Today we feature a 4-page interview with Nat Friedman, Co-Founder and Vice-President of Product Development at Ximian. We discuss a lot of interesting topics, ranging from Ximian’s products, to Apple, to Linux on the desktop and much more. Four screenshots of the upcoming Ximian Desktop 2 are also included, so come in and have a pick! UPDATE: Eight more screenshots added! Update2: Yaay… one more screenshot for your viewing pleasure!
Update: More screenshots to look at: two large animated screenshots (1, 2) and 6 regular ones (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6).
1. Which version of GNOME is Ximian Desktop 2.0 based on exactly, and what changes have you applied when compared to the vanilla Gnome?
Nat Friedman: XD2, as we like to call it, is based on GNOME 2.2, Mozilla 1.3 and
OpenOffice.org 1.0.3.
We’ve spent a lot of time polishing the user experience and making
sure things just work. Our focus is on creating _usability through
consistency_, which lowers support costs for big organizations that
replace Windows machines with Linux.
We have a new desktop theme called Industrial which themes GTK version
1 and 2. It’s also a Nautilus theme, a Galeon theme, an XMMS theme,
an OpenOffice.org theme, a Metacity theme, and an Icon theme. This
means that the desktop looks and feels unified.
One of the big problems we solved was the printing UI. Using CUPS as
the backend, most printers are now automatically detected and
configured, even if they’re on the network. We also added a simple
printer configuration wizard. Configured Printers show up in your
file manager and can be easily reconfigured to change things like
paper sizes, using a familiar interface. Small things matter: your
printer jobs appear on the panel until they are done, so you know when
to pick up the results. Large things matter too: when printing from
an application, just click on the printer you want to print to. For
most people, this solves the Linux printing problem pretty well.
We’ve also worked on file sharing for people in corporate networks.
Users often have trouble understanding why they need to mount network
drives before they can use them. We’ve made NFS and SMB share
browsing easy, and made it possible for most applications we ship to
open files on unmounted shares. It’s pretty slick when you try it the
first time; especially as a demo at a customer site with unprotected
SMB shares ;-).
When GNOME 2.4 comes out, we’ll likely issue a follow-on release not
long after which will be based on the 2.4 modules. We are currently
working on porting our OOo patches to OOo 1.1, which includes a lot of
nice features.
2. I read on your web page that Ximian Connector supports Microsoft Exchange 2000. Is Exchange “Titanium” support planed? How “easy” is to implement an alien technology like Exchange under Unix?
Nat Friedman: Yep, Ximian Connector does support Exchange 2000. There are a lot of
people who’ve been able to ditch their Windows machines and switch
over to Linux because they can now use their Exchange server for
calendaring and collaboration from their Linux desktop.
We don’t support earlier versions of Exchange because it is really
hard to do all the MAPI/DCE-RPC stuff natively from Linux, and we
expect most Exchange customers to migrate off Exchange 5.5 eventually.
We plan to support Exchange 2003 (“Titanium”) as soon as it is
released. We already have the prerelease versions from MSDN. We
expect the final release to be this summer, and most of the work we’ll
have to do will be testing to make sure the current Connector still
works against the new server version.
The Connector is an interoperability product, and interoperability
software is never really “easy.” Especially when it has to
interoperate with a largely undocumented or misdocumented protocol and
service. You can look at projects like Wine and Lesstif as extreme
examples of the difficulty of building perfect compatibility software.
It’s probably fair to say that the ratio of time our Connector
developers spend in the debugger versus the Emacs buffer is higher
than with most software. It’s not as high as with Wine; Jeremy White
from Codeweavers will tell you that his hackers spend very close to
100% of their time in gdb.
3. Do you plan on broadening your business into other mainstream Unix-based platforms, like Mac OS X for example? How would you feel of a port of Evolution and Connector to OSX (with or without GTK+ and XFree86)?
Nat Friedman: Evolution *does* build and work on OS X with little or no fuss,
especially if you have fink going; there are half a dozen tiBooks at
Ximian HQ all of which run Evolution. Apple is cool. We like Apple.
But we’re not going to spend a lot of time porting and supporting our
stuff on Mac OS X. Someone ran a poll a while ago to try to drum up
support for a Ximian-supported OS X Connector, and the demand just
isn’t there.
Why isn’t the demand there? Because Mac OS X isn’t a free platform,
and it runs on expensive hardware. It is not a plausible Windows
alternative for our desktop customers, who are mainly large government
organizations displacing Windows desktops and big enterprise
corporations replacing Solaris workstations. That is where the action
is today for Linux clients. It is not in the consumer space, which is
where Mac OS X plays.
I’m personally working on converting about 250,000 different Windows
machines to Linux desktops, primarily in European government. These
are groups of machines which are in various stages of adopting Linux:
some early, some very advanced (we have a couple big deployments that
I hope we can talk about soon), but all with a lot of pro-Linux
momentum.
A lot of that momentum comes from the fact that Linux is free
(something not true of Mac OS X, whatever they’ve gotten you to
believe) and the procurement costs for Linux desktops are low
(something definitely not true for Apple, which has a policy of
pricing slightly above the PC — a la Bosendorfer or Harley-Davidson).
You can’t tell a compelling story about cost savings or vendor
independence to European or South American governments and also peddle
OS X.
I have a G4 at home. They’re great machines for individual users, and
I even know a few core Linux hackers who are having a lot of fun with
them. But if you want to move the needle on the non-Microsoft
desktop, you’ve got to look elsewhere.
Google Zeitgeist has consistently reported Linux user-agents at 1% of
their total searches for the last year. I’d like to bump that number
and cause some shivers in Redmond. That’s what we’re focused on, and
the way to do that is to target the userbase segments where a Linux
desktop can succeed on a large scale.
