The XPde Team released XPde 0.3.0, a major upgrade to the XPde desktop environment and window manager. Check out the announcement, view the screenshots or read the detailed ChangeLog. Go to the downloads section to get the binaries and sources. Read more for a quick commentary.Our Take: While the guy does what he does just for fun, I believe he is on to something. As JoelOnSoftware.com also preaches, when you want users to switch from a mainstream product to an alternative solution, each difference you have from the original drives away half of your potential users. Ten differences mean that 99,9% of the users will stay with the original.
After the usability, behavior, shortcuts, look and feel etc. can be made identical to Windows, all it remains is having WINE to run well along the rest of native Linux apps (QT and GTK+ applications with a widget theme that resembles the native XPde). Now, that’s what I would truly call a… “Lindows”. It is a neat idea for market penetration (note that the “cloning” factor is made on purpose).
Well, I don’t know. I mean, it’s perfectly fine with me that he does what he wants to, really, but I’m a bit skeptical. In the end, wasn’t the race for Windows compatibilty one of the reasons for OS/2 never becoming what it could have been? Isn’t educating the user that things can be done differently better than cloning on purpose? Isn’t “let’s clone first, once we have enough users, we’ll innovate” just plain wrong?
Well, I guess, there’s room for everyone.
Has anyone taken it out for a spin? Any impressions?
Very nice!! Excellent work!
>>Isn’t “let’s clone first, once we have enough
>>users, we’ll innovate” just plain wrong?
I dunno, it seemed to work fairly well
for Microsoft when they first got into
the game, and look where they’re at now…
Besides, based on what I’ve read I think
that the fatal flaw in OS/2 was the fact
that its programmers got paid by the line
for the code they wrote, while the M$ way
(at that time) was to make the software
work in as little code as possible. LOL,
‘QDos’ indeed!!
Isn’t the exact look of windows copyrighted?
I’m surprised Microsoft hasn’t shut this down.
You can’t copyright a “look” I believe Microsoft won that “Look & Feel” lawsuit with Apple.
Well, as long you don’t use original background images, icons etc for your project (XPde doesn’t AFAIK), I am not sure that it’s crystal clear that MS would win such a lawsuit…
I haven’t tried this out, but I am impressed by the screenshots. There is a gentoo ebuild available. However it is only version .20 and is marked unstable
. Anyways, I will definitely have a look at this if an ebuild for .30 comes out. I find it quite an interesting project, although I doubt I’ll use it much. I prefer both Gnome and KDE to the windows xp gui.
A lot of answers for these questions can be found at their FAQ page: http://www.xpde.com/modules.php?name=FAQ&myfaq=yes&id_cat=1&categor…
KDE is still the best DE though.
I’ve tried it out a few times – it’s funny. Shows the real power of Open Source/Collaborated Hacking – Probably not in the best light though, might make people (*cough* Eugenia *cough*) think Open Source == Just copy something else, which most certainly does not.
Pitty it’s written in Pascal and needs Borland Stuff to Compile (and hence i386 only). Not good.
looks good… the last time there was a post about XPde…flames came from everywhere…but there isnt any flames here….yet..
Heading over to http://www.qvwm.org/ it seems that both
projects have simuliar goals, the question I have is that
if they claim to not being willingattempting to upsurp
KDE or GNOME, then what good are they? A DE is only as
good as its apps, and it seems to me that once the
‘experienced’ windows user tries to ‘feel at home’ she’ll
find herhimself lost when theey can’t change the system
(cosmetically or otherwise) to fit their needs!
I don’t mind their mision goals, I just don’t understand
why they seem to hesitate to go all the way? Let the
GNOME and KDE projects go as they will, but if they’re
going to call themselves a DE, then _be_ a Desktop
ENVIROMENT!! Don’t just be an ugly immitation of a
pre-existing system that has no functionality!!
Just my $0.02. (Now to go to bed before I say anything
stupid! …Oh wait. ;P)
Still waiting for something responsive, but it seems we’re still running the X11 treadmill. Linus claims the next kernel will improve X11 latency to an almost usable state, but he’s running a 4-way machine with more RAM than I’ve got in my 6 machines combined.
Nice.
