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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.)
"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?
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.
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
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.
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.