4. Red Carpet has made inroads in many corporations for software deployment and management. Would you ever consider expanding it to become a front end for apt-get as well, serving as a more elegant synaptic/gselect?
Nat Friedman: Red Carpet has a nice package abstraction layer that allows us to
support RPMs and DEBs transparently. You can use the Red Carpet
end-user client (GUI or CLI) or our centralized Red Carpet Enterprise
product to manage Debian machines just fine. Red Carpet has supported
Debian since its introduction.
One of the things that people like about apt-get is having an
easy-to-use software catalog at their fingertips, so if you want to
install some missing software on your machine, you can do it with a
quick command.
Red Carpet gives you this too, and on non-Debian systems, with a
commandline and a nice GUI. With Red Carpet, you can type:
rc in <package name>
to install new software from a channel. And you can do this on any
Red Carpet-enabled system, be it Debian or SuSE or Red Hat. (Other
tricks: with the GUI you can bundle a whole transaction of installs,
removals, upgrades, etc and run it all at once; also, try ‘rc mount
<directory>’ to map a directory to a channel).
5. What do you think about the evolution of Gnome in regards of usability and looks when compared to KDE, OS X and the latest Windows? Does the development pace satisfies you? What do you think about the lack of
integration between all X11 DEs and the underneath OS system?
Nat Friedman: GNOME is aiming for simplicity and consistency; we’re the first open
source desktop project to have a documented set of human interface
guidelines.
KDE has way more options (the clock properties dialog has five tabs!)
and Windows migrants frequently find this confusing, especially people
who work in offices. Also, KDE sort of “looks” like Windows, which
people frequently find confusing, since it implies that it will act
exactly like Windows, which it doesn’t (we have partners who have done
UI studies that confirm this).
OS X is sweet: it’s simple and intuitive, and I think GNOME shares a
lot of values with it.
Freedesktop.org has done a lot to improve integration between the
desktop environments. Send love over there if you want to improve
things. 🙂
6. How is Mono progressing? Do you have plans to include C# code in Evolution and/or other products?
Nat Friedman: Mono is doing really well. I started hacking in Mono a few months ago
for some personal projects, and was very impressed with how complete
and usable it is. There are a few software houses and embedded
developers who may be using Mono as the basis for their .NET products
soon, too (announcements to come if we get the deals).
One of the really cool things about Mono is that you get a high-level,
garbage-collected language which can wrap C and C++ trivially. For
example, if you want to use the GNOME-VFS library from your C#
application to find the MIME type of a given file, you just do this:
[DllImport (“libgnomevfs-2”)]
extern static string gnome_vfs_get_mime_type (string text_uri);
And then you can use the gnome_vfs_get_mime_type() function from your
C# code. That’s it — that’s all the code you have to write. This is
way better than Java Native Interfaces (JNI), which requires you to
compile a wrapper class before you can call into C, and needs some
other boilerplate code. In C#, for many cases, you don’t have to
worry about header files or wrapper classes or anything.
This has two important ramifications.
First, Mono applications can easily use existing C-based GNOME
components and take advantage of all the hard work that’s gone into
them. So as Mono matures, people will begin to use it to write
desktop components that take advantage of all the hard work that’s
gone into some of the meatier GNOME libraries, as well as the nifty
language features of C#. Gtk# is a good example of this, but I think
we’ll start to see things like GNOME-VFS, GConf and the Camel
messaging library being used from Mono more often.
Second, this means that Mono can be the universal component hub,
allowing you to use C objects from Python, C++ objects from Perl, and
so on. This is possible because C#’s language features make it
trivial to automatically bind C# objects into other languages. Check
out Python Scripting for .NET:
http://www.zope.org/Members/Brian/PythonNet/FAQ.html. There’s also a
Mono-based JavaScript compiler in the works (MS already has one, of
course).
We’re not going to make Evolution or any of our other products depend
on Mono anytime in the near future. However, we are already
prototyping new functionality in Mono (like the sidebar folder summary
Miguel wrote), and in a year or so, we may feel comfortable enough to
start writing new critical-path code in Mono. Certainly we won’t do
anything like rewrite currently-working components in C#. There won’t
be an all-at-once port of Evolution to Mono, for example.
What is pretty likely to happen in the near future is that we’ll ship
C# bindings for key things like the Evolution backend data stores —
your mail, your calendar, your addressbook, etc. — at some point
soon. This means the community can use Mono to extend Evolution and
the desktop without all the hassle of diving into the web of C-based
GObjects.
7. How is the market responding to your Red Carpet Enterprise product? What do you see as the biggest competitor to this product today
Nat Friedman: Big Linux deployments have reached the point where it’s become a real
problem for administrators that they don’t have nice tools to manage
their servers and desktops.
Red Carpet Enterprise has been really well received since one guy can
install it in about an hour, and it makes it trivial to deal with
software management issues like deploying updates and creating
standard package sets for your various machines.
Amerada Hess is one good example of this, where one administrator is
using RCE to single-handedly administer 300 Linux servers and
desktops. This is what people need: an easy-to-deploy, easy-to-use
tool.
RCE also has the nice advantage that it supports pretty much every
major Linux distribution out there; this is especially handy in
environments where you’ve got a few different distros in use.
8. What changes have you made to OpenOffice.org when compared to its vanilla version?
Nat Friedman: We’ve done about six months of heavy development on OOo, all focused
on improving consistency across the desktop and compatibility with
Microsoft documents.
We don’t _want_ to have any delta against the upstream OOo tree, so
we’re going to be working to get all of those changes upstream now
that this release is done.
Here’s a dump of some of the key new features in our OOo:
– ~1,000 new alpha-blended icons that are aesthetically
consistent with the rest of the desktop. We use large icon
mode by default. We also have some other new art in some of
the wizards and of course the splash (which no longer makes
your desktop unusable while each application starts up).
