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Java Desktop System Rivals XP, OSX in Usability

protohiro1 writes "In this glowing review Chris Gulker calls Sun's Java Desktop System 'the most polished and real-world user-ready Linux desktop in existence.' Well, I'm sold. Will this finally sell the PHBs on a linux corporate desktop?" Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN.

43 of 477 comments (clear)

  1. i'm interested... by mOoZik · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...but having a website with broken links (particularly of the screenshot) isn't the best way to garner support, especially for a product with fierce competition.

  2. This is only for Java apps? by heironymouscoward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    So, we can rewrite 20 years of software for this desktop?

    The three most important things about a new platform are: applications, applications, applications. I know the world was meant to switch to Java some time in 1998, but somehow it did not happen except for a certain class (sorry) of application service.

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  3. Sun, eh? by sosume · · Score: 3, Insightful

    So what's the advantage of switching from a Microsoft OS to one from Sun? Since it's not free I actually feel it's a rip-off and a major vendor lock-in. JVMs running everywhere on your machine. I'll pass, thank you very much!

    Sun is making profit over the open source community by selling free software bundled with their own.

    1. Re:Sun, eh? by trout_fish · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If you don't want companies to be able to make profit from your code then you should choose a more appropriate license. If you choose the GPL (or similar) then you choose to let companies profit from you code.

    2. Re:Sun, eh? by Cederic · · Score: 5, Insightful


      >> Since it's not free I actually feel it's a rip-off and a major vendor lock-in. JVMs running everywhere on your machine.

      Hmm. Those two statements don't match.

      It's vendor lock-in because it's $50/year licencing. Migrating away is a matter of installing Linux, Gnome and Java and running the same applications on those.

      What you'll lose are the Sun additions that make it so cheap to maintain, sort out usability, etc. But that's why they're charging for it.

      JVMs running everywhere is such a non-issue I'm confused by you raising it. You are aware that there are multiple sources of JVMs, and they all work identically?

      ~Cederic

    3. Re:Sun, eh? by NineNine · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Sun only cares about one thing when it comes to Open Source, and that's free labour.

      And your point is....? When you give stuff away to everybody and anybody, you can't pout when someone takes your stuff (that you gave them) and makes a ton of money off of it. I don't blame 'em one bit. If this is a useable product and they can make money from it, then good for them. Now, quit your bitching.

    4. Re:Sun, eh? by hollow_man · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Oh please, you just bash Sun because it's the fashionable thing to do on Slashdot these days.

      As other posters pointed out, what about the usability engineers Sun put on Gnome? Or the work they did on Apache/TomCat, or OpenOffice?

      btw if you don't think OpenOffice is free, why don't you fork it?

      Also Sun is a company and it's in business to make money, not to please OSS developers. Yes, it has taken from the OSS world but who can blame them? If you didn't want ppl taking advantage of the OSS code written , under whatever License (be it BSD or GPL) then perhaps you just should have released it under another license...

      You can't stop someone from using software released under $FREE_LICENSE just because you don't like them.

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    5. Re:Sun, eh? by IGnatius+T+Foobar · · Score: 5, Insightful
      The fact that Sun ripped off large chuncks of work from the Open Sopurce community is not a plus, and will do *nothing* positive to the community. [...] I have worked with Sun in the Open source community long enought to know that Sun only cares about one thing when it comes to Open Source, and that's free labour.

      I don't know about the rest of you, but I am sick and tired of hearing all this Sun-bashing from a bunch of half-witted Slashbots.

      Sun has contributed more to the open source community than IBM.
      • We could of course start with classics like NFS and NIS, which appear pretty much everywhere specifically because Sun open sourced them.
      • You think GNOME made such a vast improvement between 1.x and 2.x because a bunch of kids wrote code in their spare time? Sun has a lot of people working feverishly on GNOME. That's why it's so damn polished these days. Sun also contributed nearly all of the new accessibility features, which is a requirement to get in the door for some of those government contracts we want so desperately to see Linux win right now.
      • Ever heard of OpenOffice? Do you think Linux has even a ghost of a chance on the mainstream desktop without it? (If you answered yes, please take your KOffice CD and your delusions elsewhere.) We have Sun, and only Sun, to thank for freeing this absolutely crucial piece of software.
      Sun's biggest liability is Scott McNealy's big mouth. Everyone knows that, and hopefully Sun will wise up someday and either replace him or find a way to get him to quiet down. But to paint Sun as a big advocate of closed software and lock-in, similar to Microsoft or SCO, is beyond stupid. It's just plain hypocritical. Sun's attitude towards Linux is a bit schizophrenic, but they are not the enemy. They may not have gotten up the guts to slap a GPL on the Java runtime, but that doesn't mean they're not a big contributor to the open source pool in other places.
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  4. Not such a bad idea? by DeathPenguin · · Score: 0, Insightful

