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Sun Mad Hatter Linux Desktop Revealed
magellan writes "Sun has released screenshots of its upcoming Mad Hatter Linux desktop. Mad Hatter includes GNOME, StarOffice, Evolution, and Mozilla. Sun has made minor modifications to Gnome to make it more familiar to Windows users. Sun's Mad Hatter, along with SuSE's new push on the desktop, could make Linux on the corporate desktop and laptop a bigger reality."
If windows is so bad why do we keep trying to copy it?
fp
Nice, but I like the beta redhat screenies better: https://listman.redhat.com/archives/rhl-devel-list /2003-August/msg00117.html
Gnome sure can be pretty - it mught be time for me to switch back from kde....
Personally its not God I dislike, its his fan club I cant stand (bash.org)
It does not have to look like Windows to be user-friendly. Yes, many people are familiar with the Windows interface. Look at OS X. It's not like Windows, it's probably the best user interface out there.
Let's get a unique, yet intuitive interface for Linux, not a copycat.
I'm not so worried about Sun being a nice player. They've contributed some to GNOME development already.
The idea is to let Sun do the not-so-fun-but-profitable work of pulling people over to GNOME from Windows. Sun goes after Microsoft, and we get to keep making fun software.
A lot of the folks Sun's after aren't coders. There's lots of good software for coders out there, because OSS people like writing stuff that they can actually use themselves. Sun likes making money, so Sun does their thing.
I wish Sun had more of a Linux movement, but I suppose Solaris and BSD are really the only things out there that can compete with Linux and more, and Sun wants to keep their sunk investment in place.
May we never see th
I've been swashdotted -- Elmer Fudd
I wouldn't want to support someone so wishy washy
You might not (and the rest of the "community") but the real world people do want to listen to Sun.
the interface that matters is the applications' interfaces. people are familiar with office. hell, ask most of the windows users if they can do mroe than minimize and close a window and they'll say no. most people are accustomed to a particular application. especially office. sun would be better off just to map /home to /My Documents and make the OO.org UI as identical to office as legally possible. this is even more true for more specific apps,like accounting apps, what have you. that is what holds linux adoption back. most people don't even "use" the operating system, nor do they even care to. they use a tool. they could really care less what the OS is. in fact, they only know what it is when it does nasty things.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
It's VERY well done, and some of the things (like the start menu and the systray) are very well done.
You press start to stop the computer.
You press start... to stop the computer!
And pressing the Logo key between Ctrl and Alt will unceremoniously dump the player out of a fast-action full-screen game.
The "standard" Windows GUI, is quite good though.
The graphical shell lacks some things. Does it have a way to search for file names by regular expressions, by exact substring/phrase, or even by all the words? I can't get Windows 2000 to search by anything other than any of the word stems.
Will I retire or break 10K?
This looks like a step backwards compared to Mac OS X, RedHat's Bluecurve, or early screen shots of longhorn.
:)
I guess that depends on what you think of OSX, Bluecurve and Longhorn.
Seriously though, I think interfaces have just been getting worse. (Ex: OSX, WinXP.) Someone really needs to cull the eye candy from the default setup and instead go back to ease of use.
"I wouldn't want to support someone so wishy washy "
If it were one person acting this way I'd agree with you, but it's a corporation. I have no problem with seeing part of that corporation survive while other parts become extinct. That's more likely to happen if you support the part that's making the right decisions.
This desktop is not targeted at most readers of /. - so don't judge it based on what _you'd_ like your desktop to be.
Linux will _never_ gain any major ground in the coporate desktop world until it looks and feels like Windows. Most non-computer-industry types do not like change--no matter what the benefits are. This project appears to fill that very important hole - something that's almost a Windows "workalike" while eschewing any proprietary Microsoft code.
This *looks* good, a bit cleaner than WinXP & it is laid out a bit nicer. Things like "This Computer" instead of the pandering, cheesier "My Computer" set it apart yet the thing looks instantly familiar to anyone who has used Windows.
Kudos to Sun for finally getting the desktop right.
Can we *please* not end every Linux desktop submission with "[perhaps this] could make Linux on the corporate desktop and laptop a bigger reality."?!?!?!
