic!--
It's new and, uh, stuff.
And new stuff is cool!
Think I could make headlines on Slashdot?
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
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.
With the recent thread on the decline in white-collar jobs.. I'm not surprised, when they post nonsense like this to some of the world's biggest sites.
I think it's time some of the editors were given the finger and let some nice Indian people give us quality links for $5 an hour. Slashdot would live on, have more money, be of a higher quality, and so on. (CmdrTaco could stay on as general manager though.)
Normally reviews are cluttered with screenshots or useless information about how a product actually functions and is better than another product. Or even worse where they talk about limitations that a paticular product has over something else and recommend a best fit.
This review was exactly what you want, very little useful information, a claim around it being better without really explaining the short-falls of other options, and a killer feature of recognising menus, which is clearly the most important element of a suite of products that aims to present a user-focused simple desktop solution.
I applaud the Slashdot editors for doing away with reviews that leave us informed or challenged and have instead opted for reviews based just on opinions of someone only a few grades above Joe Sixpack.
This is truly a change for the better on Slashdot and I look forwards to the Windows Server 2003 review where it tells me that installing IIS6.0 was a breeze.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
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/
Bruha writes "Lewt [THAT'S ME!!!] over at Warcry News Network has written his [MY] review for Ximian Desktop 2 targeted at the home users that are looking for a good desktop solution. He [I] 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. Thanks for reading my crappy so-called review, boosting my site's traffic and increasing my Karma, my pageviews and my ad revenue.''
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?
for the 99 dollars it really stands as very affordable for the home user also.
If you value 10 minutes of work for installing java and flash to $99, then it's definitely affordable.
Since many of you do not have the time to read such an elaborate, sprawling column, allow me to summarize:
"0MGz!!!1! X1m14N 1Z t3H r0X0R!!!1!"
You will note that, in summarizing, I have attempted to remain consistent with the author's breathtaking command of the English language, meticulous attention to detail and stunning grammatical prowess.
It seems to me a trifle thing to use the same package names your vendor does and work within how things in your distro are already done.
Never overestimate the end user. -jeramy b. smith
I stronly suspect Ximian marketing pay /. to post articles about XD2, mono, etc
/. editors searched long and hard and eventually found a positive (but unfortunately lame) review (DEF positive review: a review that doesn't say something along the lines of "gnome is just a dock, XD2 is an expensive dock with a better default theme")
the
right now Ximian PR persons are composing angry emails to cmdr'taco, demanding a refund.
DISCLAIMER: this is only a conjecture
Before adopting WHATWG, read the moonlight.NET EULA [http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/moonlight.mspx]
Wait.. It took you three hours to write that..??
Nice. You'd think if someone was going to hype his own review to /. he'd at least manage to use an email address that didn't identify him as the review's author.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
You can download the installer and packages seperatly and point the installer at the files, the installer supports it. (though I can't vouch for how well, not having tried it.)
find the files at one of the Mirrors
GNOME 2 however doesn't have a browser, unless I add something like Mozilla, so this Ximian Desktop 2 idea is great. KDE has Konqueror and you can install Konqueror on top, but I think OpenOffice and Mozilla are more powerful. KDE 3 needs its competition, that would be XD2.
Problem with XD2 is that its really only available for a few distros.
==========
There are two types of people: those who are in the world, and those who aren't.
it's somewhat close to the redhat trick of replacing the rpm module redhat_release. /etc/SuSE-release to "8.2"
A quick googling brought me this and this.
looks like you can just change the version number in
(the better way would probably be to install a new suse-release RPM, though I can't seem to find one)
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.
I installed it the day it came out. I've been mucking with it for a week now and have some observations.
1) What is the "integration" with OpenOffice? Aside from a different splash screen? OK, my theme fonts come across to the user interface, and it uses Ximian icons now, but it loads (the first time) as slowly as ever.
2) They should have left the GDM splash screen scheme alone. It took a while to figure out how to replace their splash screen with my old (custom) one.
3) Mozilla is broken and shouldn't have been released. When on a page that uses javascript to open a smaller window (like TV Guide listings is where it can easily be reproduced) then sometimes the text in the child window is randomly truncated. There are other bugs but that's the most glaring.
4) Ximian cripped Galeon so that it can no longer use themes!!! Bad Ximian.
5) Ximian's installer destroys a users custom menus even when told to leave them alone. My RedHat "system tools" menu is gone, along with my Crossover Office menu. There's got to be an easy way to restore my old menus but I haven't found it yet.
6) The RedHat "alert" icon no longer works. I miss it - it was a nice way to tell instantly if there were any updates (yeah I know, RedHat sends out emails for their updates, but I still miss it).
7) There are some nice improvements like the "network proxy" setting that doesn't workin the default RedHat 9 install works now, so you only need to set the proxy once, and panel applets that need network access actually work now.
8) I know this sounds harsh but overall I do like it. Bugs have been filed so we'll see how it goes in the next few weeks...
No, everyone's complaining because it was a badly written, uninformative and utterly useless review. Don't try to pawn it off on people just not liking what you want to hear, it's not going to work.
1) Read the definition of "review" in a dictionary. I don't think you fully grasp the meaning yet.
2) Learn to write. You know, properly. "Redcarpet really looks cool." Oh, wonderful. What looks cool about it? Guess you forgot that part..and just about everything else that entails a review.
3) Make sure you've finished one and two before you ever submit a story again, if for nothing else than respect for the other visitors.
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).