    I know a lot of people are going to immediately jump on Java saying how terribly it performs on their systems, and I can't really argue with that :) However, I don't think a Java desktop is such a bad idea. My guess it that Sun is targeting their existing users and trying to get them to pay for a Sun desktop for Macs and x86 machines on the network.

    Java's known to be compatible across a variety of platforms, so it makes sense to bring a common desktop to all platforms. If the Java desktop is nearly as good as the Newforge guy claims (And I know Newsforge is pretty biased in favor of anything non-Microsoft), I can see this becoming sort of a standard for businesses already running Sun systems. If they can get the Java desktop to run on top of Windows and make it easy to install, it could even become a de-facto standard for networks running multiple architectures.

  5. The Price by zwoelfk · · Score: 4, Insightful

    From the article: The price, $50 per seat per year, including updates and support is attractive, especially if Sun's $100/seat Java Enterprise System lives up to its goal of allowing 2000+ users to be administered by a single IT worker.

    I was interested in checking it out, but at $50/seat/year it's a little to much for me to suggest setting up on all the machines. I don't mind paying -- but I have Windows machines that I haven't paid anything for in years. I don't have to pay unless I want to upgrade those boxes. This looks like a solution that's trying to be as much like Windows as possible, but with a TCO that's higher.

    I'd be OK with $100 flat fee. Then if I want support (past 30 days or whatever), I can pay extra.
    That said I might want to get one seat just to check it out, but there's no way it's going to replace my current Linux or Windows desktops at that price.

    Z.

    1. Re:The Price by zwoelfk · · Score: 3, Insightful

      (Responding to my own post...)
      Also, since Sun's page doesn't make it clear, I assume that the desktop can't be redirected to another machine without a new seat license. Right now I have dumb terminals that use KDE that is running on a server and redirected over ssh. How will this kind of setup be integrated into this desktop (and still checking licenses?) -- and how easy will it be to transfer licenses around? For example, can I have 4 "floating" licenses that are used as thin laptops connect to the servers for a desktop? I don't have anywhere near enough information to decide on this regardless of how "good" it is.

    2. Re:The Price by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      You aren't the target market. Its aimed at large organization that can use an inexpensive desktop for groups of people.

      As far as you go, your TCO calculations are confused as well. You are comparing not paying anything more for what you already have versus spending anything for something new. Under those circumstances nothing will look good, even another windows or linux box. Try comparing a new windows box with office versus Sun's new kit. The math looks a little different.

    3. Re:The Price by afidel · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Actually IF they can pull that off it would be DAMN cheap. Typical ratio in IT is one desktop person per 100-250 end users, if they can scale that back to 1/8th as many for an already well run organization then this thing would pay for itself many times over. For instance a typical desktop support professional probably makes between 35-55K/year plus benifits depending on the local market, so removing 7 professionals for those 2,000 users costs $100K but saves around $350K in personell. I really doubt anything can get support needs that low though, people are just dumb/ignorant and will need hand holding.

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  6. What is it anyway? by Mjlner · · Score: 4, Insightful
    From the FAQ:
    The Java Desktop System is shipped with Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition, 1.4.2 (with support for GNOME Look & Feel). The Java runtime is built into the desktop and into the Mozilla browser.

    I get the strong feeling that this is nothing more than a customized Gnome-distro with support for Java binaries. Especially since there is no information on what it really is...

    That raises the question "So what?". Why should I be interested?

    --
    Lemon curry???
  7. Come on, guys ... by Chromodromic · · Score: 3, Insightful
    One improvement is the Documents folder on the desktop.

    Wow. Java's really opening up the world to the power of Linux usability. And to think, how many years went by without the Documents folder on the desktop?

    That's why successive Windows interfaces have been progressively dumbed-down from the perspective of a highly-computer-literate user. Marketing types refer to this as greater ease of use.

    Okay. Usability design types, however, refer to it as "progressive dumbing down".

    The Nautilus file browser, while initially set to a large icon view, allowed a side pane and file tree display not unlike Windows Explorer, and it uncomplainingly offered a view of everything in the file system, another feature that presumably would not be welcomed in an enterprise production desktop.