It cant be ported to FreeBSD right? I guess Ill install gentoo to try this out. I wanted something like this so I can let others use my computer and not run windows (and all the headaches that comes with it) on my desktop, while using it as a ftp server or other such things I need.
Looks great though. Clean, simple, small learning curve. Not alot of bloat, would give me most thing’s I’d need.
I wonder how OO looks in it. Native look for OO/irc client/jabber/Mozilla and Im there. Actually really pleased with how this is coming along.
>Still waiting for something responsive, but it seems
>we’re still running the X11 treadmill.
X11 is not the problem, it is the solution.
Show a proof where X is holding back any WIndowManager from quickly responding to something.
You wont find the proof.
Perhaps YOUR KDE 3.1 compiled with “unltra-alpha-latest-cvs-with-all-efects-you-can-get” is slow.
So what? My Blackbox is fast. Cant be X getting in the way.
And dont cry about coloured cursors or windows ahdows.
Install XFree 4.3 and get yourself a window theme with aqua style window shadows from kde-look.org.
Yes ,its all done with Xfree. Amazing, isnt it…
I have received a very polite copyright complaint by Lycoris, they say their artwork it’s copyrighted, so I’m going to remove it, of course, but I would like to know what osnews readers has to say on this matter, isn’t just funny that a lot of companies are getting profit from OpenSource programs/developers and don’t return anything to the community? Time to change GPL? I’ll switch back to crystal 😉
No, actually OS/2 died because of poor business decissions. Having Win16 compatibility accelerated that – most applications were written for Windows 3.x instead of OS/2 because the prior can run on the latter anyway. However it was entirely possible for IBM to create an extension to Win16 like Win32/Carbon/etc. so it would be easy for Win16 apps to be ported to OS/2 (OS/2 at that time was big, mind you).
But as for looks and the UI itself, I can see some resemblance, but I wouldn’t say they cloned Windows’ looks. But I do agree that cloning Windows gets you no-where. I’d say copy what you need, but not everything. If Microsoft can be so free to change things like how Explorer looks and works, the Start menu structure, the control panel, etc., I’m sure XPde (and other Windows’ clones) can afford to change accroading to needs. Linux after all is a different OS than Windows.
Of course, making too big a change (like imitating LCARS? 🙂 would be stupid, on the other hand.
But one thing I don’t understand is that why when people clone Windows UI they don’t clone the good parts and always clone the *look* – often badly? I mean Microsoft have been quite liberal in changing the *looks* of Windows, why not companies like Lycoris and projects like XPde really create a *look* of their own? Just asking… Familarity doesn’t count. Unless your icons are totally in every way different from Windows, I don’t see a cause for worry.
No, GPL only applies on the software you write that you want GPLed. You can’t force Lycoris to publish something they did (closely imitating Xp’s icons is hard work, you know..) just because they used software given out free in the first place. There shouldn’t be a clause in GPL saying that every company using GPLed software must have all their stuff free – every GPLed stuff would drop in the market sooooo fast.
I know what you say, I have read the GPL ;-), but I’m talking about whether it’s fair or not, you know, they believe in GPL when it’s time to get things, but they never return anything (I know they are not forced to do that, but it would be nice).
That’s not true, you know… they return everything except their artwork. All of their apps are open source (in fact Ark Linux and Blue Linux make extensive use of Lycoris code), but their artwork is not. The reason they give is that it is an extension of their brand or corporate identitiy. You may be interested to know that Red Hat does similar things; the RH logo and “Red Hat” cannot be used in derivative products at all. Both are interested in protecting their individual identities, but they are still firmly behind the Open Source movement.
Point your criticism at people like Xandros, whose custom enhancements (XFM, the Xandros Installer, Xandros Networks, etc) are all closed source to begin with.
What you say has sense and you are right, but I’m talking about desktop icons, not about the Flower logo, Red Hat logo or any other trademark, but in any case, Conectiva supported the crystal icon set, and this icon set is GPL, it would be nice Lycoris releases their icon set under this license to allow anyone use it outside their distro, this doesn’t mean everyone can use their trademarks.
No it can’t be ported, unless Broland releases Kylix for FreeBSD.
I haven’t tried it, but maybe FreeBSD can run the Linux version.
