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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."
Over at LinuxWorld, Sun was demonstrating the Mad Hatter desktop. However, it wasn't just Mad Hatter on a single computer, rather it was set up on dummy terminals connected to a network computer, with a login simply being a smart card inserted into a reader within the terminal. So, what's special about that?
Well, now imagine if your work (well, porn watching) was interrupted by a nosey boss (or mother). All you have to do is yank the card out, the screen locks itself and renders itself ready to other users. You can go on to another more private terminal and simply stick your card in, and presto - everything you were doing is now displayed on the new terminal. (back to porn!)
Cool stuff, but fairly much in competition with LTSP.
I always think it's great when another hardware manufacturer sees the light of open source software. But when it's coming to sun the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is saying.
Here we have Scott McNealy telling people ""Don't touch open-source software unless you have a team of intellectual-property lawyers prepared to scour every single piece" of open-source code. " yet they're also releasing an open sourced distribution of Linux.
What's the deal with Sun? One minute their CEO is in a penguin suit extolling the world starts with open source, then it's Solaris will save the world, then it's Linux is doomed because of the SCO thing, etc.
I wouldn't want to support someone so wishy washy
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
I like the simplicity of it. I'm not a fan of the new XP look and feel though. 98 was a good year.
My main problems with Windows are the bugs, the licensing, and the built in limits meant to encourage home users to upgrade to their $4000 enterprise edition, which gives you comparable functionality to Linux and other free operating systems.
An OS can have a great UI (like Windows), but still be terrible in most other ways (like Windows).
Microsoft Windows is the bimbo that everyone wants to date -- great looking exterior, but nothing underneath the surface. It's it only real purpose is to fuck you over.
Linux is like the mousy looking girl who works at the library. Smart and fun as all get-out, but not necessarily as pretty as the bimbo.
Now Sun is trying to offer a library girl with bimbo good-looks. I say more power to them.
Read Suns position they are right to make it simple. Looky and feely is stupid for offices. Make it work and not have bunghole dep and debug problems. Keep it simple and functional for business they will love you! That is why MS is not selling to small business the way they want. XP, 2003, need 256meg of ram minimum or they will run like a dog on an old hp P2 or P3 slot one! Get rid of all the anime and flash and bells and whistles if you run thin clients and you want to reuse your 3-5 year old machines! Microsoft is bloatware and businesses know this. By MS trying to be Nervana for gamers, music and movies they have lost track of business big time. Sun is right on with this approach, they see the throut and they are going for it, so is IBM. Linux and freedom for the business people right on brother!
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
That sounds like the most "optinal" UI to me.
It's not -- it falls prey to the same issues of getting trapped that running simulated annealing without keeping things hot enough long enough runs into.
People *do* seek minima, but they will seek out local minima, not just global minima. If they're offered a feature that will make things easier and better with no cost to them, they'll take it. However, if they have the option to use something better but there is significant relearning time, they may well choose not to put out the effort.
In the case of Windows, many people know Windows. There are known issue with Windows where it does not fit with current best practices in human interface research. Take...oh, say, the use of pie menus, for instance. However, people are familiar with Windows's current linear menus, and even if there was a long-term benefit to changing to a different interface, they are going to be unhappy with the sort term cost.
I believe that the same thing is true of Linux.
How will Linux UI become "better" in the future? Why isn't these things implemented now?
The UI on Linux has been *steadily* (and compared to competitors, extremely rapidly) been improving. About twelve years ago, Linux didn't even exist. About ten years ago, you needed to be a bit of a kernel hacker to consider touching Linux. Seven years ago, a fairly serious techie experimenter, comfortable with poking around with your bootloaders. Five years ago, you had to still be a pretty decent power user, be comfortable not having a GUI for configuring much of anything, and be able to deal with lots of incompatibilities with Windows software, much less little hardware support. Four years ago, you had to be willing to deal with pretty alpha-ish, flaky or archaic desktop environment software, and still had to worry pretty constantly about hardware compatibility.
Frankly, Linux as a general user desktop environment has essentially gone from zero to threat #1 on Microsoft's worry list in the last three or four years. In some areas, UIs on Linux have surpassed their Microsoft equivalents. KDE's use of detachable panes or GNOME's complete user-configurability of keyboard menu equivalents are pretty neat. Four years ago, Linux multimedia was a pretty sad thing -- there was a commercial mpeg player called mtv and a couple of projects. Today, properly set up Linux boxes smoke Windows in latency. Microsoft has not adapted will to the tougher security requirements of an Internet-connected age, as Linux has.
Linux still has issues that keep some people from using it. A lack of entertainment software (most traditional video games do not make very good open source projects) is significant. Poor inter-distro binary and library compatibility is also an issue. If I had to ship something in binary format that I knew would run on Linux boxes, I'd probably ship it in PE format, because Wine can provide stronger guarantees about binary compatibility than Linux itself can. Linux also does not currently, IMHO, cater as well to the power-user-but-not-techie as Linux does. The light user, who uses a spreadsheet, word processor, email program, and web browser (oh, and Solitaire), has little problem with Linux other than an inability to interact with Microsoft Office file formats reliabily, and enjoys increased stability. The techie loves Linux's ability to be remotely administered, its performance, customizability, scriptability, huge (and free) suite of development tools, and availability of source to fix irritating bugs. The almost-techie-power-user, however, runs into problems. Linux has a thinner layer of GUI over the internals than does Windows. They're probably going to have to interact with the CLI. The power user may want to install unusual software, the sort of thing that doesn't come packaged, but be incapable of dealing with any problems in compiling that software.
So I believe that Linux is getting better for most desktop users much faster than Windows is, but there are definitely categories of users that will not be happy with Linux.
May we never see th