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

Re:Why is it "intuitive"?

[manavendra]

heck let me shamelessly reply to myself and throw in another question:

It sure is good to replicate a user's experience of the most widely used OS (if not the most popular), but wouldnt innovation demand doing something that it doesn't already provide? Why not invest the same collective OSS impetus and skill in building a UI? Given the OSS track record, I'm positive such an initiative would not only beat competition, but also come up with an interface that user's will find more easy to use and adapt.

Couple this with the *nix platform, and only then shall we have a wide acceptance and use of the OS that we all so love and promote!

switch users

[brysnot]

One of those screenshots shows a dialog to switch users. Has that been incorporated into any other distros desktop? I love that feature of XP. Makes it easy to share a single computer with the wife.

konqi

[Krafty Koder]

sorry xandros , but kde without konqueror just isnt kde. i'll stick with mandrake...

Dreadful Interview

[Finuvir]

Why do people have such difficulty conducting interviews properly? They ask "Could you tell us somewhat more about the work that Xandros has done to integrate KDE in their products?" and the answer has all this stuff about XFM. Then they completely ignore the talk about XFM and move on, only to come back and ask "In the Xandros Desktop OS there is an application called "Xandros File Manager"[XFM]. Can you tell us a bit more about it and the technologies it support?" later. Did they just write down a list of questions and not probe the interesting answers?
Okay so maybe they just sent a list of questions and published the list of answers they were sent back, but they really should have tried to integrate this stuff into a decent flow. It reads very badly.

NT Domain Authentication?

[discogravy]

I have heard that Xandros is the only linux distro that does NT authentication and that it is some non-free component ... if any users can confirm or deny that (and how well it works), I'd be happy to hear about it.

Re:Why is it "intuitive"?

[manavendra]

Maybe MS did copy all its bits from somewhere else - but you have to agree they did something that others didnt - be it packaging, product placement, or just the whole look and the feel.

MS wasn't as big always as it is now, so as and when they came out with newer versions they did make things easier and more predictable (thus familiar) - better than any other competitor.

And if MS copying others was so bad, why is OSS copying it now? Where does that leave OSS then?

Re:Why is it "intuitive"?

[Paulrothrock]

Or is it that they all accept deep down that MS has an interface that's hard to top?

Or maybe that Apple's is hardest to top of all, and that's why Microsoft is trying to copy it.

The Humane Environment

[Russ Nelson]

Bing! http://www.jefraskin.com/ points to a user environment which, although unfamiliar, is much easier to use. For example, the system NEVER discards your keystrokes. If you're pointing at a piece of read-only text (e.g. somebody else's web page), typing at it forces the cursor to slide over to the end of the read-only text. So if you just walk up to your machine with somebody's phone number in your head, you can just type it in without caring what context you're in.

For another thing, you never have to save anything in The Humane Environment. It autosaves (with undo!) for you.

For another thing, you don't have to start programs in THE. You access your data, and it takes care of starting the program that manipulates the data.

We can do this all, and we can do it long before Longhorn comes out.

Xandros has issues - but it works for me

[SydShamino]

Since all the comments above me are from people who say that "Xandros is no more than Debian + KDE + Codeweavers, just go compile your own", I figure I should add something.

I moved one of my machines to Xandros 2.0 last December. It was my first machine to move from Windows 2000. I hadn't switched until then for a few reasons:

1) While I can figure out technical things, I want some basis of familiarity to start with. Most Linux operating systems are completely foreign. I had previously installed Debian once, but I had no idea what to do to make my sound work, and no real way to find out without wasting weeks of my free time on my own, or going to a newsgroup to get unhelpful advice.

2) I had been very nervous about making an -insecure- Linux box. Back in college I had a SGI workstation with Irix. I learned a good bit about the OS, and even reinstalled it once from scratch. I didn't learn until it was too late, however, that buried somewhere back in section 6 chapter 7 page 35 of the documentation was a list of default accounts with no passwords! The machine was exploited. I waited until Xandros 2.0 so I would have a Linux operating system with the simplicity of Debian updates to keep it secure.

Xandros 2.0 has worked very well for me. A few accomplishments:

1) In four years, my wife and I have not been able to get Windows networking to function on our six computers. Her second machine could see my second machine in the workgroup, while my second machine could see her primary machine. None of them could see anything else, even though they were all in the same workgroup and even attached to the same hub, with all of them set up the same way. We used FTP to transfer files, and moved the printer cable manually. With Xandros, I set up a fileserver with (almost) a right-click and "share this folder". Amazingly, even now when the machines can't see each other, they ALL see the server. Samba does a better job of Windows networking that Windows does!

