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."

Comments

SuSE? Yast?

[TrekCycling]

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"?

Regarding lack of KDE

[V. Mole]

...while this is good for cosistency across their desktop [...] it also limits its users from an out-of-the-box KDE and its thousands of apps choice.

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.

Re:Wrong market

[RevMike]

The corporate desktop is not a place to be giving the user thousands of applications from which to choose. Nor even alternate desktops. It's about giving them the tools they need to do the job. Locked down, so the user can't tinker with it and screw things up. Including KDE would have been a terrible choice, no matter which side of the KDE/GNOME divide you fall. Sun need to provice accessiblity. GNOME gives that, and KDE doesn't (yet). So they have to ship GNOME. So their choices are to either ship GNOME or to ship both. For the corporate market, they definitely made the right decision on that score.

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.

Re:Regarding lack of KDE*libs*

[V. Mole]

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.

Re:Didn't they learn from the JavaScript debacle

[jeffy124]

firstly, it was Netscape who coined the term JavaScript.

Second - Java is well recognized for application development and deployment within the corporate environment, the target audience of the JDS product. Thus, they're going for name recognition and are probably trying to distance themselves from the Solaris name.