– Shares the Gtk theme elements (“theme chameleoning”). Uses
fontconfig, AA fonts everywhere in the UI now.
– Mapping of MSFT document fonts to Agfa fonts (which XD2
includes).
Also, our artists drew a whole new font just to handle the
bullet mappings (which aren’t fully covered by Agfa’s fonts).
– GNOME-VFS integration so you can open any files the VFS can
get to. This includes files on SMB and NFS shares. We even
handle the authentication for these shares (Michael Meeks
redid the authentication layer in OOo), so you get prompted if
the share is password protected.
– Nice CUPS printing integration so you get the same printer
list in OOo you get everywhere else in the desktop.
– Support for the recent files spec so that System->Recent
Files reflects the documents you’ve opened in OOo.
– Uses MSFT file formats by default, reflecting the reality of
most of the documents you will receive. No longer tells you
you’re about to lose all your data when you save in an MSFT
format.
– Removed the non-redistributable GPC library, replaced it
with libart so that we can ship OOo with better support for
importing PowerPoint presentations.
– Integrates nicely with Galeon and Evolution. OOo HEAD
actually does Evolution addresbook mailmerge, which we’re
looking forward to.
– Includes a number of foreign-language dictionaries.
– We’ve also done some performance tweaks and fixed a number
of customer-reported bugs. Our turnaround time on fixes for
document importing issues is actually averaging 24-48 hours,
which is pretty remarkable.
That’s a quick summary; we have nearly 100 patches against OOo. Check
out the .src.rpm for the full list :-).
9. Do you have any plans to move to the Gecko HTML rendering engine for Evolution or are you going to continue to improve and maintain gtkhtml?
Nat Friedman: When we started developing Evolution, Gecko was incomplete and way too
big, and especially ill-suited for editing HTML, which we needed for
the mail composer. That is why we needed to write our own HTML widget.
Gecko has matured a lot since then, but of course so has GtkHTML (it
uses Pango now, and can edit tables and so on). I think there is
still a need for a lightweight HTML widget that does all the things
you need for mail, but we’d certainly accept patches to use Gecko in
Evolution. It would be nice not to have to maintain an HTML widget,
but right now that doesn’t seem plausible. Maybe someday.
10. Ximian is gaining notoriety in the messaging & collaboration enterprise Unix market with its products, but there are more products that could fill some gaps; do you have any plans to deliver a large collaboration product,
similar to Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server, a Conferencing Server, or a more “industrial” version of Gaim or some other IM system?
Nat Friedman: No, not right now. There’s a lot still to do in Evolution :-).
it looks good to me but i’ll reserve my judgement till i get my hands on it…
i mean they can have all these interviews and screenshots but nobody really knows in the public if this is as good as it looks till we get our hands on the stuff…
Excellent interview!! When I was using Linux, Ximian Desktop was always the first thing that got installed. This will definitely help Linux in the Enterprise desktop market.
Kudos.
“Nat Friedman: GNOME is aiming for simplicity and consistency; we’re the first open source desktop project to have a documented set of human interface guidelines. ”
Why does he lie? When GNOME released their HIG, KDE had already one for years!
How do you know that he is lying? Maybe he doesn’t know. And don’t forget, Gnome’s HIG was done with Sun’s help, they did real life testings, while KDE I think it was just written out of experience without any usability tests on large number of users.
Nice interview Eugenia.
Really looking forward to the OOo patches hits gentoo
Does anyone knows if there will be support for woody??
XD2 for Debian? I would like to try this out, but don’t want to switch distros to do so.
Isn’t the first shot showing evolution for gtk1?
Surely looks that way
Benny
Well The evolution 1.4 isn’s out yet so maybe an upgrade later when is out tested and stable
I think
I wasn’t lying, but I wasn’t very clear either. What I meant was that GNOME was the first project to have a documented set of human interface guidelines, *and* to have a usability team that enforces those guidelines across the desktop. This has given us a pretty high level of UI consistency, which I think shows. (Now, if this happens to be wrong, I’m still not lying — I’m just wrong, but I don’t think that I am :-).
With regards to Debian – we’re not building Debian packages. It takes too much work to keep up with unstable and stable is too old. I’m sure some of our patches will get into Debian eventually.
That first screenshot is showing Evo 1.2, and I’m not sure why. Evo 1.4 is coming out concurrent with XD2, on Monday.
It seems many GTK based projects are actually using HIG nowadays. But doesn’t seem so with KDE. (Stuff like KBear is atrocious).
I think the tendency to include everything but the kitchen sink in a vanilla desktop kills open source desktops. I think the vanilla setup should just be a development environment, lke GNOME seems to do. Others should then add their own features like Ximian does and release user oriented desktops. I think some things need a budget to be done correctly. Like making a full coherent desktop. (Both Vanilla GNOME and KDE don’t cut it).
is set up a minimalist debian system and wget this sucker.
I hope one day after Ximian has put so much work into their product that they make a distrobution that is only XD based. they can continue to support other distros for legasy installs and stuff but for new installs an XD linux distro could make deployment much easier.
>That first screenshot is showing Evo 1.2, and I’m not sure why.
This is what I was sent. Send me another one if you want and I will replace it.
you will not have a woody version of XD2 or that RC will not be using the apt-achives?
not have a woody version of XD2
> “When GNOME released their HIG, KDE had already one for years!”
You mean the KDE UI Guidelines? That’s hardly a HIG.