Apparently their icons are their competitive edge :-D. But if Conectiva didn’t open Crystal up, I don’t think it would be anyway as nice looking as it is today. Being open allow other artists to participate…
If they have copyrighted the Icon’s you cannot use them without their say so. It is a bit against the community spirit but some companies do need that competitive edge
Their should be lots of other free icons around or you could find an artist who will create a set that you could use.
( James Warkentin is a TROLL do not reply to him )
Heh, these Screenshots look interesting and promising. I tend to quote a saying that we have in germany:
‘When two persons fight then the third one becomes the winner’.
I like it being written with QT
Now, that’s what I would truly call a… “Lindows”.
Now be careful there, LindowsOS is a trademark of Lindows.com. They might not like it if you began using “Lindows” as a generic term to refer to a Linux based system made to look and feel similar to Microsoft Windows. Not unlike like Microsoft doesn’t like people using “Windows” as a generic term.
Now, that’s what I would truly call a… “Lindows”.
Now be careful there, LindowsOS is a trademark of Lindows.com. They might not like it if you began using “Lindows” as a generic term to refer to a Linux based system made to look and feel similar to Microsoft Windows.
This is not unlike the way Microsoft doesn’t like people using “Windows” as a generic term, or using a variation of the word “Windows” as a trademark to promote products that can function similarly to Microsoft Windows.
By your reckoning those IBM programmers slaving on OS/2 were paid quite well, since most of OS/2 was written in assembler.
To the twit who thinks Xfree is a solution, rather than the problem: Please explain how you propose to get GUI responsiveness within reasonable limits when Xfree is single-threaded, and all GUI processes running on top of Xfree must therefore share a single time-slice with Xfree itself.
To quote Linus, in a recent thread over at kerneltrap – http://kerneltrap.org/node.php?id=603 : …you’re ignoring the fact that the heuristics we have now are clearly fundamentally broken in certain circumstances.
This was said about the horrible latencies observed everyday on Linus’ own 4-way machine.
Linus: having X just _pause_ for several seconds gets to me. I can’t easily make it happen any more thanks to having ridiculous hardware, and I think X itself has gotten better thanks to more optimizations in both clients and X itself (ie if the CPU requirements of X go down from 5% to 3%, it gets a _lot_ harder to trigger).
But it was definitely there. 3-5 second _pauses_. Not slowdowns.
Ingo explains part of the problem, which any long-time Linux user can attest to,
another thing. What really happens in the ‘recompile job’ [just as an example -JW] thing is not that X gets non-interactive […] Shells, gnome-terminal, X itself will be often preempted by these gcc and make processes. Making X more interactive does not help in this case.
Obviously, making X more interactive is a concern. Why say “X isn’t broken” when clearly it is? Other windowing systems (BeOS, Windows 2000/XP, etc) integrate the kernel with graphics display, because on these other systems graphical abilities trump the command line. Linux wasn’t designed for a GUI, and it shows quite plainly. The “desktop environment” such as KDE is a horribly crude hack, and Xfree is the agent by which such kludges have become adopted as the norm. I admire the persistence of the KDE crew, but the fact that KDE is built on such a foundation makes me weep for the future viability of Linux on the desktop. Bloated X-server technology from 1985 is simply not the answer, my friend.
On the other side of the spectrum, you might want to look at how things should be done; analyze BeOS for an excellent example. OSX is also a fine example, even if it is a grossly under-optimized pig right now.
Why clone XP when OSX’s Aqua is such a better look IMO?
I had to laugh upon reading this little gem…
[…] might make people (*cough* Eugenia *cough*) think Open Source == Just copy something else, which most certainly does not
If somebody would please steer me to an excellent Open Source application (ie, standards like TCP/IP doesn’t count – gotta be a program) that IS NOT an imitation of an existing commercial application I’d be surprised. Napster? Nope, not open source. OpenOffice? Nope. KDE? Nope. Linux? Nope. ANything, anybody??? How about FreeCiv? No, wait, that’s just another ripoff.. CDex? Fantastic program, but certainly not original. VirtualDub? Getting there… of course, it’s not as functional as many non-free editing programs that predate VD, but VirtualDub is mostly unique (by virtue of left-out features).
As a final note, Richard James is an IDIOT. This is self-evident truth, but it has fallen to me to clue in the less astute OSnews readers.
