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Java Desktop System Review
Reader writes "OSNews has the first in-depth review of Sun's Java Desktop System based on the final code. The article discusses the good (stability, Star Office 7, good Java integration) and the bad (no KDE, buggy RealTek driver, shaky Samba) and it includes a number of screenshots. It seems that Sun has put all its attention on Gnome and while this is good for cosistency across their desktop (some of their Java apps use the native GTK+ themeing), it also limits its users from an out-of-the-box KDE and its thousands of apps choice."
What a weird-ass system. What the heck does grafting Java images into SuSE's Yast and a bastardized Gnome 2.4/2.2 have to do with a "Java Desktop"?
And that's a Good Thing(tm).
Now, before you flame me, that's absolutely NOT intended as a anti-KDE comment. It's simply that the Sun Java Desktop is not intended for hobbyists who are going to be installing random applications. It's intended to be used by organizations who will install it on everybody's machine (or a central server, or whatever), and that's it. Everybody's got the same stuff, and uses the same tools. Anything else is a support nightmare for a large organization, and eventually for Sun.
Er... did you notice the comment saying 'check this out: Five different java applications, 5 different theme styles...'?
Why does Sun insist on diluting the Java name? A very large percentage of non-programmers who know the term Java don't know the difference between it and JavaScript. Now they're doing it again with Java Desktop. Isn't having Microsoft trying to kill Java enough without trying to do it themselves?
You are absolutely right. A corporate desktop is a support nightmare if it isn't locked down and standardized. It would have been nice if Sun provided recent copies of the KDE toolkit, however. It is likely that some corporation is going to deicde that they need a particular KDE app, and the sysadmin will then need to figure out how to deploy the toolkit and the app to thousands of machines without breaking any dependancies.
Please note that I am not arguing that the corporate user be able to run a KDE desktop/window manager. The corporate masters get the right to set the internal standards.
Yeah this is flamebait but what the hell, I have plenty of karma to burn..
Why because she brings up things wrong with your precious linux distro's instead of lavishing praise all over them? She DARES to point out that something might be wrong with them? Every damm timee there's a OSnews review on slashdot people write about how much they hate ELQ largely, I think, because she tends to not write glowing reports abour their favorite distro.
ELQ might not be my favorite reviewer but one thing she does, and does well, is find any and all flaws in an OS. THat's what makes her a good reviewer.
If the sysadmins want to distribute KDE programs, then they'll need to also distribute the appropriate libraries.
See, the thing is, you're thinking about things like "well, what if a particular oganization likes konqueror better than nautilus?", and the reality is that by the time an org has chosen the JDS, that decision has already been made. "We chose the JDS, this is what is." Sun is not interested in selling this to a group of 4 geeks who will spend a week getting the colors just right. They want to roll this out to a thousand people at a time, who will write documents, make presentations, and use the company's internal webapps. If Mozilla ain't good enough to run those apps, they the company will NOT fsck around trying to paste Konqueror into the JDS, they will simply choose a different system that works.
The major thing I mind about Eugenia's reviews is they can belittle products for things that are very obscure. And they delve into the obscure RIGHT AWAY. In this article, the obscure is introduced in the second paragraph:
/dev/hdd3 as / (a single partition for / and /boot) and used a 512 MB /swap on /dev/hdd2. I told the boot manager to get installed on /dev/hdd3 as I don't want my existing bootmanager to get nuked."
"I installed it on
For starters, if you're going to review an OS, first install it on a machine on a blank hard drive on a machine that will *ONLY* be running the tested OS, do a fairly standard install. Talk about how that works. Then try and set it up the way you like it, the way you'd use it to do your daily work. Then go see how it interoperates on a machine with 17 other test operating systems on it.
I like the way the reviews go in depth about the OSes, I just find it annoying the way they are structured.
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)