    Uncomplainingly? Yeah, okay, it's a word, technically, but it sucks as a word. If the writologist proofreadicated his articlation, he might findify prosage less awkwarditious.

    Nevertheless, it's a relief that the usability of Windows Explorer is retained in the Java Desktop.

    Also, is Java really open sourced? Is StarOffice? OpenOffice is, but StarOffice, well ...

    Whatever. The article reads like marketing spooge, and it's based on a demo off a CD. Did this really make Slashdot's home page?

    Crap. And to think my post about stripper techno-implants got rejected ...

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  8. the 'real world' by timelady · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You know what? I LIVE in the real world. I DONT like the standard that windows sets. I LIKE being able to customise my fvwm desktop to suit myself.

    What this does is just allow the trained masses to migrate easily. Great. A start, probably. But a leap forward for Linux? Sorry, just dont see it that way. Why do people get excited when another windows clone comes out, and we are supposed to act like its the Holy Grail for Linux?

    Having said that, I understand the business rationale of not wanting to retrain its end users, its a productivity issue. But I dont see how I am suddenly in the UNREAL world because i use, and train users, in Linux. I find windows, and its lack of customisation, closed source, and limited administration, to be a bit surreal, personally!

    --
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    1. Re:the 'real world' by Cederic · · Score: 5, Insightful


      Try supporting a multi-thousand desktop environment. You really really DON'T want users customising and modifying their desktop environment.
      - standard roll-outs of apps no longer work or take considerably longer development effort
      - training becomes more of a pain
      - people spend all day changing their settings instead of being productive
      - people change things so they no longer work, then ring up and complain that things no longer work (cost for helpdesk, for people to go out and fix it, etc)

      The lack of customisation is a big bonus in an enterprise corporate environment.

      For the record, I always customise my desktop, its appearance, and do naughty things like installing my own web browser instead of using the corporate standard. Which is why I always argue that development boxes (which I use) shouldn't have the same constraints that standard users boxes have. Double-standards, etc :)

      ~Cederic

  9. Usability? What usability? Where? by Mjlner · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Where in the "article" is usability mentioned? Or ease of use? Or user friendliness?

    Where in the "article" does it say that the "Desktop" delivers anything more than support for Java?

    --
    Lemon curry???
  10. Re:Stop worshipping Sun already by __past__ · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Sun takes open source software they haven't programmed
    Hm, let's see. There's StarOffice, which they have not programmed, but simply bought, and then released as to the Open Source world as OpenOffice. Then there is Gnome, which they also haven't written themselves, only most of atk, some contributions to various libs all over the place from Pango to Gnome-UI, a lot of documentation and testing came from them. And there are things like NFS/NIS/PAM, which aren't directly relevant for the desktop, and the Linux versions tend to be rewrites based on their open specs, so that only their research and design directly helped the Linux world. So yes, I guess you are technically correct.
  11. Sun has been very good for Enterprise Open Source by Kunta+Kinte · · Score: 4, Insightful
    It's disgraceful how much of the tech community keeps reproducing all propaganda that the impressive Sun hype machine keeps churning out.

    It's disgraceful that people don't check they facts very labeling information propaganda.

    Meanwhile, Sun sends millions of dollars in "license money" to SCO, and keeps spreading FUD about Linux to promote its own OS offering, Solaris.

    True. But this is business kid. It's not black and white, good versus evil. Sun has a competing operating system that they've spent a lot of money in developing. They aren't going to concede the market without a fight. That's logical and to be expected.

    Even Sun's own employees know that Java is a piece of crap,...

    internalmemos.com? Your proof is from internalmemos.com? I take it you also read the Enquirer and Weekly World News to stay informed, don't you?

    Yes, Java can be used for server applications (a claim which Java proponents ridiculuously uphold to demonstrate that Java is good technology -- if it couldn't, it would be quite useless, wouldn't it?), but so can Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby,....

    This argument right here tells me you don't really know much about professional web application development.

    J2EE is one of the biggest things pulling linux into the mid to large webapp/middleware market! Unfortunately, we don't have an application server that quite matches J2EE application servers in OS; except OS/J2EE based servers, of course. I wish people would try to write a few decent sized web applications before they decided that *they-favorite-language* was good enough for everyone.

