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Cobind Desktop Reviewed, With Interview
An anonymous reader writes "Cobind Desktop takes a remarkable turn from other Linux distributions by being one of the first to include Mozilla Firefox 0.8 and Mozilla Thunderbird in their first release. Though Cobind Desktop only uses XFce and not the more popular KDE, its entire design is based on a clutter-free workspace. Flexbeta.net took the time to write up a review and conduct an interview with David Watson, Co-Founder and President of Cobind Desktop. He mentions how the entire design concept of Cobind Desktop is based on a book called the Paradox of Choice, by Barry Schwartz, who is a professor at Swarthmore. David Watson believes that this concept can be applied to software design, and produce more usable products as a result." (We mentioned Schwartz's book earlier today.)
A third article on Paradox of Choice, and this is officially Google/Paradox of Choice Day on Slashdot. Perhaps an article on BOTH Google and Paradox of Choice would be a good one.
To many choices make it harder to choose. So, introduce another choice.
I do run Debian Unstable. And I'm really hating Sneakernet right now...
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
There was a competition a year or so ago. Emacs won.
...chances are they're not going to be using IE anyway.
"Sneakernet" is an old term referring to running data between locations on floppy disks, for anyone who didn't know.
Hopefully this will encourage more people to move away from IE.
Only if these people were running IE on this Linux distribution. I don't think there are many people who will download and install a new distro because it has the latest, bestest browser.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Wonderful. Another /. headline: "Combinddesktop uses XFce rather than the more popular KDE". Yet, of course, XFce uses gtk+, the screenshots ( http://cobind.com/desktop.html ) show firebird and GNOME/gtk+ apps.
Why would it? It's a linux distro. Most linux users already don't use IE.
The darkness... controls the music. The music... controls the soul.
XFce does look remarkably like XP, so a public computer running the software could certainly expose more people to alternative browsers without the fear of an unfamiliar operating system.
(They'll think they're in XP, so they probably won't panic.)
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
It does look like it'd be a pretty slick Live CD distro (although I admit that I haven't tried it yet), so maybe that'll get some exposure. I know that a bunch of people here at my school have been exposed to linux via the liveCD idea (some of the helpdesk guys carry around knoppix or the like for quick diagnostics and file recovery). So maybe it'll get people to use firebird in that way - live CDs let people who don't use linux use linux. For about 2 months this year, i fooled around with knoppix and PCLinuxOS before finally installing a full HD-based distro.
"Sneakernet" is an old term referring to running data between locations on floppy disks, for anyone who didn't know.
What is this 'floppy disk' of which you speak?
Most linux users already don't use IE.
I always never use IE.
What's the deal with the screenshots show off, where they show you how nice is gnome, gaim, firefox and openoffice? Shouldn't they show off what they actually wrote?
I've heard that, other than GCC, only Intel packs the required heat to forge the mighty kernel.
GCC hasn't had pre-compiled headers, which might or might not have any effect on kernel compilation, and also targets more platforms than one could shake a small forest at.
I wouldn't expect it to beat Visual C++ in a race, but that's like saying an M1 Abrams can't beat a Ford Escort in a drag race. If the idea of a cross-compiling suite of portable tools that you can crack open and freely do what you want with, and not have to pay the tax to the Malicious Satrap fails to grab you by the naughty bits, then, please, take the Ford.
it's this thing in my pants that hasn't seen or touched a women since i started using computers.
hell i can't even _see_ my floppy any more.
too many spicy hot cheetos and mountaindew
Umm, are you sure yuo're not thinking of XPde. XFCE is nothing like windows XP. XPde however is.
an ncurses interface *is* a GUI, it's got buttons, windows, etc. What he seems to mean is that it doesn't have gpm running during the install, nor does it use an X-window, directfb or similar program with the installer.
a non-gui interface would be one in which you use a command line and have to type all the arguements and paths there...
Actio personalis moritur cum persona. (Dead men don't sue)
Cobind Desktop takes a remarkable turn from other Linux distributions by being one of the first to include Mozilla Firefox 0.8 and Mozilla Thunderbird in their first release.
How is that remarkable? I'm sure if Firefox and Thunderbird were around when Slackware or Debian 1.0 were created they would have included them.
He mentions how the entire design concept of Cobind Desktop is based on a book called the Paradox of Choice
So this distro set's itself apart by including less packages, then allowing users to download any more that they want.
As far as i can tell from reading the article, it's based on fedora, but has less packages, and a few more bugs. It fits on one cd, and doesn't ask you to select packages.
I really don't see a niche for this distro. It seems like the bastard child of a Live CD and a full distro, not really doing either well.
How is this interesting?