This is the same thread in which they say they are testing this while running make -j3 vmlinux in the background. They are talking about the system under very heavy load.
I’d like to see another system run three makes of the kernel at once and still be interactive.
Also they note that the problem is not X itself rather the fact that the kernel does not realise X is an interactive task. It is a kernel problem not X.
It seems that noone has actually tried this out. Eveyrone is kust arguing over what it looks like and the GPL. How silly.
Does anyone know if he is in compliance with the standards from freedesktop.org?
For instance, will the notification area standard be followed for the system tray?
I have to say, the encouarging thing about freedesktop.org will be that a new DE like this could come in an be compatible with Gnome and KDE apps in many ways.
This is funny, i think through all remarks thus far no one has even tried XPDE. Even in the prior thread about XPDE only a couple people actually claimed to have install it. Everyone says “looks good, i’ll try it”. As you know my thought is simple “It Looks Really, I’ll try Windows XP” =).
Hey why go with a clone like Lycoris, Lindows or XPDE ?
Use the original WXP (wnt 5.1.1).
No bullshit x11 window manager which stops responding.
Why the heck are those Linux freaks after clones.
Is it because they are dumb ?
Hey why go with a clone like Lycoris, Lindows or XPDE ?
I can’t answer this part because I don’t understand it myself.
Use the original WXP (wnt 5.1.1).
That is an adroit suggestion, if it does what you want it to do. Coming from a programing point of view, there are times when Windows just doesn’t offer the flexibility that I want. I use Windows sometimes, but sometimes Linux or BSD is a better choice for me. Perhaps others feel this way too, but they like the looks of Windows XP. Maybe this is good for them. Personally, I hate the looks of Windows XP and am happy to use something else.
No bullshit x11 window manager which stops responding.
I really don’t know what you are referring to here. Windows crashes far more frequently on me than X does.
Why the heck are those Linux freaks after clones.
Is it because they are dumb ?
I don’t know. As I have eluded to, I personally don’t like Windows’ appearance. I guess you will have to ask Linux users who do like it in order to get an answer. However, calling them dumb is probably not a good way to phrase your question if a response is truely what you are after.
>>Why clone XP when OSX’s Aqua is such a better look IMO?
Why don’t YOU clone it then? This guy obviously wants to clone the 2K/XP interface. Moron.
“It is a kernel problem, not an X problem.”
Precisely correct. I did not see anything during that particular discussion on the lkml that indicates that X is the real problem with some of the slowdowns. In fact, it hints just the opposite – Inigo’s and Linus’ patches combined make the problem pretty much go away.
The complaint itself doesn’t even seem to make sense: on a single-processor machine, multi-threading just doesn’t give you all that much (hell, usually hurts) performance, and the vast majority of machines are uniprocessor right now. Multi-threading is also not exactly trivial to implement in a GUI, even if you’re doing it from the very start.
It’s been said before, but it can be said again: GTK and QT are badly implemented in most apps, and are thus responsible for quite a bit of the slowness you see in XFree86. If you want to convince me X is really at fault for all of this, you need to show _proof_. But then again, even on an obsolete machine like a Celeron 700, I find GNOME+X to be just as responsive as Win98 ever was. Notably, I’ve found KDE to be much worse in this regard, although that may be because of my particular build options (using RedHat’s, no one seems to like it).
As for XPde, I’d like to give it a shot, but the site appears to be down. Quite a shame. Anyone got a mirror?
-Erwos
C’mon man serious, why do people clone something they do disregard.
Maybe you consult Sigmund Freud for the answer.
…for me to switch out of WinXP is something that would run Photoshop, and a browser and email, oh yeah, and Word.
I’m by no means a big expert in this stuff, more like a lowest common denominator, but if I am indeed lcd, then there is a revolution panting to happen. I am so tired as a user of being tooled around by MSFT.
If you want to convince me X is really at fault for all of this, you need to show _proof_.
http://www.std.org/~msm/common/WhyX.pdf
But i can name a few on my own:
A client/server model doesn’t fit a desktop use, as there are too many processes involved (app, xserver, wm) causing a lot of context switching.
No support for 32 bit modes causing slow alpha support(transparency).
Does X even do hardware acceleration of pixmaps?