Compare http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/1.0/ to http://developer.kde.org/documentation/standards/kde/style/basics/
The GNOME HIG is *way* more verbose, and is not just a “GNOME user interface guideline”, but an entire book about writing good software in general. Everybody should read the GNOME HIG. Yes, that includes KDE developers too! Even if you don’t follow the GNOME user interface guidelines, the GNOME HIG can still teach you a thing or two about general software usability.
This is a great interview for a cool looking product.
Keep up the good work.
Is Nat like 12 years old or what? (Just going by the picture.)
-hugh
First, Eugenia, great interview. I really enjoy your interviews (like the one with Havoc awhile ago, that wasa great).
Second, Nat, great responses. Lots of thought put into them. I really appreciate it.
I think XD2 looks beautiful, and I can’t wait to try it out on my RH9 box on Monday. Hats off to the Ximian developers. It’s been a long wait for XD2
but it looks like it’s been worth it.
Two questions: is there a full list of all packages included in XD2? Will Ximian include Epiphany?
Thanks.
Galeon.
will it work with redhat 9 and the recent JAMD 0.0.6?
Which distro versions will XD2 support initially?
>Which distro versions will XD2 support initially?
Why don’t you pay a visit in our big fat link of Ximian Desktop 2 to find out?
I won’t answer here, because the answer is there, in their “download” page.
“we made it possible for most applications we ship to open files on unmounted shares”
That’s pretty cool. How’d they do that?
Woow, what a great interview. Well, I though XD2 was dead out of the water, but it looks like the wait is going to be worth it. We’ll have to see, soon enough!
I got alot of good info from this interview and the screenshots are always a plus. Some of it went over my head since I’m not a programmer, but that’s a good thing. I’m primarily a FreeBSD user so I likely won’t purchase Ximian, but I will definitely try it on my Redhat box. What’s good for Linux is generally good for BSD in the long run. I’m all for *Nix taking some desktop share from Micro$oft.
Great Interview!!! I thought the first ximian desktop was pretty nice but after seeing this one, I know I’ve got to try it out. Any ideas when I’d be able to download it onto my Mdk 9 distro? (if at all)
We made GNOME-VFS support smb: and nfs: URIs. And we made OOo support GNOME-VFS. Booyakasha!
first of all i agree, this is a great interview
this looks really good.. although i’m quite happy with KDE3.1, i’ll definitely try out XD2!
http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/mac/HIGuidelines/HIGuidelines-2…
That is a link to Apple’s documention and HIG with respect to all the HCI research and practical implementation that went into their OS’s prior to OS X.
It is several hundred page book covering everything from metaphors, human psychological acceptance of certian paradigms, how Apple built a UI to satisfy users and stringent usability criteria, and of course it includes documentation for how apps developers can achieve the same goals Apple did.
Regardless of your development platform, if you are a thick client or desktop/workstation apps development this book is a MUST READ.
YOU WILL BE A BETTER DEVELOPER FOR HAVING READ IT.
I agree with Debman, I wonder why XD2 couldn’t be it’s own distro. It seems that there are more steps then needed to install redhat or suse then XD2. Plus, you’re bound to get some stuff you don’t need when you install them. Making basically a Red Hat or SuSe minimal install on a CD with just what XD2 needs, and installing XD2 in one step would make it easier to implement. It doesn’t seem as if it would take that much work, either. There’s probably something I’m missing, but why doesn’t ximian do this?
I wonder is XD2 free/open source software. Will for example the OO.o team be able to use the improvements made by Ximian?
Nat,
You state that OpenOffice.org uses fontconfig for the UI. My question is, have you set up XD2 some way such that if I install new fonts into the fonts:/// directory they are automatically picked up by OpenOffice.org so they appear in the drop-down font menu? That is one thing I’d really like to see, since it’s a pain to have to install fonts in fonts:/// and then again having to run OpenOffice.org’s spadmin program to install the fonts in OO.o.
Thanks!
I’m over this Outlook feel. Having an iBook running Apples Mail.app, addressbook, and calendar as integrated but separate apps makes Evolution look so outdated and bulky. Plus doesn’t Evolution go against the traditional Unix model for apps? That being, do one thing and do it well.
This is the same problem I have with Open Office. I can’t just download the writer. I have to download everything even if I don’t want everything.
Break up Evolution. Provide a set of API’s for each function. If somebody else writes a better contact manager that integrates with Evolution’s mail, then all the better.
“Will for example the OO.o team be able to use the improvements made by Ximian?”
Doesn’t he specifically answer that question on page 4?
I think there is still a need for a lightweight HTML widget that does all the things you need for mail, but we’d certainly accept patches to use Gecko in Evolution. It would be nice not to have to maintain an HTML widget, but right now that doesn’t seem plausible.
Circumstances like this is exactly why I say that (Mozilla) Composer should be developed as an HTML ‘widget’ instead of a full-blown program. That way, anyone could use it as a drop-in HTML editor.
It seems to me that it makes more sense to have all these functions integrated in a business environment (which is what ximian is aimed at) that way interoperability is assured and you will use all the parts of the program. Granted, combining a media player or development environment into evolution wouldn’t make sense, but as it stands now for a business user everything there would probably be needed. It’s also, however, a matter of personal choice for yourself, and if you don’t like evolution there are other apps out there, like kmail etc. for KDE.
i must say, from what i can see, ximian seems to have sucessfully adressed many of the remaining issues which i (and i guess many others) are having with linux DEs, that are
– seamless integration into windows-networks (finally, opening of windowsshares will be possible-VERY cool!)
– consistent look and feel
– integration of OOo (which now will hopefully load much quicker…!)
– easier printmanagement (i guess to make it even more comfortable, you’d need the support of the printervendors…)
now, the only 2 things i miss are
– easy graphical installer (like autopackage), and one controlpanel for rpms, autopackages etc., means for all installed software where one can easily upgrade, deinstall etc. them.