It's interesting much in the way a ball or block is interesting to a 8 month old baby. They don't really understand it, but they play with it anyway.
What an uncreative troll.
Cobind doesn't own Mozilla, whereas Microsoft owns Internet Explorer and uses their desktop dominance to force the browser onto the ignorant masses.
Dude, you have no clue. It is not illegal for any company to provide a complete browser/os/etc solution unless they are a monopoly and including a browser undercuts competition in a significant way because of the monopoly status of the company including the software (microsoft).
Before you start throwing around accusations of people being hypocrites, you should a least have some understanding of what you are talking about. Since MS does have a monopoly on the desktop, they are treated differently because they are in a position to entirely wipe out competition just by including a browser (or media player) even if their competition is better. There is no level playing field for browsers when ms is involved because their os is the playing field. That is why they must be artificially constrained in ways the other companies are not.
Get a clue, please.
This 0.1 version of the Cobind Desktop is an alpha release. That means that it has only been tested on a limited number of different hardware platforms and peripherals.
It seems there's a lot of "news" lately around software that's alpha and even pre-alpha. Maybe folks should remember that Linus never pushed Linux, it grew as small, incremental improvements were made.
It's easy to make a lot of noise about software you're going to write. It's a lot harder to be quiet and write software that will someday make a lot of noise.
Ruby on Rails Screencast
Who is this guy and why does he capitalize these words? Can I become President and Founder, too, just because I know how to recompile linux kernel and install KDE on top of it?
Two factors invalidate your claim:
Schwab
Blithely ignoring the Do Not Feed The Trolls sign
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Funny that I'm a member of the Western-Pennsylvania Linux Users Group (which serves Pittsburgh, PA... the home town of this distro), and this is the first I've heard of it.
Too bad they haven't been involved in the local *nix community so far as I can tell.
That should be:
Among the different desktops, KDE has to be the most cluttered ("featureful"), by design and by choice. Some people like that, I suppose, but XFCE is a reaction against that kind of approach to building desktop environments.
which means that some of us spend a lot of time figuring out what is meaningful difference and what isn't.
why does this make me think of the 2 party system?
(This has been a Daily Show moment with your buddy, Tokerat)
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Konqueror and Mozilla share the gecko rendering engine, which is a desperately needed step in the direction of the open source community focusing on depth, not breadth, in choices (applause).
They don't actually. Konqueror uses KHTML, which is a pretty nice HTML engine (Apple chose it over gecko for Safari). As both engines are very nice, I guess either the OSS community isn't taking desperately needed steps or we got enough people to work on a few implementations of things at the same time and make them good.
Having used both browsers extensively, I think the latter is true.
You can mod your friends, you can mod your nose, but you can't mod your friend's nose.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
uh Vector linux has been out much longer than this and its had Firebird AND its minimalist. Just cause the guys who made the distro didnt mention that damn book they dont get on the main ./ page. How moronic
That has got to be one of the stupidest damn things I've ever read.
The hallmark of superior software design is flexibility, not rigidity. Rigid systems keel over at the slightest provocation, unanticipated conditions being the most typical (out of disk, out of RAM, bad input from operator, dropped connection, power fluctuation, installed new mouse driver, etc.) If your system cannot tolerate substitution of a component with a compatible alternative, then your system is, by definition, fragile, and sooner or later is going to go toes-up on you.
Your thesis is also manifestly disproved by the very thing you hope to defend. By (pretending to) integrate the browser with Windows, they massively destabilized the system.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
One alternative is a one-party system -- we all learned in school in the U.S. on how terrible the Soviet system was that they had only one party, and I grew up in Chicago, which with many other big cities really only had one party. Apart from the anti-Communist propaganda telling us how bad it is, what is does a political party even do when there is only one party? In Chicago, the one party was both a political party as well as a kind of social welfare system: kind of like Hamas.
In Soviet Russia (please, no "in Soviet Russia" jokes), I don't have any direct experience, but as far as I can tell it worked like some kinds of committee structures in an American university. The Party was not the government, it was not the military, it was not industry nor agriculture, and it was not a labor union, but it supervised all of those institutions to make sure that they were run according to "scientific socialist" principles. I imagine the Party was resented by people in government, military, industry, and other places just trying to do their jobs because it was a kind of oversight that a lot of people dedicated to their jobs could do without -- a lot like what takes place in universities.
The multi-party system, however, would have a Liberal Party, a Conservative Party, a Green Party, a Libertarian Party, a Labor Party, a Civil Rights Party, and so on. The problem with a multi-party system is forming a majority government -- think Israel where they have two major parties but they have to suck up to religious parties to form a government.