Systems implement hacks, but oen thing some Linux peiople are going for is removing the hacks. Having the display server in teh kernel is a HACK. teh windows style of higher priority for the top app is a HACK. nicing apps is a HACK.
In the LKML discussion with Linus and Ingo, Linus says that this does not just fix X, X is just the most noticable since a user expects responsiveness. So going with The Right Way is fixing less notable problems which is a good thing.
X11 gives a lot of flxibility. Like someone said, sometimest he implementation slow it down. I liekd that I ddint have Java installed so I ran a program for a class remotely. Id liek to see taht done in Windows and a good job of it.
Erwos: Multithreading done right on a single proc computer can help responsiveness. With all of the Be and ex-Be advocates here, im suprised you havenyt heard baout it. It basically allows the processing to be done seperate from teh UI. An example of a single thread is a graphics progfram I use to download from my digital camera through twai. It completely stops refreshing until its doen with teh task. With multi-threaded, it would still be fucntional while crunching numbers. I would like to see QT apps go more multithreaded because it could be really good, especially with desktop HyperThreading.
In general about XPDE. I ahve a mom that screams when an icon is out of place is how bad she is with computerrs. My dad on the otehr hand used to program and work with Unices and still has a love for them and owuld liek to go back. Soemthing liek XPDE would solve both sides as long as their dirt cheap hardware is supported
“If somebody would please steer me to an excellent Open Source application (ie, standards like TCP/IP doesn’t count – gotta be a program) that IS NOT an imitation of an existing commercial application I’d be surprised.”
How about Apache? That’s a program. Or Nedit. Or TeX. Or the original SSH. Those are all open source, and they aren’t imitations of commercial programs, and they are all rather good at what they are supposed to do.
Actually calling most open source programs imitations of commercial programs is disingenuous. Often they take ideas from commercial programs, but springboard off of them rather than hew to them slavishly. KDE, for all the talk of it being Windows-like, only marginally looks like Windows and has different features from Windows, and GNOME is even more different from Windows.
In some cases, when open source does clone, the clone is better than the original. Compare the GNU versions of the traditional Unix utilities with the original ones. The GNU versions are far more robust, and have more features.
Sorry, but the whole “Open Source chases taillights” bit doesn’t wash.
A client/server model doesn’t fit a desktop use, as there are too many processes involved (app, xserver, wm) causing a lot of context switching.
>>>>>>>>>
BeOS used a client server model as well. So does QNX Photon. In fact, even Windows XP uses a client server model: (it just happens that the server runs in kernel mode). Since most graphics calls are batched, the client server model incurs minimal overhead. What it does do, though, is put a heavy burden on the scheduler to schedule things properly. That’s why BeOS felt so fast: the good scheduler, not the graphics system.
No support for 32 bit modes causing slow alpha support(transparency).
>>>>>>>>
Wow. That’s interesting. Given that I’m running in 32-bit mode right now, I’m kinda surprised to hear that. I don’t even think my GeForce4-MX supports 24-bit modes. Now, what you’re thinking of is that X doesn’t use a compositing model, so it can’t do transparency effects like OS X. That’s not really a limitation in my view: the OS X compositing model incurs a huge amount of overhead. It basically mandates the use of OpenGL for decent performance, and it is partially responsible for the obscene memory usage of OS X.
Does X even do hardware acceleration of pixmaps?
>>>>>>>>
Yes. In fact, X blits pixmaps faster than GDI, and about as fast as DirectX. The protocol overhead is low enough that the graphics card becomes the bottleneck once you get pixmaps larger than about icon-size. Do a search on some benchmarks I posted on OS News a while ago (I think it was in the BlueOS using X thread).
The “twit” who tinks X11 is a solution is not talking about XFree he is most probably talking about the X Window System. And Xfree is only one implementation of a server for that system.
The advantages of X11 is quite clear especially in a network centric world like the one we live in today. It makes it possible to easily run thin client solutions as all applications are always written to live on a network. Not like in the windows terminal server world where some apps really have piss poor performance if they work at all. Not to mention a zillion configuration problems. And by having X11 stay ut of the kernal, the kernal remains small and maintainable, something that is very important for system security. I imagine that we would have had a lot fewer blue screens of deaths if windows had kept their GUI in userspace
I certainly prefer X11 to Windows terminal server any day. I don’t know how BeeOS do remote application presentations so I can’t say if they have a better method.