– for gnome, an equal to konqueror is really missed!
and yes, especially gnome could get a bit faster and responsive (you might take a look on blueeyedos.com patches/fixes for xfree)-more or less finetuning.
but if companies like ximian with clearly an eye for what’s needed to make linux ready for the desktop will continue to push it forward, i’m quite sure that in 1-2 years, the remaining rough edges will be polished!
congrats!
I know Ximian is trying to convince companies to move away from Microsoft but why insist on doing things the way that corporation does ? Years ago, when people migrated to Windows NT, they agreed upon learning how to use a new platform : they didn’t expect NT to behave like Netware or Solaris. After all, does it really take forever to convert to another computing environment ?
Therefore, I think instead of wasting time deciphering what Nat Friedman calls “largely undocumented or misdocumented protocol and service”, Ximian could concentrate on offering customers a new paradigm and should get rid of the proprietary cruft that Microsoft loves to add to standards.
A bigger barrier to upfront costs involved in making a switch is retraining. Linux is still very different from windows even though they are aping some windows functionality. Besides, in a networked world, interopereability is important. maybe 10 years ago it may not have been as important as now, but we are working against a huge momentum here. Anything that makes it easier is good.
Once people are off windows, they can learn and see how Linux is so good. They wil never know without using it in the first place.
You said:
By Josh (IP: —.client.attbi.com) – Posted on 2003-06-03 20:11:30
I agree with Debman, I wonder why XD2 couldn’t be it’s own distro.
Oh, you don’t want to go into that. Yeah, it sounds tempting– “hey, we could control the whole stack!” But there are two big problems with it:
a) you have to develop and support, an entire distro.
b) you compete with the other distro makers, which as an ISV you rely on for partnerships and support.
In short: Yes.
In long: Yes. If you read about Ximian, you’ll see that their business plan is not to compete with Windows, that’s a losing battle at this point. However, developing Linux to sit side by side with Windows is profitable and buzzworthy. If an office can move SOME people over, it makes it easy to pilot the program, access ROI and TCO, and deploy on your own schedule. Ximian is smart- they aren’t trying to go for the whole ball of wax too early.
> But doesn’t seem so with KDE. (Stuff like KBear is atrocious).
Bad example, KBear is not developed in kde.org’s CVS repository but is a third-party application out of range of the KDE usability team.
> I think the tendency to include everything but the kitchen sink in a vanilla desktop kills open source desktops. I think the vanilla setup should just be a development environment, like GNOME seems to do
Gnome 2.2 didn’t include Games? Gnome 2.4 will not include even more stuff like a video conferencing programm?
Go back to troll school and learn!
Your right there, I guess I never looked at it that way, but by making it more of a symbiotic relationship with the distros you can focus on the UI and it helps boost linux in general by making a (for lack of a better word) standard available across several distros, so that no matter what you have you can be familiar with ximian. Very true.
Also, for the aping windows, it looks to me as though it apes macOS more than windows, but the key is it doesn’t do either, it has it’s own GUI taking (hopefully) the best from both worlds and improving on it, but you _must_ have compatibility with windows because they are still on most of the desktops. Asking a company to switch would be unrealistic, but a kind of phasing effect would be very affective, because there is no “down time” while people learn the new software, and yet you still switch over eventually. The reason Windows could make the switch to NT so abruptly was because (to me any way):
1. It’s still windows, not an entire new OS
2. There just really wasn’t much competition
Go back to troll school and learn!
Reading his answers, and yours, I think you are the most adequate person to suggest him a nice troll school.
It definitely looks sweet; I like the idea of “simplicity” in a user interface, something which to date Linux and Windows both fail at (IMO). I don’t have any experience of using a Mac so I can’t comment on that.
I think I’ll definitely give this a try when I get the chance. Hopefully there’ll be a linux distro with Ximian enabled as default! Note I haven’t visited Ximian’s website just yet.
This is so off topic, but yesterday there was a thread with links to Ximian’s site both here and on /.
Now this on osnews and slashdot.
I feel soooo sorry for their server.
The last time I checked, KBear came with KDE 3.1, in extra gear though. Hey, I really like XD2. I am not counting games here. I am counting real apps. I do not think games make a desktop release.
I said BOTH vanilla GNOME and KDE do no cut it. Look at my post. What I said was someone needs to properly package GNOME and KDE lke Ximian is doing. And this is why I sai someone needs a budget to do it. The reason GNOME wins in usability IMHO is that is has Ximian and Sun and to some extent Redhat putting money and resources for usability testing.
It looks like “Industrial” is one of those “one pixel off each corner” themes. Simple mathematics tell you that that’s not scalable! Widgets scale with the text inside them. People using high resolutions (me!) use larger font sizes, and thus have larger widgets. Removing one pixel from each corner imples a certain amount of perceived curvature in the element. The bigger the widget gets (in pixels) the sharper the one pixel curve looks. End result? These themes look really weird on high-res screens. Either allow the corner pixels to be turned on (thanks clee!) or (better) scale the curve with the resolution of the widget and anti-alias the edges.
>It looks like “Industrial” is one of those “one pixel off each corner” themes
Yaaayyy!
MANDRAKE 9.1 support!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I also want KDE to be as polished, fast and user friendly as XD 2. KDE has practically all the features GNOME ha and than some in areas, but they jsut aren’t as easy to use.
For example compare, the wonderful usability and elegance of XD2’s find tool and KDE’s bulky mess. =(
I’ve always wondered this – If you use Microsoft’s Plus package, you pick one theme and everything has a nice new look and feel.
According to Nat Freidman, they had to come up with themes of nautilus, galeon, open office, etc. W
Why don’t all these applications share a common set of theme preferences?
There IS an HTML widget based off of Gecko (Mozilla’s rendering engine).
