Interview: Xandros and KDE

Fabrice Mous writes "The Xandros Desktop OS is known for their intuitive graphical environment that works right out of the box. Their polished desktop product is based on KDE. The KDE News website had the privilege to talk to Rick Berenstein, Xandros Chairman and CTO and Ming Poon, Vice President for Software Development about Xandros and their products and the relationship between Xandros and the KDE project. Without further ado ... enjoy the interview!"

Comments

Why is it "intuitive"?

[manavendra]

I had a quick look at the Xandros OS screenshots, since I hadn't heard of it before (sheepish grin).

Most of it seems to be an exact replica of MS look and feel - the same start button, the task bar, task trays, heck even the colour variations!

Why is this deemed "intuitive" then? Isn't this just another attempt to replicate MS experience on another OS? Or am I missing something?

Jef Raskin says "don't say intuitive"

[Russ Nelson]

Jef Raskin says, in The Humane Interface, that people misuse the word "intuitive". In the context of user interfaces, they mean "familiar".
-russ

As a Xandros user...

[ites]

I can say why it's easily worth the price tag.

1. On every PC we've installed it on (about 10 in our company) it just worked, with the exception of a notebook that had some CD hardware problems.

2. It installs smoothly and gives you a good set of applications without overloading the UI.

3. It has an excellent one-click GUI update manager that is based on apt and is compatible with it.

4. The Xandros File Manager really _is good_. Whatever file you have, you click and the 'right' thing happens. Want to burn some files to CD? Selected them, right click and select "Burn to CD"... Want to unpack a zip file? Right click, choose "Unpack". and so on.

5. It is stable.

Overall Xandros gives you the feeling that you are driving a luxury car. Smooth, highly polished, and incredible attention to detail.

6. It is Debian: want to add something? Find the sources, unpack, build, install.

Now the poor points:

1. Slow release cycle, annoying if you're a thrill seeker. With one release a year, Xandros gives you reliability over performance and gadgets.

2. Not free. You can't just copy it and share it. I believe Xandros is preparing a free version.

3. The Windows support is flaky and not something you should bet on. It's better just to migrate to Linux/portable applications such as OOo over time (it took me about 6 months to migrate, switching one application at a time: office, media players, browsing, streaming, agendas, and finally email.)

I've tried many different distros, but I'm not willing to spend much time installing, or learning the details. It has to work quickly and smoothly. That's what Xandros does.