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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.
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.
What is this 'floppy disk' of which you speak?
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.
No, he's doing the right thing... I dunno if I completely agree with his choice of packages, but it does mesh well with the aims of a basic but complete package. With a little polish applied to the installation, I'd imagine it would work just fine for a lot of people, and they wouldn't have to fret over which word processor they want to use today.
Fedora and Mandrake et al couldn't get away with dropping half of their packages - the user outcry would be enormous. But a new distro can. Whether many people will actually use it is something else however. Personally, I think the real solution is not rolling a new distro, but providing a reworked installer script that uses an existing distro, like say Mandrake 10. You get the clean interface and small footprint, but you also get the installation base and user support.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
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
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.
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.
that'd be XFCE and Abiword, they don't include Openoffice.org
Software Freedom Day!.
...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"
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.
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