2) I have an old HP scanner. The HP driver for it blue-screens Windows 2k on boot, and they never provided an updated driver. I haven't used it in two years because of this. When I used Xandros Networks to install their scanner program (Kooka) and then plugged in my USB scanner, it just -worked-. (The first day.)

3) I have several Windows applications running well in Xandros with Crossover Office, including Excel (didn't like OO.o), tax software, GURPS character creator, etc. This helps build hope that I could leave Windows entirely one day.

Now, that said, there are some things that have gone wrong:

1) That Samba share worked great for all the Windows users, who could great and modify files in the shared directory with ease (when I had permissions set correctly in the graphical dialogs). To get my user on the Xandros machine to be able to also create and modify files at the same time, I had to dig through the Xandros support site and the Samba online docs to find the right setting to make in a config file.

2) The mouse in Xandros was "sticky". The cursor wouldn't move until I had moved the mouse a certain amount, and then it "jumped". This made it VERY hard to do things like resize columns in Excel. The fix was adding a "resolution" line to the pointer's configuration, which again I had to go to support forums to find. I have no idea why this wasn't configurable from the control center.

3) After using my scanner the first day, two days later it completely didn't work. Again, after digging around on support sites, I found the solution - it was a permissions problem. (Why did I have permission the first day but not on later days? I have no idea.) Anyway, it works fine again now, and I was even able to help some other folks who had the same problem.

In summary - Xandros 2.0 has a market. Maybe it's not a market for most Slashdot readers who work in IT or are in college or high school and grew up with Linux and PCs. But it has a market for this electrical engi

Re:Why is it "intuitive"?

[manavendra]

...as much as it is "an interface that everybody is familiar with

I perfectly agree. But lets stop and think how this "familiarity" was bred, and nurtured. Someone at sometime did came up with an OS no matter how buggy it is, which suddenly made a computer usable to common man. No longer had one to be a geek, or intricate knowledge of what's stored where, or what a filesystem is or how to execute commands or hell! even the notion of "executing" something - nothing was required.

You just bought a computer, switched it on and you have frienly icons that let you play games, or use your word editor or your spreadsheet or pretty much anything that an average Joe needs.

I personally don't care much about what MS copied and from who. Even with all this copy and paste, they glued it all together successfully enough for new users to come on board without too much fuss.

The only thing that brings a tinge of sadness is the attempts to make a system look like MS interfaces. Sure, it would be familiar and would make a user less scared to migrate, but why not think of a better UI? We all rant about things that MS got wrong and the superiorities of *nix over MS - why not apply all that to UI's as well? Hell, there are already so many things that ppl dont like in the newer version - the whole control panel sucks, the start bar leaves a lot desired and everything takes more clicks now than ever before - why not improve on that? Why not think of say, a 3D inteface?

I bought Xandros

[Anonymous Coward]

And it's the first distro I've ever bought 'officially'.

I'm mixed about it. I wanted an easy desktop but I also want to be able to config "some stuff". Like, I wanted to be able to upgrade kernals, or upgrade to kde 3.2 etc, which I couldn't.

I suppose it wasn't really aimed at me, but for the average windows user it is fantastic. Amazing hardware support (minus USB) easy installation, looks great (you CAN have Gnome in it, it's a matter of "apt-get install gdm" and "apt-get install gnome-desktop") also the software is easy as pie. You have their GUI interface to apt-get, meaning you literally click and install or click and uninstall. This is also true of patches, select patches, then click the patches to install.

Setting it up with Samba was amazing, it detected it all by itself with my other Windows box, config'd great with my router and modem.

It's also not a bloated Redhat box, it runs fast, this was on an AMD XP3000+ 512ddr, 64mb gfx but there was no sluggish behaviour at all.

The worst thing was their own servers, though. Their own xandros-compiled database of applications was very limited, which meant I had to rely on Debian-based programs a lot of the time, or compile myself, but then I suppose I was going for slightly more obscure programs (though I don't consider amsn and gaim that obscure.

In all, if you want a Linux desktop that you're not going to want to touch much (just for office, web, email etc) then go with Xandros, if you're like me and want that little bit more power, like being able to choose to upgrade the kernal when you like and updated WM's then give it a miss.

more expensive than windows xp?

[Anonymous Coward]

standard home user edition $129. well, why dont people just use windows directly?

Attention Qt License FUDsters:

[LMCBoy]

Here's some more information for you to ignore:


When we started the Corel LINUX project back in March of 1999, GNOME/GTK was there so we actually reviewed both GNOME and KDE to make sure we used the right desktop environment to start. We had a very short and aggressive cycle and the simplicity of KDE/Qt won again. Looking back, we never regretted about not supporting GNOME at all. Most of us came from OS/2 PM or Windows GUI development or freshly from a new object oriented technology called Java back then. MFC was a big life saver when it came out in Windows in developing GUI apps. Java was even better where everything was simple and made perfect sense. There was no way any of us would like to go back in time and program in something (GNOME/GTK) that was even more awkward than programming in pre-MFC days where we had to deal with the Win32 C API only. KDE/Qt was just like Java where everything (well most of the time anyway) made sense.