    Sun has partially funded Tomcat development for a while, also making tomcat the reference implementation for JSP. Those programming languages you mentioned are scripting languages, not web application servers. They don't provide much of the functionality true web application servers eg. Tomcat, JBoss, etc provide.

    Sun bought StarOffice and released it as OpenOffice. Sun continues to fund OO/SO development. Sun put much needed people on the GNOME usuability project. Sun has been marketing Gnome to its customers, exposing it to thousands of conservative businesses who would never have looked at it otherwise. And Sun have probably done a lot more I can't remember right now.

    The world is not separated clearly between good and evil. Get over it.

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  12. Re:A tribute to Microsoft by ctid · · Score: 3, Insightful
    (what a dichotomy for Microsoft haters, such as Sun!!! from one side they are against Microsoft, from the other they copy Microsoft!!!)

    Perhaps it is other things about Microsoft that suck. For example: security, secret file formats, bloated and buggy applications etc.

    By the way, Java is free. Why the Java Desktop is not free ? this is Linux, for Christ's sake.

    Notwithstanding the non sequitur, Linux is free-as-in-speech, not free-as-in-beer. However, you can get Linux for free-as-in-beer if you just search for it on the web. It's perfectly simple to search for free linux downloads with google.

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  13. Re:Stop worshipping Sun already by Eloquence · · Score: 2, Insightful
    If Sun can't get Java right on their own friggin' operating system, where can they? The Linux Java implementation was crappy for years until they finally got around to making it at least somewhat usable, but in any case, Java, at least in its JIT-compiled form, is completely unsuitable for serious desktop applications. OpenOffice isn't written in Java for a reason, but true to form for Sun, it's still slow as molasses.

    Furthermore, given that Sun makes its money selling big iron, it seems to me that they have a vested interest in keeping Java slow and bloated (each JRE being more massive than the last).

  14. what's new? by MikeFM · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I don't really see anything new to this desktop. It's just Gnome cleaned up (the way many of us admins already have it for our users) with the ability to launch Java programs (which we can do anyway last timeI checked)? I didn't really see anything else described. I have no problem with Sun selling this (except for the stupid name).. it'll be good that someone finally figured out not to default with a stupid number of menu options and so forth.. but is there anything really news worthy? It sounds okay for normal users but I'm glad I don't have to use it. :)

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  15. Re:The bottom line - cost by Cederic · · Score: 2, Insightful


    Because of the bottom line - total cost.

    $100 / year / desktop for Java Desktop System
    + 1 support employee per 1000 desktops

    or

    Windows XP licencing cost + Office XP licencing cost /desktop for the MS alternative
    + 5 support employees per 1000 desktops

    You'd have to upgrade Windows/MS Office no more than once every 3-5 years (depending how good your discounts with MS are) to compete on the headline cost, and that ignores the support employee costs.

    I'm sure there are a lot of other costs I've ignored (hardware, for instance) but even taking just two costs into account it's easy to see how the cost implications aren't quite so straightforward.

    ~Cederic

  16. Re:The bottom line - cost by skinfitz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    But I pay about $20 per desktop for WinXP and OfficeXP (inclusive)

    Then there are the OSX machines at $60 a machine that would have to be thrown away.

    Why is that so cheap? We are academic. Why is that important?

    Because whatever we use is what students are exposed to & familiar with.

    Microsoft and Apple know the value of this which is why they give us such hefty discounts - it will be interesting to see what Sun offer.

    I think your comment about 1 support person for 1000 desktops is way off - what happens if that person is off sick or simply stuck in traffic? It is better to have many support people to create an overlap.

    Besides that your 5:1 ratio for XP is way off too - there is no reason whatsoever one person could not admin 1000 XP machines with the right tools, but it would be a bad idea.

    Then there is staff training - technicians working in academia are very low paid and as a result (in the UK at least - I cant speak for anywhere else although I imagine its similar) you really don't tend to get highly educated academically qualified people with degrees working as technicians (unless it's temporary or work experience.) so the skill sets they will apply for work with are what they are familiar with working with either at home, or at college.

    Schools and Colleges simply do not have the money to pay for staff training or to hire qualified people. Even an MCSE will get you a much more highly paid job elsewhere.

    That is the hegemony that needs to be broken to replace Windows and Mac on the desktop.

  17. At least some competition by bizcoach · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Java is ok, but I don't like Sun. Given that together with MS they help funding SCO's attacks on GNU/Linux, they're only a little less evil than MS. However, it's good news for GNU/Linux that MS gets serious competition. That makes it harder for them to extract a monopoly rent from the still strong market position, and it makes it much harder for them to shape the future of the IT world according to their desires.

