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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.
So, it rivals OSX in usability because Nautilus has a toolbar button that opens a Documents folder, it can browse SMB and NFS shares, Evolution showed an hourglass cursor while launching, and - are you ready for this? - cut, copy and paste work.
Yep, I'm sold.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
The enlarged screenshot is actually here, for anyone interested.
and of curse Star Office 7.
Just to exercise your brain cells - Linux (and XFree) is written in C - does this prevent you from running programs written in other languages?
Jeez - the stupidity of some people.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
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.
In this glowing review Chris Gulker calls Sun's Java Desktop System 'the most polished and real-world user-ready Linux desktop in existence.
From this article :
The "proper" name of Sun Linux is "Java Desktop System" (which can be confusing as Sun is branding everything as "%java%" lately, exactly the same way Microsoft did with their ".NET"). The development/high-end version of Java Desktop System (JDS) is called "Java Enterprise System". The distribution is based on SuSE 8.2 and not on Red Hat Linux as it was originally said about a year ago.
According to that article Java Desktop System is a Linux distribution, not just a desktop.
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???
Can we say *yawn*?
Ximian pops up looking like Outlook. The overall layout looks like Windows. Ad nauseum. 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. Trying to accomodate Windows users by giving them a similar interface, but branding it Linux, is just plain foolish.
Make a product that's better than Windows on *all* counts, is bundled with custom-written applications instead of tweaked versions of existing ones, and then i'll raise an eyebrow.
I don't think Windows is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but let's acknowledge the faults of the alternatives. There are dozens upon dozens of Linux distributions, and so far, i've seen virtually *nothing* worth noting from an interface perspective. We brand everything as being intended for this and that audience, this and that purpose, whatever emphasis..but with the exception of some underlying framework, isn't this just a essentially a rehash of what dozens have done before?
I'm sure this will get more than few people stepping up to proclaim the vast differences between their distro of choice, but please save it. "Debian uses apt!", "Gentoo uses portage and is intended for..!" meh. They're both Linux, they both lend the capacity to do whatever the hell you want, and they can both be made to run the exact same applications...which, really, is what the average end user cares about, above all.
The average user is going to take one look at this stuff and go, "Ok, so if it looks like Windows, but doesn't run all the apps I need, why bother?"
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.
Here's a *real* java desktop, free. Looks cool
http://www.jdistro.com/
Enlarged? I'd probably think it was enlarged if I was browsing using my phone. Just how small does something have to be for it to enlarge to that size?
Oh, wait.. we're geeks. Small is good... remember the mantra, small is good... it's how you use it that counts.. ;-)
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.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
I came to this article after reading what Sun think of Linux in this story. Really puts this marketing bullshit into perspective for me.
Here's what I found on Sun's site: "The software consists of a fully integrated client environment based on open source components and industry standards, including a GNOME desktop environment, StarOffice Office Productivity Suite, Mozilla browser, Evolution mail and calendar, Java 2 Standard Edition and a Linux operating system."
Translation: in no way, shape or form is this desktop written in Java. It is merely branding, the same way Microsoft brands a version of Windows "Windows .NET Server" and Visual Studio ".NET" in order to tie together their .NET brand.
The Java desktop is not written in Java and has almost nothing to do with java. It is Gnome. It will run on Windows when Gnome does. The Java name is just marketing. It has nothing to do with the underlying technology. The more accurate name for the "Java Desktop" is "Sun Linux". More information
Any desktop which requires the user to use more than one mouse button obviously can't be all that great. ;-)
>> 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
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
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.
Yep, because if there's one thing someone like Jordan Hubbard couldn't manage, it's writing BSD userland code.
(extended eyeroll)For something as complex as a desktop OS, it's virtually impossible to have "usability" without usage, and to-date this OS has no users to speak of.
Show me even a meager 500,000 users who consider the usability of this to be on par with WinXP or MacOSX and then you'll have a story. Otherwise this is just PRWire disguised as a lab study.
It's very good to see Sun launch a a Linux distribution that won't make repel adults in horror, but Gulker perpetuates at least one of the abiding and unfortunate errors of many Linux supporters.
Contrary to the linkage made by the review, ease of use is not synonymous with "dumbing down". Ease of use does not mean hiding capabilities. It simply means what it says: easy to use.
Example: Creating a "Documents" directory and suggesting users sore all their documents there makes a system easier to use. Nothing frces a user to do that; no capability is lost. If a user wants to track through the file system and store files in other locations, nothing prevents that. A "Documents" directory is based on the same principle as the "etc" and "home" directories. Both provide a suggested place to store files that share certain characteristics. If using a "Documents" directory is for dummies, why don't we see smart admins storing configuration files all over the file system? Surely, anyone smart enough to use Unix doesn't need help finding files?
Other examples exist, but the perpetuation of the bogus ease of use/dumbing down linkage remains an ugly theme of the Linux community.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
- "Also, let me really clear about our Linux strategy. We don't have one. We don't at all. We do not believe that Linux plays a role on the server. Period. If you want to buy it, we will sell it to you, but we believe that Solaris is a better alternative, that is safer, more robust, higher quality and dramatically less expensive in purchase price."
- "If you use Linux on the server, even if we sold the distribution to you, you are on your own. If you buy our Java desktop solution you are completely indemnified as long as you run it as a desktop solution. And by the way, don't take our desktop product and put it on the server. We are indemnifying them for our products. If we incorporate someone else's component we will make sure that we can indemnify it. I have licenses to all those issues that SCO is suing IBM for. If I didn't have them, I certainly wouldn't indemnify them."
- "eWEEK: So, does the uncertainty around Linux benefit Sun and Solaris?
With friends like these, we don't need enemies....Schwartz: We have an interesting migration opportunity now because we can go back with Unix that is familiar, we can deliver the Java Enterprise System pricing at $100 per employee, which allows them to run Solaris at infinite scale.
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
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.
Full Time Idiot and Miserable Sod
Nothing is real but the pain
Calling this thing a "Java desktop" is rather deceptive. Sun took the Gnome desktop, bundled it with a Java runtime and JavaCard authentication, made some cosmetic changes, and then just called it a "Java desktop". Pretty much all the applications, all the policy decisions, all the behavior, and all the functionality are Gnome's. If this is a "great desktop", then so must Gnome be.
In seven years, Java desktop application use is virtually non-existent. Sun has already tried and failed to create and establish a Java-based desktop with Java applications. So, what do they do? They take a successful open source desktop written mostly in C and C++ and call it a "Java desktop". I think that speaks volumes about the suitability of Sun Java and Swing for writing desktop applications and about how desparate Sun is getting. I think it also shows a disrespect Sun has for open source, despite a veneer of support and opportunistic open source licensing of some of their products (mostly in an attempt to harm competitors or to prop up bad Sun standards).
From a practical point of view, this won't matter. Basically, what this really says is that Sun is replacing CDE and OpenWindows with Gnome on their machines, and that they are shipping Java along with it (surprise). Sun had already announced that they were going to do that.
What will be really interesting is whether Sun will start shipping Mono with that, since it looks increasingly likely that at least some Gnome applications will be written in Mono (just like some Gnome applications are written in Python, Perl, and C++).
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.
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.Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
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.
Typical Linux Geek thinking ease-of-use = dumbing down and that a good interface means pretty icons.
/usr/share, /usr/bin, and crap like that, or are applications put in a folder called Programs?
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
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.