We have also seen a lot of poor arguments made on Qt where it cost money if you want to develop a commercial closed source application. Usually people argued that the $500 per developer license fee was just as much as a developer's salary in some third world countries. That may be true but they don't really take into account the months of headaches and development time they will save by using Qt every year. That alone is probably worth the $500. KDE/Qt is simple and is designed for the desktop. We like it and we have no regrets in supporting KDE at all.

Re:MFC vs. GTK+?

[abigor]

You would choose Win32 over MFC?? Gaaaah. MFC was not wonderful, but it greatly simplified app development on Windows. Apparently every application company out there felt the same way, because Win32 was swiftly abandoned (along with competing class libraries like OWL) once MFC and Visual C++ became usable (around VC++ 4.2, if I recall - sometime in 1996).

Personally, I'm busy learning PyQt and PyKDE for fun. This is the way to do app development - Python is a nice language with the ease and speed of development of VB but without its general horribleness. I think the combination of Python and Qt (and even better, the KDE libraries, if you are targeting KDE only) is fantastic.

The only people I can think of who still write GUI apps in C are the Gnome/GTK types with way too much time on their hands. In places I've worked in the past, I think you'd get canned for even suggesting it.

What is a "good interface"

[NtroP]

OK, confession time: When I looked over the Xandros screen shots they looked pretty slick to me. You know, polished. Many of the windowing environments I've seen and used on Linux has fallen a bit short on this point - much of it simply having to do with poor default choices for graphics and "clunky" (IMO) default choices for window decorations. Then I started reading the various posts about "why are they imitating windows?" and "why don't 'we' use our efforts to build a better interface?" followed shortly by arguments about what intuitive means.

I'll admit to being guilty of confusing intuitive with familiar. But let's be honest here, no interfaces are created or used in isolation. They are always based on some previous knowledge, understanding or bias and exploit a framework of shared understanding between users. That "Network Neighborhood" icon is only intuitive if you know what a "Network Neighborhood" is and can guess that the little drawing is about.

I ran into this problem while designing a webmail interface. I had to battle the impluse to go with my personal preferences for a clean, unobtrusve interface with small icons and hovering tools tips. I found out that icons that made perfect sense to me were uselsess to my users. My preference for having additional information appear only when an item was focused on (ie. hovered over) instead of splattered all over the screen up front wasn't shared by my users. Moreover, I found, when I asked for feedback and input, that "experienced" users alway asked for things to be laid out like the software it was replacing (Eudora, Outlook, etc.) while the "new" users, once given a brief tour accepted the interface much more readily. I'm guilty of that myself. I use the Gimp whenever I can, but because I cut my teeth on Photoshop and have hundreds of hours experience with it, I find myself giving the Gimp negative reviews - mostly because it's unfamiliar (read counter-intuitive) to me.

So, after sitting for a while and trying to literally think out of the box and come up with a truly new interface for an OS, I realized that almost everything I imagined was impossible (or at least impractical) with current technology, or heavily biased toward familiar paradigms and conventions. When it came down to it, most of the thing's I'd change are little annoyances instead of overall design. I think if anything, incorporating some fuzzy logic into the interface so that it morphs to my usage patterns. I mean subtlely, I hate it when windows chops off a menu and removes objects I haven't used yet. It's a good idea, but how about leaving them where I was used to seeing them but making the most used items progressively darker, sharper, bigger, whatever. Don't remove them from sight or even rearange them.

For me personally I rely on relative location of objects rather than what they look like for immediate recognition. It drives my wife (and my boss) crazy, but what migh look like a complete mess in my office to others is "organized" to me. Whatever you do, don't move anything. When I'm reading a book, I can literally stop in the middle of the page and be able to pick the book back up months later and know exactly what word I left off on, because it hasn't moved. So for me, spacial orientation is critical. For my wife, it has to be labled and "organized" according to the Dewey-decimal system or she's lost (I don't know how we've made it for 18 years). So, I guess what I'm saying is that comming up with a revolutionarily intuitive user interface may be impossible. That leaves us with an evolutionarily familiar interface. I mean, my God, vi is NOT intuitive, by any streatch of the imagination. However, it IS powerfull and familiar to me, meaning that I'm more likely to turn to vi for many tasks and get things done more quickly, than I am to fire up a graphical editor. My mom on the other hand has no compatible frame of reference and would be totally lost in vi.

So, for those of you who ar