  18. whats the diff ? by hnz · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I dont get it, why should I use it ? its just linux with Gnome. I get the update and patches faster when I compile the stuff myselve. And what will happen when XIMIAN/NOVEL change there Evolution Licence ?
    Me Dont think the world is waiting for this.

  19. Re:Sun has been very good for Enterprise Open Sour by Eloquence · · Score: 3, Insightful
    With enough effort/resources you can make *any* language and runtime scale.

    And we all know that Slashdot has infinite resources at its disposal. Look, this site has been hacked together by a few geeks in their spare time. It scales well not because of the amount of effort and resources invested in its deployment, but because the platform is simply lightning fast -- there are no unnecessary libraries and APIs, instead, the webserver API is accessed directly using mod_perl. Database access is nevertheless not tied to a specific DB -- without any effort whatsoever, Perl DBI provides a transparent and fast interface to a large number of DBs.

    For example, generating static pages from dynamic data at short intervals and serving those instead,

    In Slashcode, old pages are archived. New ones are generated dynamically. This is necessary because of the rate of modifications.

    If Slashdot used JSP or ASP.NET they'd be able to significantly decrease the load on their MySQL database

    Not only is this statement unsupported, it is also irrelevant. According to the FAQ, Slashdot uses a single MySQL server and 8 webservers. This shows clearly where the major load is.

    And their performance suffers as well.

    Also an unsupported statement. I and many other people I know use Slashdot to check their connection speed because it is almost always highly responsive.

  20. Re:Explain by BlueF · · Score: 2, Insightful

    People who use XP, absolutly hate XP.

    I absolutely love everything about XP except M$. Go figure.

    In terms of useability, features, and *GASP* simplicity -- really, we're talking user interface here -- XP does nearly every single thing I want it to. In fact, rarely do I find myself thinking of a feature that if not included, hasn't already been thought of and created by 3rd parties.

    Don't get me wrong, I'd love to love OS X or any other *nix flavor. Sadly, I've yet to meet a distro that can hold a candle to the useability I've learned in Windows over the years.

    Then, aren't most of us stuck in the same trap, more or less, with the OS we "know" best?

  21. Re:Article Summary by Bugmaster · · Score: 4, Insightful
    You may find it funny, but broken copy/paste is actually the reason I don't use Linux on the desktop. Oh, I'm sorry, what, it's not broken ? It's just giving me a choice of which copy/paste method to use ? Sorry, that's not good enough.

    On Windows, I can copy/paste pretty much anything from any program to any other reasonable program -- images, files, text, URLs, whatever. In Linux, I have to use a different button for each program, and half the time it doesn't work at all. If you think that's a trivial complaint, then you probably aren't using a desktop at all -- you must be doing all your work in vi or something.

    --
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  22. Re:Not again... by Pedrito · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Once again, someone is scraping together a Linux distro, trying to make it look like Windows, and giving us absolutely jack in terms of innovation, *better* usability, or creativity.


    Actually, that's precisely what Linux needs. If it doesn't look like and work like what people are used to, they're not going to use it. I agree some innovation would be nice, but I'd settle for something that works like Windows for the most part.


    The Linux community has tried time and again to do new, fresh, creative things with the desktop, and it repeatedly fails to gain favor with end users for one simple reason. They don't understand it becuase it doesn't work like what they're used to.


    Sun is on the right track. Once you start getting the mainstream users over, then the innovations will come, little by little.


    I have two neighbors who have their XP boxes so customized in terms of UI that I can barely find my way around. That's frustrating as hell, especially when it's me that needs to fix something on them.


    The first time I used a windowing environment under Linux, it was set for the right mouse button to do what I expected the left mouse button to do. I could never get used to it.


    The target here is your Joe Average computer user, and this is what you want to do to get companies to buy it for Joe Average


    Forget innovation for now. Marketshare is what you want. I truely want to see Linux succeed, but I've seen the hype for years and the problem has always been the failure to follow the paradigm that users are used to. People don't like change. I don't mean geeks, I mean people. Mr "Joe Average" mentioned above. They want simplicity and comfort. They want to be able to get on with their work without having to relearn how to do everything that they already know how to do in Windows. And that's what company IT departments are looking to satisfy.