Rayiner Hashem: XFree as current doesn’t support 32bit colours. And it doesn’t need to. It supports 24bit colours, + 8bit of transparency levels.
Actually, it is the same as Windows. They just call 24bit colour + 8bit transparency for 32bit. This is where the confusion is.
Eventually… You can see this, can’t you?
I mean Linux doesn’t notice pauses in ‘X’ because of the killer boxen he works on. No surprise there. I think between processors like Banias, the Northwood P4, and Athlon 64 this will become less and less of an issue. No doubt, the kernel optimizations and ongoing ‘X’ work will also help latency and are welcome.
I see all these projects ongoing to supplant ‘X’ but when it comes down to compatibility, ‘X’ wins. It may not be pretty. It may be from 1985. But it does WORK.
Do you have any idea how many older DirectX apps no longer work (or work correctly) in 2000/XP? I can tell you from experience – quite a few. Funny. ‘Xbill’ still seems to work just fine under anything that runs ‘X’.
“Why clone XP when OSX’s Aqua is such a better look IMO?”
It’s an interesting thought but consider this – Apple has more lawyers on look and feel than MS. MS is trying to keep a low profile on lawsuits. They have enough issues without generating new reasons to be hated. But Apple? Uh-uh.
Apple sues people for using gumdrop appearing buttons – you can bet that anything approaching that or their nifty ‘Program Wheel of Death’ would be sued into oblivion.
No one should think that just because MS is evil, Apple doesn’t have a dark side as well. I think that, if anything, you’re going to be hearing a lot more from Apple than MS for a while.
That’s interesting. Given that I’m running in 32-bit mode right now
I know nvidia doesn’t have a 24bit mode, what i was saying was that xfree doesn’t use the extra 8 bits (RGBA) for alpha, am i wrong?
Also if your going to call the gdi a server then you might as well call everything a server, you can call directx a server, the filesystem a server etc, i call them “services” because they only run locally, but it’s a matter of opinion and generalization.
Can’t find your directx vs. gdi vs. xfree86 benchmarks, is this the thread: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=1905 ?
Heres some benchmarks i found, care to comment?
http://www.directfb.org/news/dok/xdirectfb-1.6.4.xml
…for me to switch out of WinXP is something that would run Photoshop, and a browser and email, oh yeah, and Word.
I’m by no means a big expert in this stuff, more like a lowest common denominator, but if I am indeed lcd, then there is a revolution panting to happen. I am so tired as a user of being tooled around by MSFT.
So buy a Mac. What’s stopping you?
“Why clone XP when OSX’s Aqua is such a better look IMO?”
Because the XP interface is so much more usable.
“Multithreading done right on a single proc computer can help responsiveness. With all of the Be and ex-Be advocates here, im suprised you havenyt heard baout it. It basically allows the processing to be done seperate from teh UI. An example of a single thread is a graphics progfram I use to download from my digital camera through twai. It completely stops refreshing until its doen with teh task. With multi-threaded, it would still be fucntional while crunching numbers. I would like to see QT apps go more multithreaded because it could be really good, especially with desktop HyperThreading.”
Being a programmer myself, who has written multi-threaded apps before, I’m well-aware of what multi-threading is and how to implement it (well, in Java and C++ Linux).
Your particular example is a good point of what I was talking about: yes, you’ll get your refreshes, but that other app is going to be sucking for CPU time while it does so, and thus take longer. On most CPUs (read: non-HT P4s), only one thread can execute at a time. Having 50 threads means your CPU has to switch between each of them. If you have one thread, it might not be doing refreshes, but it won’t need to do all that switching and take CPU time to do so.
The fact is multi-threaded apps just cannot be as fast as single-threaded ones in a single CPU environment due to the overhead involved in doing the threading. If I write a single-threaded app, that overhead is not there, and it runs faster. I have not seen anyone advocate otherwise, at least… maybe I’ll ask a prof tomorrow to be sure, ain’t no one who’s perfect or always right, even me
.
I’m not advocating not writing multi-threaded apps – everything should ideally be multi-threaded as much as practical, because the speed gains on SMP machines more than make up the speed losses on uniprocessor machines. But claiming that multi-threading is the magic key to performance on a uniprocessor machine just ain’t true, even with a fantastic scheduler like the O(1). Most likely, BeOS’ smoothness came from a large combination of factors.
