Slashdot Mirror
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."
E-Week also has a good review.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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"?
Usually I wind up spilling my java all over my desktop when I read a particularly inflamatory on Slashdot...
We have seen a lot of articles here in slashdot pointing to OSNews lately, an all of them are by Eugenia Loli-Queru. Am I the only one who hates her reviews? I can't get any substance from any of the writeups.
Life isn't like a box of chocolates. It's more like a jar of jalapenos. What you do today, might burn your ass tomorrow.
That Moz problem she mentioned has bugged me for a long time on every platform: the problem is that real player thinks a file with the extension .rpm is its territory. I wonder if Real will keep claiming "rpm" or give it up?
All's true that is mistrusted
The desktop should have been written in a low level language, like VB. This interpreted language garbage is bad, because you still ahve to load th interpreter into memory, and it isn't buffer controlled against privilege escalations or unauthorized sudo activity.
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.
You're looking at it from the wrong perspective. 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.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
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.
This is from the same reviewer who blamed Fedora Core 1 for her problems compiling a new version of Gaim with the wrong packages installed.
I'd take anything said with a grain of salt.
Cheers Koz
If you want minimal breakage, it just makes sense not to ship (and hence, support) code you don't intend to use. If people want it they can download it...but developers are not the target audience for this product.
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.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
The Smurfs got so popular because they stuck the word "smurf" in their vocabulary as much as possible. As a result they made a smurferrific amount of money smurfing every kind of merchandise smurfable.
Sun has obviously Javaed the smurfs, and wants to make a Javalicious Javatop that will make them Javatastic sums of money.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Several other language-specific distributions have been released in recent weeks, including the CPAN Perl Desktop, the Ansi C++ Suite, and the Pure C Distro.
C++ creator Bjorne Strausoup noted that many Linux apps are too "C-heavy" and binaries generated from C++ code would benefit from being executed in a sky-blue themed environment.
Meanwhile, Larry Wall of Perl fame pointed out that worker efficiency will be at an all-time high for users of Perl applications now that the turquoise-themed Perl distro will ensure applications point to the correct bin/ directory for perl upon installation.
The Pure C Distro dream has been thwarted by the widespread adoption of C precompilers among projects seeking to attain compatibility with the new neon pink distribution.