*If* it happens (and that's a big "if") it'll take years, and it's entirely likely that it won't. Assuming Microsoft has only 90% desktop marketshare, that's 10% split among Apple, Linux, etc. That means *no one* is even *close* to MS's dominance on the desktop. (Remember the Princess Bride? Think "land war in Asia") So why does anyone think Sun or Mandrake or anyone else is going to be the one who makes PHBs say "Well, gee, if Sun is behind it, I'll switch everything tomorrow!"?
I like Linux as much as the next guy, but this pie-eyed optimism is not getting anyone anywhere. Hell, headlines here oughtta read "Company X introduces Linux desktop that's nicer than last year's; world continues not to care."
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
actually looks like a step back from CDE.
:-)
I've never said that about any other interface, considering how I hate CDE
It looks like a cheap clone of win95, just not properly done and with inconsistancies everywhere. I think they should have just used bluecurve or something like that.
Ok, I know I'm going to be flammed for this one, but here goes:
Please, Gnome developers, switch Cancel and Ok to a consistent Ok(LHS) and Cancel(RHS)... Please?!!!
So annoying! I'd use Gnome, be proud of it and recommend to all, if not for this one, single, pull-my-hair-out irritation.
As it is, every time I try to introduce Gnome to someone (Mac or Windows user), that's the first place they stumble. Then I have to say, "Well... Eheh... Why don't we try KDE. Mk?".
Look, it sure seems that the whole left-to-right-reading world thinks this way. I think Gnome is a terrific windowing environment, otherwise.
[puts asbestos suit on, real fast]
I like being able to position the task bar at the top of my screen and not have it stretch the entire width of the screen. I like multiple desktops and the only thing windows has I wish did a better job of is the oganization of system configuration guis. I said gui for a reason, I don't like having to learn every venders settings and which config files they use to get my stuff working. The control center does and ok job with this, but I hope it improves some in the future. I can make my desktop look as pretty as windows or gnome with kde, so the diferenciator is the functionality and kde has much more of it in my opinion. Namely being able to easily change permisions on menu items as well as orginizing now it looks. I also like being able to menu items as different users. Maybe I haven't figured out how to do such things in gnome yet, but that's the point, it's easy to figure out in kde.
should be built into it too?
I bet less than 1% of the population needs that extra flexibility in the Multimedia Settings control panel.
What IS microsoft's aversion to regular expressions?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Maybe Sun does have a team of intellectual-property lawyers prepared to scour every single piece of open-source code and he was merely being sincere. ;)
What kind of desktop environment called "Project Mad Hatter" is going to be taken seriously by a CIO?
...
I spend a lot of time with corporate management trying to convince them to make the move towards open-source software, and one of the biggest stumbling blocks is when a serious piece of software has a ridiculous name.
Me: Well, this a multi-user enterprise desktop, with groupware, task-management, exchange-server integration, a full office-suite compatible with MS Office. The great part is that it's going to save you more than 90% in terms of TCO over Micrsoft Windows and Office.
CIO: Great, what's it called?
Me: erm... *mumbles* Mad Hatter...
CIO: (hilarious laughter)
Me:
CIO: No, really. What's it called?
Now, You can get away with it for programming languages, and for some way-out software (though trying to sell a creative director on The Gimp is always tricky), but when you're gunning for the enterprise desktop, wacky names just aren't helpful.
Please, for the sake of those of us actually trying to raise awareness of the Open Source Community, try to bear this scenario in mind.
install cygwin
I do not have permission to install software on a significant number of Windows computers that I use. And does Cygwin (including its installer) work well on Windows 9x, on computers that connect to the Internet through dialup, or on computers whose Internet access is filtered to a whitelist of approved web sites? And is Cygwin XFree86 mature enough to be usable for everyday work?
Will I retire or break 10K?
I don't think this is going to overtake RedHat any day soon, but it's good news for me and people in a similar situation. I've been having lots of trouble getting Linux working on my Sparc Ultra 5, because everything is optimised for 32-bit i86 platforms. I'd would love to have the goodness of Linux optimised for my lovely Sun hardware. Sun's problem was always the software rather than the hardware, and this looks like the best of both worlds.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
There's actually some fairly solid UI research that says the OK button should usually be on the RHS of a dialog. People who speak and read left-to-right languages like English tend to scan a dialog box from upper-left to lower-right, and their brains really want to click on whatever is in the lower-right corner of the dialog. Thus, the default button (usually OK) should almost always go there.
