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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."
How many desktops does linux have now? 20?
Unless there is only one desktop, you don't have a standardized system for businesses. Personally, I think KDE is a better option for businesses, since it's hardware requirements are much less than gnome's, but that is just my opinion.
It's still good to see companies making a drive to make linux more user friendly and usable for the masses.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
One of the XP backgrounds was real except they put a fake moon in it (the same kind of trickery they use in marketing). In the Sun system, I see that one of the familiarty things was adding an applications menu even though that just adds one more step to your menu browsing. What other than applications are you going to launch? a rocket? At least they didnt make the submenus of applications" into the names of the people who made the programs adding yet another step.
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So, let's see, Sun's proposition is that they will "enhance" the Linux desktop by throwing Java in there.
Now, Java is about as proprietary a platform as they come; just to download the specifications, you have to agree to a license that requires any implementation you base on it to pass a Sun conformance test (I'd like to link the license itself, but the Sun site uses some dynamic content that makes that difficult; just click on the download next to the documentation to see the license). If you dare to download the JRE or JDK, the license gets even scarier, with having to donate pretty much everything you do "based" on that to Sun.
Well, it's par for the course, I suppose: the same cast of characters from Sun Microsystems has been trying to replace open UNIX desktop GUIs with something proprietary before, most notably with NeWS. (As an aside, one of the main Java movers and shakers, Gosling, actually sparked the creation of the FSF and GNU Emacs by creating a proprietary version of Emacs.)
Maybe there would be some argument that this is a deal one had to live with if Sun actually had something to offer in terms of user interfaces. But look at what Sun's history of user interfaces: SunView, OpenWindows, and NeWS--not exactly stellar success stories, either in terms of technology or in terms of industry adoption. These days, Sun is shipping Swing, which manages to be bloated, slow, and thoroughly unintegrated with the Gnome or KDE desktops, and OpenOffice, which also manages to be bloated, slow, and thoroughly unintegrated with the Gnome or KDE desktops.
If Sun wants to ship MadHatter, that's their business: Gnome is open source and as long as they comply with the GPL/LGPL, they can do whatever they want. But I think the Linux desktop and UI needs help from Sun about as much as the US needs economic advice from North Vietnam.