From their website:
Gecko allows third party developers to use the same technolgy as found in Mozilla. That means you can embed a web browser inside a 3rd party application, open channels and streams through the network backend, walk through the DOM and so on. You even also construct whole new applications using chrome.
Official website:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/
>There IS an HTML widget based off of Gecko
Yes, but Ximian evaluated their needs and their offerings and saw that Gecko does not support HTML editing (which is what they need for their mail client) and it is NOT as lightweight as gtkhtml. They weigh the good and the bad, and they decided gtkhtml. As long as they maintain it, this is good enough for everyone (and faster to load).
I am repeating myself, BUT:
When will we see gnome with a global menubar a la MacOS X/NeXTSTEP ?
Having one for every window is a waste of screen real estate.
Having one for each window _AND_ a global menubar that fills almost no purpose is sheer madness.
(and yes, I know about the sloppy focus problem)
> Why don’t all these applications share a
> common set of theme preferences?
They DO.. nautilus, galeon, gaim, evolution are all based on GTK. OOo is heavily modified to match the current GTK theme, too.
They expect to obtain some amrket from microsoft YET the default format of oo.org is MS’s own. IMO, it really shouldn’t be the default or at least it should eb configurable.
MS word for example can’t handle a good deal of 3d effects, complex background and alyering which OO can in taht format.
and so is Evolution. thanks
I too hope KDE has the slickness, usability and just plain polish of XD 2. KD Epeople jsut don’t seem to get usability though, i wished they would jsut freaking follow the HIG ebcause I gave my mom both KDE 3.1.1 and GNOME 22 and she didn’t really care which DE she used, but she still thought GNOME was friendlier and looked better.
However all she does is mail, itnernet and word processing, no games so it didn’t really matter.
“We have a new desktop theme called Industrial which themes GTK version 1 and 2. It’s also a Nautilus theme, a Galeon theme, an XMMS theme, an OpenOffice.org theme, a Metacity theme, and an Icon theme. This means that the desktop looks and feels unified.”
It really seems like aside from the OOo stuff, that most of the improvements xd2 brings over something like the default redhat 9 desktop is backend stuff like: consistent printing widgets, improved gnome-vfs for printing and network, etc. The other big improvement they bring is just general organization and streamlining of the desktop. It seems like all of these improvements will quickly make it into the mainstream gnome 2.3 development series and OOo 1.1.
Is that not true? If so, what does ximian have to offer regular gnome users? If I can get more flexible and just as featureful gnome from redhat/gentoo/deb they I don’t think I will bother with ximian messing up my dependencies and making me wait a long time for updates (been burned there already by ximian). I understand that for businesses wishing to streamline their maintenance costs that xd2 will be great but I don’t think I’ll use it.
“I too hope KDE has the slickness, usability and just plain polish of XD 2”
that’s the good thing about competiton…if gnome/ximian is ahead in some issues, kde has to catch up, and vice versa.
on the other hand, there’s afaik no commercial company that does a desktop that sits atop kde, so that might be the reason that kde isn’t that polished. on the other hand, it’s the default de od suse, so they should be interested to take a more active role in polishing it.
i used to use gnome on my rh9, but i recently installed kde just to check it out, and while it hasn’t such warm themes as gnome (and clutters the menues with all those k-tools i really don’t want or need-aarrgh…!), i really appreciate konqueror.
but the possibilty to easily use smb-shares, as well as the more tightly integrated and better looking OOo will likely make gnome to my desktop default once again, although i just realized on 2 read that OOo doesn’t use gtk, just resembles it. hopefully you can nevertheless switch to a different set of buttons (i don’t like the default, but if not, there still way better than the normal ones).
also, hopefully streaming media from windows shares will also work, not just opening documents (i really need that).
anyways, a big step in the right direction, and i’m looking forward to check it out to see what it’s capable of in terms of integration and flexibility.
A really good interview!
GNOME has really done wonders in terms of usability since GNOME 1.4 (which was a compelete mess, but my favorite DE). KDE meanwhile, was really cleaned and polished in KDE 2.x and 1.x series but seems not be these days. I still love KDE though because of it’s features. In the end, it’s features that win, not usability. Microsoft proved this time and time again with quite a few different software sectors (hint hint, not only talking about the general environment here…)
I checked out KDE’s and GNOME’s HIGs, and KDE’s are quite __old__ compared to GNOME’s. Shows where people’s interests have been lately (of course, did GNOME 1.x even have a HIG?)
But, both of them look puny compared to Apple’s HIG and Microsoft’s huge section on User Interface Design on MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/nhp/default.asp?…)
I’d find XD2 very compelling if it just did ‘sloppy focus’ right. It’s far better looking than KDE, and in many ways more usable, but Metacity’s lack of configurability makes it unusable for me. If I dump Metacity, then all kinds of Gnome things seem to break.
All I want is the ability to to click on a window without it coming to the top. Is that too much to ask? I’d even give up usable root menus if I could only get focus to work right.
KDE has a lot of warts, but I can set focus to work the way I need it too, and that excuses a multitude of sins.
There’s a huge thread in the bugzilla about raising on click. I too would like an option to disable this. But the usability experts now rule GNOME. They somehow decided that an option is unacceptable and want to do it right. Until then we all have to suffer.
I wished they provided this one option until they invent something better.
I have also for some days tried to use Nautilus. I gave up in frustration and am now using MC. Nautilus is just broken as a file manager. Just take a look at bugzilla.
Short list:
* tree view isn’t remembered and synchronized with file view
* impossible to drop files in list view
* impossible to drag files that are not selected
* files open by default in the file view, which makes it impossible to actually manage files and have files open in applications
* you can’t have more than one user defined application associated with a file type
They made a huge error when they turned the file manager into a crappy file view. I want to manage my files and I want to edit them in different windows. If I want to view them then I will simply not edit them. There are also great specialized viewers like gthumb, gqview, ggv, gpdf.