The two party system means that you stack the deck against minority parties to narrow it down to just two parties so one or other party is sure of having a governing majority. The two parties don't really offer much in the way of choice unless you think Coke and Pepsi represents choice. But on the other hand, the two parties compete for the center of the voting electorate, and the two parties act as critics of each other to expose gross wrong doing. Kerry and Bush are not really that different because they are all part of the same political culture, but they represent themselves as polar opposites to rally their respective core supporters, but they are careful to position themselves for the middle when they govern so having Kerry in office or Bush in office is not going to change all of that much. But that is the goal, to have a stable equalibrium of two parties competing for the center rather than the anarchy and travails of a multi-party democracy.
...you have one more choice: a distro with less choices.
And you wonder why sticking with XP for now seems like a sensible solution?
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
I'd never really seen it before trying out the freesbie freebsd livecd. XFce combined with rox-filer for the desktop icons is a pretty slick combination.
Let's see, a simple distribution that takes the most popular software and gives you that as a single choice. So instead of having Mozilla, Galeon, Konqueror, and such that I don't use, I have Firefox waiting for me. Same goes for Thunderbird.
...this is bad how? XFc3 + gDesklets makes for a very nice desktop.
Getting rid of the bloat of Gnome and KDE in favor of XFce4
So let's review here:
1 CD? check.
Basic software package? check.
Use yum to add whatever else I need? check.
Once Cobind gets a few more version updates under it's belt, I see it being very popular to those of us that prefer simplicity to the 4 CD monstrousity that is Fedora Core.
ce n'est pas un Sig.
Yes, multimedia is certainly something we'd like the desktop to do well. However, it's not realistic to expect comprehensive multimedia support from a Linux desktop today with open source software. It's a very difficult and costly problem to solve comprehensively. There are some positive signs, such as helix community, but you don't really have a single piece of software that does it all as well as the Windows variants.
Ummm...I'm not sure how to respond to this. How about mplayer? That has to be the best movie player I have ever used. And didn't it receive some sort of award recently? Or how about Xine?
Let's see...what else? The GStreamer framework is coming along nicely and will probably mature before the end of the year. There are several audio players available, some more usable than others, though. There are also more specialized programs like the Bedevilled Audio System. So I would hardly say linux is deficient in multimedia software.
On the one hand this doesn't sound like anything a seasoned linux user couldn't do for her/himself for free. I run icewm, some of what I think are the best apps, and only one app per function ( okay, I have 3 editors installed....but this is *linux* ). However for people who want to support OSS, try an alternative, don't have a lot of time for system futzing around, don't have a lot of tech knowledge, and don't like bloat this could be a nice solution. I see a similar niche for people who want to recycle old, small footprint hardware but don't have the expertise to make such systems work. If you don't know a lot about hardware/nix, don't have time to learn, or have higher priorties you are stuck with the bloat of the easier distros. Steve
innovation is not necessarily about building sth from scratch.
:) workers in the US.
/. community.
i think the fact that they were the first to build a simple usable platform viable for the broad desktop market currently dominated by ms is innovative enough by itself. some times the simplest things can be the most innovative.
and by desktop market i mean the hoards of pc's in the corporate world used by the hoards of white- (or blue- i was never able to remember which one is which
and by "platform" i mean not a distro in the sense that it is not targeted to the broad current hard-core "geek" linux user base. it is targeted for the average layman user who does not care about the
i am at odds from the overwhelming (short-sighted) negative response from the
all you linux-lovers and/or should be happy that microsoft is finally getting some heat in the desktop market.
i believe cobind comes right on time, after hp's lead in deploying linux on the desktop.
i can understand why most of you would not want to look at cobind. well, this distro is not targeted at you. come out from under that rock and you'll see that there's much more out there than your own little world.
this distro has a lot of potential and it will be up to the small team at cobind to make it happen. only time can show.
the current release is not wihtout shortcomings and naturally so - if you took the time to take a glimpse at the web site you will notice that this is version 0.1 - i would say that it is actually an impressive start!
p.s. as for the claim that vectorlinux has already done what cobind tries to do, i have only this to say (about their web site):
bad design + no screenshots + too much "geeky" information = extremely uncrear message
As the subject says...
Agreed. I might not run this on my desktop, but I'll for sure run it on my spare Celeron 333 with 8Mbs of video memory. Fast usability being the name of the game.
I'm running XFCE4 on it now, and coupled with Menu Maker, it's already a DRASTIC improvement over the lack of usability I was getting out of Gnome or KDE on FC1.
It might not fill a LOT of niches, but on that machine, it's perfect. I don't want to have to suffer with a source-based distro like Gentoo when I just really don't need the bloat of your typical modern distro.
-9mm-
Is it possible to metamoderate the moderation on (my) parent as redundant ?
#include "coucou.h"