I remember reading this in a book on user interface design about 10 or 15 years ago. I think the research was done at apple, but it wasn't an Apple book. It was a collection of articles in a big blue paperback with a poorly-designed walk/don't-walk sign on the cover, but I can't remember the title. Now I may have to go dig through the boxes in my closet.
The long answer ultimately has to do with usability studies.
Then why, in Windows 2000 Explorer as configured by default, is there a 1-pixel gap between the corner of the screen and the Start menu? It would be nicer if I could slam the mouse pointer against the upper left and then click (Fitts's Law states that the corners are among the easiest screen pixels to hit), but no. Microsoft had to put in a gap between the screen edge and the Start button that does nothing but slow things down.
And why, in the taskbar, does a selected program lighten in Windows 2000 but darken in Windows XP? That difference confuses me every time I work at an XP machine.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Anyone wonder how Sun is suddenly making so much noise about Linux? They expect us to ignore all the recent backstabbing efforts (regarding SCO FUD) by merely distracting our attention with pretty toys?
Expect a statement along the lines of "but to really get the benefit of the cutting edge Mad Hatter, along with a robust, industrial strength OS, take a look at this Solaris-x86 over here..."
Sun certainly has a trust problem to deal with.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
The point isn't to secure the machine, but to secure the user's logged in session. If I have some personal emails open with the screen locked, and the best a would be attacker can do is kill the X session, my data is still safe.
Having said that, if someone leaves a terminal logged in, you can Ctrl-Alt-F* to it and type 'killall xlock' or 'killall xscreensaver' and it releases the X desktop back for normal use.
For instance in this example, why does the logoff button have to be over the start button, doesn't anyone at Sun realise that this is a terrible design decision because if you are a "sloppy clicker" either from being new to computers or having some physical handy cap your will log off the computer.
Also, why does the trash have to be on the desktop?, wouldn't it make more sense to have it as a applet, I mean even Apple who have a religious attachment to their GUI do it this way in OSX
And on the subject of badly implimented Machintoshisms, Why do we still have to dquble click on a PC just because Macs have only one button?.
Couldn't we have somthing better then the start menu, I mean why can't we have some sort of fixed menu where you just go through sub menu's (like how you issue commands in a FPS) then having to go Applications >> submenu1 >> submenu2. If this was the case at least you would be able to build up some sort of mnemonic. ie pressing the window key then 122 to start word or whatever.
What the hell is the clock doing on the right??.
It be fair they do get it right, ie changing the names of my computer and my network places to this computer and network places. A very annoying MS Marketing gimmick, and reducing items to icons on the taskbar.
All in all, This reminds me of a story I once heard that when the japan first whated to moderize their socity someone had the bright idea buying a old diesal engine, and copying exactly, So what they ended up with was a fleet of crappy diesal engines,
Like a developling country the linux community have to learn to abandon what does not work, and favour alteratives that do. Even if linux never becomes dominate on the desktop then we still all win since MS will just knock off our interface ideas (like they do with Apple) for the well being of all users, ie multiple desktops. If we forever follow. then most normal people will think of linux as just being a cheap knock off of windows. Like what we thought of the japan before their auto industry ate ours.
I have had to do exactly that, and the same goes for a lot of the other things he talks about. This is where you're average user will be saying, "The proc what?" And I'm using Mandrake 9.1, which most of us I believe would think of as one of the easiest distros to use.
It has to be said, over and over again whenever an article like this comes up: Linux has a loooooong way to go to create a usable desktop in the same sense that a Windows or Mac desktop is usable. Now, pardon me while I return to my MDK9.1 desktop, to watch my movies, surf the web and pull the pictures off my camera by opening Konsole and typing "mount
I think that the only "serious" Linux desktop is provided by RedHat. Mandrake just doesn't cut it and Ximian does not make a Linux distribution. Judhing from the screenshots, I can hope that there will soon finally be a viable alternative to the BlueCurve desktop. Personally, I wish SUN best of luck with this venture.