  23. The Sun breakdance and zigzag by theolein · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I read about this a while ago and at first thought Sun had gone the whole hog and turned out something like jDistro i.e. a completely Java based desktop environment, but then discovered it was YALD (Yet Another Linux Distro) albeit a clean one, from the same company that bashes Linux one day because they're pissed that it's taking customers away from the hallowed Solaris, and pushing it like crazy the next in an attempt to actually market StarOffice and grab a piece of the Linux pie.

    The distro, because this is what it is, will certainly gather a few customers that want 24/7 desktop support and don't mind paying for it, but they're going to have an uphill battle against established players like RedHat and SuSE in the enterprise and Debian and Gentoo in the small space. There really isn't much room for YALD these days.

    Sun would almost assuredly have preferred to have done all this on Solaris, but no one is interested anymore, given Sun's haphazard moves in Solarisx86 and the increasing popularity of Linux in governments and large businesses.

    What is Sun's problem? Easy, they make excellent servers and a robust stable OS, but their pricing and their totally insane one day on next day off commitment to TotD (Trend of the Day) and comments by no less than McNealy and co. only serve to make potential customers even more wary. i.e. no clear long term goals!

    What could Sun have done instead of this YALD? They should have taken an intelligent risk a while ago and comitted to making Linux robust, fast and scalable on their own good quality hardware. This is the route that IBM has gone and it is paying off bigtime for IBM. They should have realised that proprietry *nixes in the server room are on the way out, due to costs alone (OS, propritry support and application porting costs)

    Instead Sun's McNealy likes to think like SCO's McBride one day (All your IP are belong to us) and like Steve Jobs the next (My desktop is better than yours)

    What he hasn't noticed is that Apple has taken a very consistent long term approach to establishing OSX and Apple hardware as popular amongst consumers and design pros first and slowly amongst enterprise CEOs, CIOs etc second (Hey, WTF, Oracle runs on that snappy XServe?) with the byproduct of being immensely popular amongst *nix Sysadmins (The number of Linux and Solaris Sysadmins running around with Powerbooks and iBooks is amazing).

    As for this YALD being more usable than WindowsXP, this must be a joke, right? Windows and Microsoft have a terrible security record and a bad image as wife and market abusers, but they have a huge marketshare, almost all of the desktop applications and an acceptable and responsive Desktop UI. For all its problems Windows is here to stay for a long time (and copy-paste actually works)

    Sun should stick to what it does best, and avoid running off into uncharted waters every second day.

  24. Re:Article Summary by EvilNight · · Score: 4, Insightful

    He's definitely right about this one. That sort of copy-paste and drag-drop power is taken for granted in Windows, and it's one of the things a Windows user is going to notice is missing instantly when using linux.

    Linux desktop simply isn't ready to tackle Microsoft yet. It's too kludgy and doesn't have enough program interoperability. When it does, I'll switch with a big ole smile on my face. I just hope linux gets a good desktop before I am forced to switch to a Mac to get away from Microsoft.

    --
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  25. Still missing the point by ZoneGray · · Score: 5, Insightful

    From the article:

    >> Java Desktop System could be dropped into most non-technical enterprises in places where general productivity was the mission,

    What he misses (like nearly all of the Linux On The Corporate Desktop advocates) is that nearly every small business uses some sort of vertical-market application as their central IS system. There are packages for real estate agents, beverage wholesalers, dental offices, auto repair shops, property management, and for practically every other business you can think of. And nearly all of them run on Windows.

    Every small business I've ever worked with uses something like this, and that's always the obstacle to having such companies even consider Linux.

    Perhaps as more of these are moved to an HTTP-based architecture, the doors will open for Linux on the business desktop, but until then, the real lock-in isn't MS Office but the zillions of vertical-market apps that run on Windows.

  26. Re:Explain by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Your a fanboy huh? I love Windows XP. Its a great User Interface.

    Here is what I do with one click on a daily basis:

    1) Launch any application I choose.

    2) Open any file directory of my choice and manipulate it's files (with one-click).

    3) Type the path to any local or remote directory and browse it.

    WinXP is great. I'm sure OSX is too, but your too much of a fanboy to see that computers are just tools and not extensions of your ego (as Apples marketing department would have you believe-you have to justify that extra grand somehow).

  27. Re:Article Summary by David_W · · Score: 2, Insightful
    If I want to replace existing text with the text I'm pasting, can I highlight it and paste over it? No.