-Erwos
>> Why clone XP when OSX’s Aqua is such a better look IMO?
Because Apple is quite aggressive when defending their look.
1) Delphi 8 has been released which has a beta version of Delphi for .net meaning that in the next year once mono becomes more stable and feature complete we should see a version of kylix develop for mono and thus provide that “cross platform feel’in” to those who wish to run it on FreeBSD or any other operating system.
2) KDE is a usability nightmare, one only needs to look at the control panel, browser configuration to see the problem. The “kde gurus” need to chant that less is more. The majority want to jump on their computer and get on with the job or either listening to music, surfing the net or writing letter. If KDE want something to look at, look at the Apple control panel. Dead sexy and easy to use. Heck, as a new MacOS X user I found it easy to use. Or, if you want something closer to home, just have a look at the configuration tools included with GNOME as another example.
Just look at the control panel for goodness sake, have these people EVER sat on a helldesk and tried to explain to the end user to click on the plus/minus sign? users want big frigg’in icons they don’t want small confusing little widgets that they’re unfarmilar with.
Not enough options make the user feel restricted, too much options confuse the user.
Interesting comments on threading. IIRC in a BeOS programming book there was a section that went into great detail about the negative affects of programmes with with no multi-threadint code and ones with too much multi-threading code.
Erwos:
I did not say multithreading imcreases performance. The complainst against X normally deal with responsiveness or “performance” judged by responsiveness. I was stating the benefit of multithreading being responsiveness, sorry I didnt make this entirely clear. Performance and responsiveness are different beasts, though performance can help with responsiveness. I perfectly understand how multithreading can decrease performance. To an end user, responsiveness is more important then performce.
I’ve noticed the file explorer doesn’t have a cut/copy/paste icons on the toolbar. Is this feature currently available?
It’s the first version of the File Explorer, just use the right click button to copy/paste, cut/delete functions are not implemented.
Thanks for your response José
As a graphics guy, you’re talking about 32 bit RGBA. 8 bit per channel: Red, Green, Blue, Alpha. X11 doesn’t support the Alpha Channel, thus we’re talking about 24 bit RGB. Just as many colors as 32 bit RGBA, but it’s not possible to assign a transparency value to a pixel. Current transparency solutions just take snapshpots of what’s behind a window, calculate the whole thing themselves and use it as background image. Very slow.
Now, as far as I know, GDI+ in Win2k/XP supports the Alpha Channel natively. I’m just now sure how it works. Might be an inefficient hack like the X Servers do it. Could someone with insight into GDI explain?
And don’t forget Mosaic to add to your list. The first graphical web browser ever was open source. And the first email clients. Ho hum. Killer apps weren’t they?
Aside from the bitching/flaming, does anyone have anything to say about the product? You’d think this question wouldn’t need to be asked
I tried it under mandrake 9. Looks promising.
Too bad that it is not using the XP-like icons , right now. Drag and drop is not yet implemented and the start menu doesn’t come down when you click on the start button by the second time. Also the windows don’t minimize if you click on their icons in the task bar.
IMHO , they shouldn’t bother for now to implement system interfaces to configure things like network, etc…. The goal should be to provide an interface that would satisfy the
_really_non_technical_ windows users. They would see it as a “restricted” windows version ( There are restricted windows systems running in some places).
If they can do that, it will rock.
In my opinion, linux desktop programmers should emulate the mac’s ease of use and not try too hard to make things familiar for win users… more people would switch to something that feels like a mac if it were free and ran on their pc.
my 2cents
It seems that MS acted quicly. XPDE site is out, Freshmeat entry of XPDE too vanished.
And you can’t copyright a look?
At least CVS is still available:
http://cvs.berlios.de/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/xpde/
For those of us who don’t yet use CVS, go to :
http://developer.berlios.de/projects/xpde/
You can still download 0.1.1 from there.
Has anyone managed to compile the latest CVS? I’m not sure what all software is required (compiler, libs, etc?), and the readme/install files in the CVS tree dont offer much guidance. Alternatively, is there any other download sites for the 0.3.0 version (yet)?