Still GNOME is my favourite desktop. The other apps are the best.
Will XD 2 hav ea way to disable those rounde dcorners, those annoy me and proabbly don’t look too good on high resolutions or save screen sapce or increase performance OR ANYTHING, its a waste of time to do that IMO and I don’t even like the way they look.
Also synergy, KDE will have to catch up in terms of slickness and usability, not features but the KDE developers don’t even seem to really find any fault with usability unless you can not do something at all. If there si an option for it they consider it is good as long as that is acessible though a gui and hidden somewhere, it doesen’t seem to really matter how much more userfriendly of an implementation of that option there could be.
I’m all for configurability, not too much configurabiltiy but just a little less than KDE has, however I want it to be implemented in a well documented and user friendly way.
For example, like Nat mentioned, the KDE clock sia total usabiltiy dissaster! Check this bug out and vote for it to show that KDE’s suers do care about usability and don’t want infinite configurability.
Please post a list of the fonts that come with XD2.
How many of them?
“fc-list” output will do nicely!
/ralph
I do not have XD2. Ximian did not offered it to OSNews.
Hi, Nat, Eugenia, et al.
First of all, thanks for the great interview (both the interviewer and interviewee). It was very informative. My initial reaction was to forward to someone at Ximian the name and email address of someone in our company who they could make a sales pitch to (I’m a software engineer). Then it occurred to me that there are two pieces of software missing to make it a possible sell: IBM Rational ClearCase client for RedHat 9 (the distro we’d prefer) and NTLM support for Linux.
We need a ClearCase client for RH9 and someone from Rational mentioned something being “in the works”, but who knows how long that’ll take. That plus ClearCase’s atrocious installation system might make it a hardsell.
The other requirement is NTLM authentication support in a web browser. Our company uses MS Great Pains, err, Plains as part of our project management system. Everyone logs in their time spent on projects to this system and currently, only Mozilla has this support but not on the Linux version.
Anyway, if you Ximian guys want the contact info for someone you can pitch to in our company, lemme know, ;-).
Eugenia: I’m replying to Darius, who suggested/implied that there should be a Mozilla HTML widget. I’m not arguing for or against its use by Ximian.
I can’t wait to get my hands on it:)
I disagree with Ximian’s decision not to port connector to OSX in a supported fashion. But, it’s their s**t so…
The market for an app that doesn’t exist can’t be accurately gauged. If Ximian put the effort in, especially considering there is currently no way to attach to Exchange servers and get the calendar et al.
The way to approach it is to…duh…not make it free for a non-free platform. Oh, yeah, Connector ain’t Free is it?
And this decision was based on what ? Wake up Ximian not everyone uses or even likes RH, Suse or Mandrake.
Thanks for nothing !
Ximian can give you source. Porting is hard and costs money for Ximian. They only produce packages for the ones they hope to sell much of. I agree with them on this one.
One of the debian maintainers can pick up XD2 and maintain it if they so wish. If the market becomes big enough, Ximian will pick it up without doubt. Ximian is not a non-profit oganisation.
…um, white. Seriously, I thought OS X’s Aqua interface was the “brightest” GUI around (at least since the old, old Mac OS days before Platinum), but this beats all! It’s so white that it makes my eyes bleed!
XD2 looks really great, but with all that white, methinks I’d choose a different theme.
Jared
Eugenia, plese oh pretty please do a great review of XD 2 like that of Redhat 8, sure they didn’t give it to you, its not cmpletley finished and tehy know what a critical reviewer you are (which sia good thing) and want you to get their best work.
However, this doesen’t mean you can’t download it Monday and tahn do a review a week or two later? right…? I hope so, thanks.
If you do please comapre it to KDE 3.1.2 and tell them to open their usability manauls ;p
I’m running RH7.3 and RH9 systems now with the default Redhat Gnome desktops. I tried Ximian in the past but had too many clashes with redhat and updates that I stopped using Ximian.
From what I have read about the new XD2 I will definitely try it out. I like the new simpler Gnome approach. Keep it simple, make it bulletproof. What is ximian doing about multimedia, java, and plugins? That’s alway a problem with RH systems. I wish Ximian success in the desktop linux market. I’m also glad to hear that Ximian is being good about feeding patches back into the open source projects so everyone benefits. Keep up the good work.
Not that I want to rain the party, but after looking at all screenshots Ximian’s “theme chameleoning” for OOo seem to be pretty half backed, it’s still using the standard scroll bar style and pretty much all other widgets except the ones related to the icons seem to be the ol’ OOo style all over again. So I guess a Geramik won’t make OOo any better looking in KDE as for now.
Well, wasn’t my reaction, however, I did wonder whether he was younger than twenty. Mind you, Miguel does look a bit like by cousin. Maybe its the Spanish/Med. in my family?
can I change OpenOffice’s to default to its own file format? Is there a switch in the prefences? I most certainly understand and agree with the decision to standardize on the unofficial MS world standard, but I personally almost never need to share files with anyone – I print my work more often then not. Also Sun’s XML based file standard produces much, much smaller files – I like that. Sometimes their tremendously smaller, usually their roughly half as large.
If the answer is yes, I can change it in prefences then I’m gonna buy me the boxed set.
Christopher X: the answer is almost definitely. I can’t think of a single reason why removing the ability to save in sxw format would be a benefit. More than likely, all they’ve done is make a Ximian install default to .doc instead of gzipped xml files, something you could do yourself anyway.
That Nat Friedman guy is cute. Who says all hackers are ugly? Too bad he probably doesn’t like guys.