    I'll easily grant the first two points you mentioned, but this last one isn't fair. The first ones deal with missing features, while this one is a methodolgy issue. Highligting text to place it in the cut buffer is Just the Way X Works. X shouldn't have to change it's behavior just because that's how the clipboard works in Windows. I know many people who greatly prefer the X behavior, even though they can't do what you stated above.

    (That being said, it would be nice to have as an option you can toggle, but that doesn't seem to be what you were advocating here.)

  28. speculation: positioning "java desktop" for future by flacco · · Score: 2, Insightful
    java would have a lot more friends on the desktop if it had a shareable JVM so you didn't have to lug in another multi-megabyte VM every time you started the smallest utility.

    Maybe this is what Sun is positioning this desktop for: future versions fo the JVM might have this ability.

    while we're at it, a lightweight servlet engine for lightweight desktop web applications would be quite nice too.

    --
    pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
  29. Morons on both sides of the argument by spitzak · · Score: 4, Insightful

    1. The "X clipboard" that most people are talking about is NOT the "clipboard" from Windows. It is DRAG & DROP!!!! With the huge advantage that you can move windows around, raise and lower them, and close them, before you drop. Basically selecting something is the start of a drag, and clicking the middle mouse button is a drop. It is EXACTLY the same (the normal complaint that you can't select the text to replace? Try doing the same action in Windows using drag & drop) Therefore X invented drag & drop first, something Microsofties are loath to admit.

    X's problem is that they failed to provide any kind of clipboard, thinking this drag & drop was sufficient. This led a lot of idiots to thinking the drag & drop WAS the clipboard, and stupid things like adding cut & copy actions modify the currently dragged item. When people started doing this correctly (all Gnome and KDE and most other toolkit based programs do) by putting the clipboard into a different buffer, people then complained about that (look at one of the other letters who said exactly this, apparently that person is too stupid to realize that if Ctrl+X modified the selected text, then selecting text would also modify the Ctrl+X text and thus completely defeat the purpose of the clipboard).

    Microsoft is 100% to blame for the fact that some programs use Alt and some use Ctrl for the shortcuts. When the GUI programs were being developed, they copied the Mac. Now LOOK at a Mac, and check where the Command key is. Nobody in their right mind would use any key other than Alt to emulate that. But Microsoft is not in their right mind. Almost all MSDOS programs and most early Windows programs were "inconsistent" too and used Alt instead of the Microsoft standard of Ctrl.

    If you discount old character-terminal programs like Emacs and VI (which both incidentally run on Windows and are just as "inconsistent" there) then I have never seen an X program that uses anything other than Ctrl+XCV or Alt+XCV for cut & copy & paste. There are however a lot of programs that mess with the drag & drop buffer instead of the clipboard for these actions, so I guess there are 4 arrangments.

    As for data other than Text, well here Microsoft is doing a lot better. Interestingly enough, both X and Windows have almost identical mechanisms for sending data other than text (lists of atoms identifying what types are available, and the dropped-on program chooses the type to get, and the called program converts to that type). Where Microsoft was smart and X was idiots is that Microsoft ASSIGNED some symbols, such as one for a BMP image. Stupid X consortium thought these assignments would be worked out by users and so now all X has is about a dozen ways to identify text and nothing else. Fortunatly it looks like the whole idea is going to be scrapped on both systems, to a system by which the dragged data is either plain text, or a URL identifying where the data is stored. This has the huge advantage that programs can reuse code that reads/writes files to interpret the dropped data, and programs that cannot understand the URL can easily run other programs that do. Because of this massive change it may be possible for X to catch up.

  30. KDE? by SyntheticTruth · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'm sorry, but I use that kind of copy-n-paste, drag-n-drop "innovations" every day in KDE. This is one of the *main* reasons I use KDE on my desktop, because the KDE apps work together so well.

    Granted, it does not work so well from a KDE app to, say, some independant GTK app, and vice-versa. KDE does *not* feel kludgy to me, and I've used just about every damn Desktop/Window Manager that you can possible get and compile for Linux, as well as SGI's 4DWM on the old Irix machine that sits on my desk.

    All it would take is for the KDE folks and the GNOME folks to sit down and implement a shared C-n-P and D-N-D functionality, which if I remember correctly, might actually be happening.

    So, to sum it up, I think a Linux desktop *is* ready to tackle any other OS out there, if it is a unified desktop. If you built it from ad hoc pieces, then I would agree with you. I just don't see any major distro doing that though.

  31. Where to begin... by b-baggins · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Typical Linux Geek thinking ease-of-use = dumbing down and that a good interface means pretty icons.