*sigh* I hate to be the next guy bashing your review since it's gotten bashed enough by now and people already get the idea, but... all that mumbo jumbo as you put it, is by many considered to be the basis of any decent review. A review that just says "I tried it, I liked it, it has nice colors" is not a review. It's good enough to be used in a conversation with your pals, but a review consists of a little more than subjetive shallow remarks about a product. When writing a review, and especialy before posting it on such a high traffic website as slashdot, you gotta ask yourself if the world realy needs to hear your message; if this is important enough to bother tens of thousands of people with. In fact, too little people think about this before they post something on the web. You could just as well have written this in 10 seconds instead of wasting 10 minutes of your day on this by just writing: "Ximian Desktop 2: Ooh, shiny!!!"
Install windows on my workstation? You crazy? Got any idea how much I paid for the damn thing?
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."
Wtf are you on about? How can Debian users be on their high horses? Are you talking about Debian developers?
Sorry, that should be "some Debian users". Not all Debian users are on a high horse.
I frequently hear things like "I just use apt-get, it does all the work for me" or "Apt just works" or "You should just use Debian" when I describe an rpm/RedHat install problem. Apt may be superior to anything on a RedHat system (And is much better then up2date), but Apt doesn't always "just work". Somtime it fails miserably, just like any solution on RedHat (I've tried up2date, apt-rpm, and RedCarpet). Debs can be mispackaged, just like rpms.
Not too long ago, I tried to install Gnome on a Debian Woody system via these instructions. I don't remember the details, but I had to fix at least a dozen problems by hand before apt would download and install everything automatically. Most of the problems involved an old package on the sytem preventing a new package from being installed. It didn't automatically remove the old package like I expected. Sometimes, I had to fiddle with the sources list and download alternative packages.
describe there suggests that your sources.list or something were faulty.
So how is that different then my RedHat rpm's requiring the wrong dependancy?
Look, Debian is a great distro. Apt/dpkg is a good packaging system. I'm going to install it on my second system here when I get the chance.
But apt is not without it's own problems.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Not too long ago, I tried to install Gnome on a Debian Woody system via these instructions
The instructions you were trying to follow describe how to install an unofficial (i.e., not-supported-by-the-Debian-project) backport of Gnome 2.2 to woody and, in fact, the the page containing the instructions also contains feedback from a number of other users who attempted to follow them and ran into dependency problems.
Your criticism of the distro and the packaging system seems a bit unfair, since (1) it was clear going in that other users had been having problems with the packages and (2) the (unofficial) packages hadn't been subjected to Debian's usual quality-control process.
Once it is installed, however, it is very pretty. The menus are clearly layed out for novice users (e.g. Office menu contains things like 'SpreadSheet' and 'Word Processor'). All of the menus are simple and have a 'more' option at the bottom with everything else usually found in that menu.
The theming of Mozilla and OpenOffice to look like the rest of the system makes it feel a lot more like an integrated desktop.
Beyond that, I haven't really used it enough to know what is different from a plain Gnome2 install (I use Gnome 2.2 on FreeBSD at home, and only used Ximian enough to check that it was installed properly before moving on to the next system.)
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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
As a professional product reviewer myself, here are some hints.
1) Don't hide that you're the guy who submitted the story to slashdot. It's rude, at least in my opinion.
2) MS Word has a grammer checker in it. You may wish to use it. "First impressions were of the clean interface it provided just like Windows XP you start out with a mostly blank desktop." This sentence grammer poor. Slashdot posts, usenet or personal web pages that's acceptable. I am not an English major and do make mistakes. But the quality of this review is plain awful. It looks more like the notes you take before writing the review. Using complete sentences would only take a few more minutes of time.
3) Download size is more informative than download time. The site could of been slow, and not everyone is on DSL.
4) Don't refer to Microsoft Office as just "Office" when talking about OpenOffice in the same paragraph.
5) "The OpenOffice.org office suite included is supposed to be even more compatible with Office documents though I did not really do any testing in that department since Iâ(TM)m focusing on the desktop user" That's something desktop users need to do, especially users switching from Windows. Big oversight. You might also of wanted to mention which version of OO is installed.
6) The paragraph on Red Carpet is unreadable. And why is it sad that users will eventually install 3rd party software?
7) Pricing information? Is XD2 free and how much is the pro?
8) In the 'how to get' section, if you're not suppose to put the periods before the wget, then why are they there? It's also not really the smartest idea to promote wget | sh, but that's just the security guy in me talking.
9) You didn't really say much. There's very little information actually transferred to the reader. It's not the length of the review that matters as much as the content. All that mumbo jumbo is important. And please, don't just list mumbo jumbo features, say if they're good or not. And say what's lacking. Otherwise, I'd just read the press release.
10) All this complaining is criticism of a poor review. If you did not submit this to slashdot yourself, it'd be more forgivable. But since you published it and advertised it via slashdot, it has to hold up to a certain level of professionalism. Next time, if you want to do it half ass, don't purposly show it off. It just makes you look bad in front of a large audience of your peers.
11) Don't include this version of the review in your portfolio. If you try to use this as an example of your work when trying to get a freelance paying review, you'd be turned down right after reading the first sentence. Use the advice posted throughout this thread to not only improve the XD2 review, but future ones as well. Many times editors will want to see example work before giving you a freelance job. If your goal isn't to be paid to write, which I don't see why not as you obviously have a strong passion for writing/reviewing, you can still use these pointers to improve yourself in a business setting.