XD2 looks cool but I wish window managers would stop trying to round the corners of windows when they can’t antialias them. It just looks unprofessional. I haven’t used a Ximian desktop before, but it also looks like they might be misusing the top menu bar. Do application menus appear there as on the Macintosh? Doing it that way boosts efficiency quite a bit.
Good luck though, and I hope Ximian contributes a lot back to the community.
My fc-list output is <a href=”http://primates.ximian.com/~nat/fclist.txt“>here.
Any chance of getting native support for mouses that have 7+ buttons like logitech mx700. What is the point of having a mouse config utility when it cannot really configure mouse buttons (mapping). Keyboards shortcuts work pretty well, and I think that the same should be done for mouses.
These are the same little things that will keep regular users (non-power users) away from linux, and will frustrate power users.
Yes I do know about imwheel, but unfortunately Gtk2 does not seem to work well with imwheel at all.
If you havne’t figured it out, Ximian is for a CORPRATE DESKTOP, that would be my guess as to why RH and SuSE are the only ones being supported right now.
Complain all you want, I love Debian. But the corprate world isn’t going to install Debian on hundereds of desktops at a time. When they can get support & something like kickstart from RH.
That’s my guess anyway.
> there’s afaik no commercial company that does a desktop that sits atop kde
Xandros, Lycoris
I noticed there’s a border around their Start button, like in Windows before XP. I hope they didn’t make the retarded mistake that you can’t jam the mouse all the way to the corner and pull up the Start menu.
Actually, there are far more KDE applications using the HIG in complete than likewise in GNOME. Only GNOME 2 apps have a high percentage of HIG usage – but even with that, many applications still don’t follow through completely, leaving one foot in the old GTK+ 1 UI and another in the new.
Even Evolution (1.2) isn’t fully HIGed.
“Actually, there are far more KDE applications using the HIG in complete than likewise in GNOME.”
Maybe that’s because the KDE UI Guidelines has been around longer than the GNOME HIG?
“Only GNOME 2 apps have a high percentage of HIG usage”
Duh. The HIG was created after GNOME 2 develop started.
“Even Evolution (1.2) isn’t fully HIGed.”
Evolution 1.2 is a GNOME 1 app. Expect 1.4 (GNOME 2) to be HIGified.
Yes, drag and drop to fonts:/// will work just fine; you’ll need to re-start OO.o – as you do with any other fontconfig based app – since there is no notification on update.
HTH.
hi,
I was wondering if others have the words “network” and “printer” on the first page of the interview highlighted with a link for an advertisement (a green underline).
I am not sure if there is some kind of spyware on my machine so I just want to confirm if everyone sees it or not.
Thanks
Tom.
Hi
The redcarpet thing is very good and also now looks fancy. The only thing that still bothers me is, why doesn’t have a daemon to run on the system-tray and to fetch the available updates alone or at least to notify you about the available updates (like the susewatcher, or redhat thing do). This could spear the user of starting each day redcarpet to check if there is something new available or so.
Ximian’s developers would deserve saint hood by the Vatican if they manage to get rid of all of the Windows-like UI widgets. Ironically, Microsoft has the same problem with Office on Windows XP – it uses its own widgets.
Maybe that’s because the KDE UI Guidelines has been around longer than the GNOME HIG?
Precisely my point.
Duh. The HIG was created after GNOME 2 develop started.
It was created during GNOME 2 development, but frankly asking them to have one done before any applications start getting ported is stupid :-). My point is that KDE had a quasi-HIG since KDE 1 and barely changed since. KDE 1 applications are more consistent with KDE 2/3 than GNOME 1 and GNOME 2.
Evolution 1.2 is a GNOME 1 app. Expect 1.4 (GNOME 2) to be HIGified.
True. But from what I see, the UI barely changed.
Anyone know if they are going to support YellowDog Linux again or other ppc distros?
rob
RCD also connects to RedCarpet Enterprise, and this functionality isn’t necessary or desireable within a corpoate environment. Here it’s not up to the end user to worry about their system being up to date, that’s down to the admins. Using Autopull, Instapull, etc., system admins can keep machines on the network up to date without requiring any input, or knowledge from the user.
I get them too – Opera 7.11/XP here
Nat,
What have you done about translations? I know a lot of people in my country running GNOME in Norwegian and being very happy about it. GNOME has a very good translation team.
But XD2 is based on GNOME 2.2, but with a lot of changes, probably involving a lot of string changes. I heard from the GNOME translators that you haven’t been in contact with them.
Does this mean that XD2 will only be 70% translated into Norwegian, and that way look pretty unprofessional?
I really don’t hope so.
I really hope you didn’t break what has taken the GNOME translation team so long to build up.
Cheers, Benny
> I really hope you didn’t break what has taken the GNOME translation team so long to build up.
This sentence wasn’t meant in a criticizing way. Just to let you know. I really appreciate your work.
It is just that translations matter a lot to me. I really feel home running a Norwegian desktop – especially now I live in .dk. 😉
Benny
>>Evolution 1.2 is a GNOME 1 app. Expect 1.4 (GNOME 2) to be HIGified.
>True. But from what I see, the UI barely changed.
Evolution was used as one of the sources for the Gnome HIG, so you may say that it was already HIG-compliant, at least in part. That’s why the UI barely changed.
Hi Benny,
I am pretty confident that won’t be fully translated into any language other than English (American), even though Nat indicated that they were talking with European Governments.
I am sure though, that Ximian will find a way to solve this. It is not so easily done though, especially not since some apps use gettext/intltools, and others don’t (Gecko used in Galeon, and OpenOffice.org in particular).
Cheers, Kenneth
PS.: Btw, do you study at DTU? Judging from your k-net.dk IP.