    Ease of use means making the computer work the way PEOPLE think, not forcing people to work the way COMPUTERS think.

    Linux geeks and other developers, who have been conditioned to think like the computer because of the work they do, have the mistaken notion that advanced computer user means a user who has learned to force the natural human way of doing things into the artificial machine way a computer does things.

    Any interface that doesn't force this paradigm is "dumbed down."

    The truth is, the Linux geek has simply been conditioned to do things the difficult way, not the natural way. Designing the interface to do things the natural way is not dumbing it down, it's making the Linux Geek's paradigm obsolete. Of course, the Linux Geek doesn't like this, so in a fit of human ego, he looks his nose down on anything that points out the stupidity of his position (working the way the computer demands; being the tool of the computer), and calls it "dumbing down."

    The Sun Java Desktop follows this same, stupid convention.

    The start menu is in the wrong place. In cultures that read left to right, top to bottom, the most important area of focus is always the upper left corner, followed by the upper right corner, then the lower right corner. The area of least importance, that takes the most conscious effort to locate, and feels the most unnatural, is the lower left corner. So guess where Sun, Windows, and other Linux copycats put the most important UI widget in the whole interface?

    Next, the start menu is packed with long lists of applications in tons of different categories. To the Linux Geek, this is heaven, because it forces him to think like a computer. To a human, this is unnatural. The human mind works in small groups. The start menu should be sparse, with a few, general categories, containing a few applications. Lists should have no more than five items, with an option to dig deeper. You make the detail a conscious choice to the user, not throw it in his face. That's the Windows paradigm: Let's see how much crap we can throw on the screen because it proves our program is POWERFUL!!

    And, finally, the reviewer totally ignores the most important UI elements for ease-of-use, which shows he doesn't get it...still.

    Does the UI still use the web browser paradigm for file location? This is asinine. The web browser paradigm is based on pages of information. The folder/file structure of a hard drive is designed around a, well, folder, folder contents model. Using a page serving paradigm to locate items in a filing cabinet is stupid, and continuing to insist on it is asinine because it is unnatural, feels unnatural, and requires the user to expend too much effort to find what he wants.

    What about configuring items in the start menu? How easy is it to add things? Remove things? No mention of this.

    What about installing applications. Does the user have to deal with /usr/share, /usr/bin, and crap like that, or are applications put in a folder called Programs?

    What about account management? Can the GUI allow root commands for installing software the way OS X does, by authenticating in a dialog, or does the user have to think like a computer, and change his identity just to install a program?

    This review can basically be summed up as: This is a cool desktop because, hey, it's got a cool look, all the apps follow that look, there's a documents folder on the desktop for morons who don't know any better, and the start menu is so full of crap, it's unusable.

    Sorry, but Linux is STILL not ready for the desktop. Go back to OS X, study it again, find out that it's NOT Aqua and throbbing buttons that make it a great GUI, and try again.

    --
    You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
  32. Partisanship by selfdiscipline · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'm a PC user, and have been for many years. I haven't used Macs much at all, but the few recent times I have, I've been very pleased.
    If I wanted to buy a powerful, stable system that I didn't have to spend much time tinkering with, it would be a Mac. The only reasons I have a PC running linux right now is because it's cheap and I like to tinker.
    For the average desktop user now, I'd recommend the Mac. The only thing that you'll loose by getting a Mac is the convenience of being able to run all software made for windows. In exchange for this, you'll get pretty close compatability with other *nix flavors, which means you can benefit from the majority of open-source software out there.
    If you have to choose between PC/Windows, MAC/OSX, definitely go with the latter.

    --


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    Incite and flee.
  33. This should be what the story is about by Cokelee · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Fuck Sun.

    They suck.

  34. Re:Article Summary by RevAaron · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Drag-n-drop power is also something I miss when using Windows. I don't consider myself loyal to any platform, I'll use what works. On a PC, your drag-n-drop abilities are pretty severely limited to a handful of operations, and apps typically have to support it specifically. On Mac OS, a lot of areas support DnD without the developer having to write code for it especially. For instance, on the Mac, I can select some text- in an edit field, Word doc, or just on a webpage and drag it to my desktop. Or drag it to Emacs or some other editor.

    This kind of functionality doesn't sound all that important. But it can really reduce the time it takes to grab some information, among other things. I can just select some text in my emacs-based IRC client and drag it to Safari, and it'll see that it's a URL and go there. Very handy.

    --

    Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad