OSNews got their hands on the golden master of Java Desktop System (JDS) from Sun Microsystems and we gave it a spin. Here is our review and some screeenshots.
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that Sun has themed GTK to be very similar to the look of Java apps. nice idea.
Yeah, only problem is the default Metal look and feel is dead ugly, and many developers have countless gripes with it.
That said, its really disappointing to see that Sun hasn't done anything to improve the integration of Java into the Gnome desktop. They really should work on getting GTK themes to work under Swing so that Java apps don't stick out like a sore thumb. I had hoped that the Java Desktop might have some good integration with Java, but it looks to be merely a marketing ploy.
There are TWO Java-GTK+ themes, one is the normal GTK+ 1.x theme and the other one is BluePrint. If you are running as GTK+ BluePrint the Java Media Player will use BluePrint too. If you change your theme, it will default to the GTK+ 1.x look. But all the other Java apps don't take advantage of this ability, and so they look like Java.
If it is Suse derived, does that make it unitedlinux compatible?
Isn't that 'Looking Glass' thing in this release ?
I totally agree with their not including qt btw. 2 toolkits is enough (gtk,swing). I wish more distributions would go either kde or gnome, it feels much nicer and you avoid interoperability issues (though there are far fewer than there used to be)
Well, as far as I can tell by reading this review, not much has changed since I reviewed the beta edition of JDS, a few weeks ago. Too bad... I expected much more of a company like Sun.
Let's just hope that they do listen to criticism, which can eventually lead to an improved distro 
Overall I found the installation cumbersome. It is very involved (I had to go through 4-5 pref panels to configure monitor and gfx card to my liking), very time consuming (staged installations, going through unessasery screens sometimes), it is ugly and, under some conditions as above, buggy.
Linux ... seems like the more things change, the more they stay the same. Let's see how well Xandros 2.0 fares.
Which is still pretty shabby, given that its called the Java desktop. Since they had GTK themes since Java 1.4.2, it wouldn't have been too difficult for them to have modified the Java VM to apply the current GTK theme to all Java apps.
Btw, how native do the Java apps that make use of the GTK+ BluePrint L&F look? When running on RedHat, Java apps can take on the BlueCurve theme, but they still stick out because the fonts are just different from the rest of the system.
>Isn't that 'Looking Glass' thing in this release ?
No.
>I totally agree with their not including qt btw. 2 toolkits is enough (gtk,swing).
It is NOT about toolkits. It is about software choice. Most apps for linux today ARE for KDE/QT. By cutting out their users from *easily* installing Qt/KDE apps (without having to compile stuff) in my opinion is very limiting.
The only Java app that uses the GTK+ themes is the Java MEdia Player, all other Java apps included there aren't. So, it is not enough to judge how integrated feels.
Nice.. on their website they say it's available December 2nd.. lovely of them to change it without letting people know. That peeves me off.
That's what I read *elsewhere* and mentioned it there, might be Dec 2nd though. Don't know 100% of this.
I hate to say this, because I think Sun is a great company, but I haven't found a piece of artwork (themes, icons, etc..) created at Sun that I like. I wish Sun had licensed the Alloy look and feel for Java from Incors. See http://www.incors.com/lookandfeel/ and made a Gtk theme out of it. It looks a LOT more professional than BluePrint seems to from the screenshots.
Also not including at least kdelibs and a modern Qt is horrible. They have to include Qt anyways for SuSE's tools, so why not include a version of Qt that actually WORKS with the latest stable version of KDE? If anybody wanted to install a KDE application like k3b (best burner on Linux bar none), they are going to have upgrade Qt, which means that Yast could get broken. Which means bye bye system configuration tools. That is simply not acceptible for their customers.
I'm sorry but most apps are not for Qt/KDE. As a matter of fact I use no qt based applications at all. And I use Linux full time, every day, both at home at and work. It is perfectly reasonable for Sun to not include KDE. I, for one, am glad that somebody finally had the nerve to not include both.
I am sorry, but I disagree. Most apps written today are for Qt/KDE. Why? Because the dev tools and ease of use programming-wise are better with Qt than it is on GTK+. I like Gnome2 better as a DE and this is why I only use Gnome2, but the dev environment of KDE has no parallel compared to the crufty GTK+ and its complexities. The Gnome people really need to create powerful dev tools as the KDE people have.
Odd that it would run slow even on your athlon xp, the minimum system req'ds are a PII 266 (god only knows how painful that would be) and sun makes a point on their product page about "leveraging older hardware" with JDE.
Also am I the only one who thinks that sun's position of only 1 year worth of support is ridiculous? Microsoft gives you 5.
Interesting review.
I think I'll try to aviod this desktop system like the black death...
I would like to know what is this Ximian Preferences patch? Do you have a link (or screenshot! =))?
Victor.
just as we had nice fonts in linux sun is gonna throw those ugly java fonts in again.
just look at the screenshots and try not to cry.
I would like to see a review with a "clean" hard drive installation. Honestly, how many corporations are going to have multiple OSs installed on their hardware? Not many. I found that once I limited myself to one linux OS on my crappy laptop, the thing runs flawlessly. Can we please have a "PLATINUM" review with just JDS on the hardware? Thank you.
This has no effect to the review. JDS was alone on its own hard drive, no messing around with Slackware or Fedora.
Stop doing this. Your comments are NOT deleted, they are moded down, just click to read them.
This article is the worst-edited one I've seen in a long while. It's chock full of grammatical errors. Don't you have anyone look at your articles before you post them? I always do whenever I'm writing in Arabic or French (not my native language).
Here are a few:
* "Nautilus has being patched to support new VFS modules" should read "Nautilus has been patched to support new VFS modules."
* "Too bad Sun didn't took on the Ximian Preferences window too, though." "Too bad Sun didn't take the Ximian Preferences window too, though."
* 'Evolution has also seen patches from the default and it is now dumbed "Evolution Java Desktop System Edition."' I didn't know that dumb is a verb. In any case, I doubt that the Sun Evolution is really _that_ bad.
* "I was really surprised with Sun forgetting Real Player off their menu because they did such a big noise about it a few weeks ago and did a press release about it too." Sun is a company and therefore is an it, not a they. Also, the first part should read, "I was really surprised that Sun forgot RealPlayer..."
The article has some other problems. You complain about the installer and then do not include any screenshots of it. That doesn't help your case any.
You also say that JDS is more stable than other distros you've tried of late and then you site the buggiest one out there, Fedora. You ought to stop using Red Hat's buggy stuff and then you'll get some stability. Try Xandros 2.0, Slackware, Debian, Libranet, Lindows, or SuSE 9.0 and you'll get the stability you want.
I have the same network card as you (on 2 machines) and have not experienced the module problems you experience with SuSE 8.2 and 9.0.
One of the main features of JDS is its integration with the Sun line of products. Apparently, you don't have access to any Solaris machines and didn't do any reporting on this except for a few sentences at the end.
As I explained in the mod down comments, we do the best we can. The article HAS being proof read by an english person.
The installer is the same as SuSE's, there is nothing new there to see.
> I have the same network card as you (on 2 machines) and have not experienced the module problems you experience with SuSE 8.2 and 9.0.
Not all the models have the problem. RT8139 has about 15 revisions.
Your comment in the article "50%-60% of linux software written today is for Qt/KDE" would be considered flamebait if someone posted it here in the comment section. Can you substantiate this claim? ['Substantiate' means 'provide evidence for'.]
If you really feel that the Qt/KDE development tools are superior, why don't you commission an objective comparison article for this site? I would be interested to see if an objective reviewer found Qt/KDE tools to be superior. [The trick, of course, would be setting up the comparison in a way that maintainted objectivity.] I admit that I don't know the answer to this question, I would be interested to read such a comparison.
Finally, I prefer Gnome myself, and I don't find any lack of Gnome applications. In fact, I seem to find proportionately more Gnome than KDE applications. With the exception of k3B, which I agree is excellent, I find most Qt/KDE applications to be on par with the typical Windows shareware Visual Basic application - a pile of crap. They tend to be all color and sparkly icons, and incomprehensible UI. I personally would love it if KDE just went away (as long as someone ported k3B to Gnome).
I would be interested to see if an objective reviewer found Qt/KDE tools to be superior.
----
Actually, almost everyone considers KDE's IDEs superior to Glade and friends.
And if you think Nautilus is better than Konqueror, you need to put the crackpipe down. Konqueror runs circles around it in speed and has about 4x as many features.
Good review. Hahaha!! You look at the screenshots, and it is immediately obvious that SUN has a hideous artistic taste.
>> It is important to remember that this desktop system is meant for the enterprise and corporate desktops and not for home desktops.
>>
Doesn't matter. Corporate employees are home users at work. If it doesn't look good enough for the home computer, it probably isn't comfortable enough for the office computer either.
That article WAS proofread by an english-speaking person. You don't have to nitpick you know. We all do the best we can.
I realize this, I really wasn't trying to be rude, just give constructive criticism. If you aren't aware there is a problem you can't fix it. Now you are aware.
This site has by far the most reliably interesting links, conversation, and articles posted of anything comparable I have encountered. Thank you for that.
"I am sorry, but I disagree. Most apps written today are for Qt/KDE."
Where are you getting this information? I haven't read anything that backs up this statement. I would appreciate it if you could elaborate where you got these facts.
This is easy to know. Go to apps.kde.com and then go to gnome2's repository and see the difference in the number of Gnome2 and KDE apps. KDE has more apps per day.
It is funny how there are so many angry gnomers like you nowadays 
. No objectivity. Cheerleaders. They do not want to Gnome to grow. They don't look at KDE to see what has been done wright. You want KDE to fail? Why?
You should look to what the others desktops are doing wright.
Gnome in general does do, and KDE also. Gnome is looking to be more integrated, as KDE is. KDE is looking for saner and simpler defaults (you should see a big difference in KDE 3.2), as gnome has. They both improve. This is good.
KDE is looking for saner and simpler defaults (you should see a big difference in KDE 3.2), as gnome has.
If this is true, that would be great. I barely have to configure a default Gnome desktop so it won't bother me, but KDE in it's current incarnation is like having 20.000 elephants running at you all at the same time..
Eugenia all you have to do is go to the KDE site and get the newest KDE packages for SuSE Linux and they install fine from the Command Line. Then you have to create the .xinitrc. One bug that I did find in using this method is that Konsole will not change the schema, dont ask me why. I reported it to the KDE mailing list and they said as soon as they get a copy of JDS they will see whats up with it. Otherwise everything else works good and no it doesnt break YaST.
"$100 / desktop / year." Not much of a deal. Most of the supplied software is free.
I was made to understand that there are more gtk apps than there are qt ones. With regards to which toolkit is better between qt and gtk, I think qt is a bit better, but I also think it is quite over hyped.
People also fail to acknowledge that GTK is the best implementation of an object oriented framework in the C language. I simply haven't seen it done any better, correct me if I'm wrong. For pure C coders (True coders ;-), this is a rare gift.
And even though GTK is unfairly bad mouthed by everyone. Experienced coders marvel at the careful crafted works of this mentally super human developers. The same goes for the GLIB developers.
I just skimmed over the article and I'm not quite sure if I missed any other stuff, but I saw you mentioning GNOME doesn't automatically refresh directories in Nautilus, while JDE does.
This is not true. What's probably wrong with your Slackware install is that it lacks FAM, the File Alteration Monitor.
This is not just used in Nautilus, btw, it's used all over. The theme chooser, for example, automatically updates when you add a (meta-)theme.
FAM's homepage is located here: http://oss.sgi.com/projects/fam/
I heard that JDS is based on SuSE 8.1. Is this really true?
Maybe the KDE packages from SuSE 8.1 could be used with JDS.
I'm a little confused here -- how is JDS different from any other distro? It uses a typical installer to install a typical distro of Gnome with all the usual gnome applications. Sure, it comes with java preimnstalled.... but it would appear that the average joe wouldn't actually launch anything that depended on java anyway
So where is the "Java" in JDS?
jeff
"People also fail to acknowledge that GTK is the best implementation of an object oriented framework in the C language."
This is right. But I doubt that many programmers would choose C for an OO system today.
"I simply haven't seen it done any better, correct me if I'm wrong. For pure C coders (True coders ;-), this is a rare gift."
I see it more like poison then a gift. This C code is full of ugly marcros, structures, and casts. Just program a class in C and one in C++ or C#, you'll see a difference. It would be much more readable if they would use an oo supporting language. In Planet Gnome there were already comments from prominent Gnome hackers how much more beautiful (which means also more maintanable) the code could be in C# or other languages.
GTK developers realize the limitations of C, that's why they make bindings for multiple languages.
You don't have to use C to make GNOME apps. Look at the Caffeine file-sharing program. It's all in python.
eugenia did you combine your custom kernel 2.4.23 with a suitable initrd when you tried to boot your system with it ? Maybe that was the problem.
It doesn't support kde !!! That's a big minus minus :-(
I would rather stay with Lindows and/or Linare !!!
Bob
Java applications looking different is Sun's own fault. I like programming (simple) swing user interfaces since it's so easy to do in code, but swing just doesn't look good, no wonder app writers use a different look and feel than the default one. Hopefully the gtk integration will help out with that.
I think sun is pitching their desktop towards business users. (secretaries and the like). Installing programs (other than MSN messenger ) is only of interest to enthusiasts. The average business does not want it's average computer user to be an enthusiast as they waste time installing and uninstalling programs/operating systems.
Qt is better than straight GTK+, but it isn't all that great compared to GTKmm, though, which is the bigger problem the KDE project is going to start facing. New coders are familiar with the STL from school. Qt doesn't use it. GTKmm does. I would not be surprised to see some migration...
-Erwos
Not surprising they didn't include KDE. Remember, KDE isn't Section 508 compliant, it has no accesibility toolkit yet. More than likely they had to ship a Section 508 compliant desktop, which Gnome 2.4.x is generally speaking...
I'm still wondering how this compares with K12Linux-LTSP http://www.k12ltsp.org/ . (Hint for a future review by Eugenia?)
I've been very impressed with how easy it was to set up a multi-terminal system with K12LTSP. I know JDS has paid-for support and (at present) slightly more recent versions of some applications. But then K12LTSP supports Windows Terminal Server, and costs much less: for the price of n thousand desktops at $100/year, I can buy a lot of full-time support!
If anything, the review here and subsequent comments point out the weaknesses of the Linux community, not necessarily of Sun. Sun has pretty much combined a basic Linux distro with a few applications and is passing it out (to businesses, not home users). I'm not sure how responsible Sun can truly be for segmentation faults in Nautilus and hardware incompatibilities.
Installation problems, ease of use issues, uglification -- most of these things I've experienced rather commonly in my Linux endeavors. Should we really have expected anything different with JDS?
I'm not sure what Sun's exact strategy is, but if this JDS is something they want to really take to a higher level, they'd probably be better off bringing in some advanced user interface experts/artists and get a really clean, integrated, nice desktop that could run on Solaris x86 w/ full binary compatibility with Linux apps. Then they could drop Linux like a bad habit. I mean, 50% of this thread is KDE vs. GNOME. What does that say???
JMO,
John
The QT containers pretty easy to figure out, and besides, have an STL-like compatibility interface. Most new programmers won't know enough of the STL to be shocked by the difference between the real STL and the compatibility interface, and experienced programmers won't blink twice, since Qt's regular interface is very intuitive if you have a good grasp of OOP.
One more plug: The Qt (and to a less extent, KDE) code is *phenomenally* clean. Its not a big deal, but I've made several small customizations to Qt/KDE, and they've taken me very little time. Its just very elegant.
Is this the same OS Sun is selling to China?
I can't believe it.
Thanks for the review. Nice to see a critical review and I'd love to see how you review XP. I'm sure it would have some seriously bad scores! Also, praise to Sun for this product. While their deriders profess they will be squashed by Linux, they are innovating and changing and, basically, doing for themselves what M$FT should be doing (getting in place to profit from Linux/Open Source). I thought the Mandrake install was far easier than Windows and would assume this good of an install from Sun.
BTW, I would also love to see a good critical review of what app.s are needed on Linux. E.g. on Windows a good File Manager is not provided and I did not find one on Linux either. Usable ones but not great. Also, the navigational mouse in myIE2 and others is a step function improvement that M$FT failed to do but one would assume Sun included in JDS/Nautilus.
Thanks for the review,
TimJowers
I see it more like poison then a gift. This C code is full of ugly marcros, structures, and casts. Just program a class in C and one in C++ or C#, you'll see a difference. It would be much more readable if they would use an oo supporting language. In Planet Gnome there were already comments from prominent Gnome hackers how much more beautiful (which means also more maintanable) the code could be in C# or other languages.
GTK+ is concrete proof and evidence that C does make a good object oriented frame work, contrary to popular misnomer. 90% of GNOME is written on base on GTK+ and it's associated libraries, like Glib.
With regards to ugliness of code, I've seen far more uglier Java and C++ code than I have seen C. And I'm talking about large projects here. Talk to any of the KDE devs, and they'll narrate the horror and ugliness of majority of the classes they need to deal with. In fact, they are rewriting the kdelibs for KDE-4.0 just because of this.
Writing good C code is hard, I agree. But because python, perl and C# look better to the eye and are very forgiving doesn't make them more manageable. They get really nasty, and spaghetti-looking faster than their C counterpart. I'm not even going to talk about speed, flexibility and control.
And if you think Nautilus is better than Konqueror, you need to put the crackpipe down. Konqueror runs circles around it in speed and has about 4x as many features.
I realize that Konq has a lot of functionality, but I hate the way it looks and works. It seems too disjointed; like a project that really didn't know in what direction it wanted to go, so it compromised and went in all directions at the same time.
If my only two options were Nautilus and Konq, I'd choose Nautilus; but I still think the command line is the best file manager.
I'm not saying this is what you should think. I just wanted to point out that others have different opinions.
I am usually very supportive of SUN when it comes to their softwae, I like what they've done with StarOffice 7 a lot, I like the direction they are taking Java in with 1.5, but this is a brutal dissapointment.
JDS, is despite what they have said usability, and aesthetics are definitely not its strong point. Not having icons for important and marketed applications, throwing more than 5 themes at the user, and mixing so many technologies that don't mix all that well yet (Qt, GTK+) is unacceptable. Their branding is also way out of hand, it seems nowdays any software SUN makes will be branded with a dozen Java stickers regardless of what it actually is. Just looking at the screenshots I see that the start menu has a java label, nautilus has a java label, and Mozilla too, this is going overboard and it would have helped if they at least used a consistent logo.
It also seems that this is quite a bit out of date, its using GNOME 2.2.x while now the GNOME team is already hard at work on 2.6. However, I am glad at least that the applied some useful pathces like the file selector and automatic refresh patches. Also, at least it is more recent than the latest Solaris version of GNOME. In addition to being out of date they fail to include a number of essential applications such as XMMS, GAIM, a good burning application like K3b and as Eugenia mentioned, KDE/Qt libraries. As I was fearing multimedia support isn't all that great either despite their advertising, no mpeg support is just plain sad for a modern OS.
On a more positive note, while the speed isn't great, at least it is usually a stable operating system and it has a multi-billion company behind it with a name that everybody in the industry knows. I just hope that they are serious about this, their opinions on Linux throughout history have been very contradictory and as they've said they have no REAL linux strategy and are just supporting it because the market is forcing them to.
I am very displeased with SUN's offer, I hope that maybe the final version will be far better, but I doubt it to be honest. I don't know why their product ended up this way, they have used a respectable distribution, SUSE as their base and it's already been a long time, by its release it will already be severly out of date compared to Xandros, SUSE, Mandrake, and Fedora. This definitely doesen't seem like a good choice for new users and I am even skeptical about companies using it, sure they will have system administrators and professional support, but time is money and getting this up to spec sounds like it will be a pain in the arse and $100/per year is not cheap even for companies. For a first release this is still decent and I am sure it will get much better as time passes and SUN gains some good experience in the field of Linux.
On a sidenote, I admit that I like KDE more than GNOME for a number of reasons which I will not go into here, but I also like GNOME and I think its a shame that SUN isn't showing what it can really do, 2.4 is significantly better than 2.2 in terms of speed and polish.
Also, KDE needs a lot more regognition, donations, and perhaps a real corporate sponsor. Right now it is looking pretty great for GNOME in terms of money and users, with the recent adoption of JDS by the Chinese this is a major step forward for GNOME as were the wins in schools and Mexico. They are also well backed by corporate sponsors such as SUN, Ximian, Redhat, and IBM to name a few. They are getting thousands of dollars of donations, while KDE's donations are minuscule in comparrison. This is in part KDE's fault as they are against blunt begging for donations and not too aggresive or competitive on their donations page. For example GNOME's Friends program has different levels which yield small gifts, donations are tax refundable and they have a great charter and website for it all.
While GNOME deserves this, I think KDE deserves it just a much if not more, in any case they NEED it more, only about 5 developers are actually hired to work on KDE. It's amazing how far the project has come.
If you use KDE or think it's a good project please don't hesitate to donate a little, to it. It is free software, but NOT free to develop, which goes for all of open source. Show the developers that you appreciate their work by contributing. BTW: This is the WRONG way to ask feature requests: http://www.kerneltraffic.org/kde/kde20031130_69.html
Anyway, go here to help KDE: http://www.kde.org/support/
Also, EUGENIA, can we expect a review of Xandros Deluxe Desktop 2.0? I am really looking forward to see how you perceive it and its general problems. I'm sure you'll get a review copy if you have a convincing request, I got a review copy for Xandros 1.0, which I've been using exclusively on one of my boxes ever since.
There are TWO Java-GTK+ themes, one is the normal GTK+ 1.x theme and the other one is BluePrint. If you are running as GTK+ BluePrint the Java Media Player will use BluePrint too. If you change your theme, it will default to the GTK+ 1.x look. But all the other Java apps don't take advantage of this ability, and so they look like Java.
Then again, as you said, this is being used in an enterprise environment, meaning, Joe Employee will/shouldn't have access to the desktop customisation, hence, those "issues" shouldn't arise.
From what I have heard J2SE 1.4.2 was just to get basic theming support and 1.5 (Project Tiger) will include more comprehensive support.
"Not surprising they didn't include KDE. Remember, KDE isn't Section 508 compliant, it has no accesibility toolkit yet. More than likely they had to ship a Section 508 compliant desktop, which Gnome 2.4.x is generally speaking..."
She never said to include the full blown KDE desktop as an alternative. Two desktops can be overkill for support to handle and its no wonder that only the desktop they were pushing was included. But even so, I would have liked if KDE could be included as an unsupported desktop through the custom install, as it is on Redhat Linux.
The problem is that essential KDE libraries were not included and it is using an outdated version of Qt making installing many of the available KDE/Qt applications impossible to install without a lot of effort and time is money so this is a definite minus. There are areas where GNOME/GTK+ applications just don't cut it or exist to match KDE/Qt applications.
"I realize that Konq has a lot of functionality, but I hate the way it looks and works. It seems too disjointed; like a project that really didn't know in what direction it wanted to go, so it compromised and went in all directions at the same time. "
Konqueror does do a little of everything and its interface is too cluttered and its context menus are a mess in the current iteration of KDE. However, as for being disjointed, that is NOT in the least bit true. Konquer is a beautiful filemanager/web browser when it comes to integration. Everything is seamless, I can drag and drop an image to my desktop and it will ask me if I want it to become a background or just a link or copy for example. Konqueror is in many ways shows the beauty of Kparts, it is the center of KDE technology and runs the code you need on demand. Integration is key and in this area Konqueror delivers and Nautilus has and still is greately lacking.
As for going in all directions, it all depends on the plugins loaded. Konquror is really a shell and you just plug in parts to make it what it is. I think that it often has downfalls in usability and consistency because it is also a web browser in addition to being a file manager, but otherwise it is great.
It should also be noted that KDE 3.2 will cleanup many longstanding usability issues in KDE and it will fix thousands of bugs and add/remove many features.
I hate to say this, because I think Sun is a great company, but I haven't found a piece of artwork (themes, icons, etc..) created at Sun that I like. I wish Sun had licensed the Alloy look and feel for Java from Incors. See http://www.incors.com/lookandfeel/ and made a Gtk theme out of it. It looks a LOT more professional than BluePrint seems to from the screenshots.
Well, if you have been following SUN for some time, they try to make the look 'n feel "SUN'ish" as if to fit in with their purple boxes and give it an "industrial" look. IMHO, there is nothing wrong with the theme when in comparision to Luna (Windows XP) or what MacOS 10.2 uses (10.3 is a major improvement).
Also not including at least kdelibs and a modern Qt is horrible. They have to include Qt anyways for SuSE's tools, so why not include a version of Qt that actually WORKS with the latest stable version of KDE? If anybody wanted to install a KDE application like k3b (best burner on Linux bar none), they are going to have upgrade Qt, which means that Yast could get broken. Which means bye bye system configuration tools. That is simply not acceptible for their customers.
Why should they support that? this is a corporate desktop, Joe Employee has NO right to install cd burning tools, and even if they DID want to burn a cd, they could easily put the CD into the drive and use the built in Nautilus CD burning tool.
The fact remains, a corporate desktop is looked down to the point the end user can only do their work and that is it. The fact that they can't install software or tweak the interface is a none issue when in the larger scheme of things, the whole point of them being there is to work.
I realize that Konq has a lot of functionality, but I hate the way it looks and works. It seems too disjointed; like a project that really didn't know in what direction it wanted to go, so it compromised and went in all directions at the same time.
You must like screwing around with the settings. As for me, I like using a file manager rather than playing with it. Konqueror gets the job done. Nautilus is a dumbed-down plaything since GNOME 2.0.
The reason I chose open source is that it provides me with choice. Nautilus takes away my choices. This is why, IMHO, KDE will always be preferred by power users and home users while the coporate suits will prefer to make employees use GNOME.
I am sorry, but I disagree. Most apps written today are for Qt/KDE. Why? Because the dev tools and ease of use programming-wise are better with Qt than it is on GTK+. I like Gnome2 better as a DE and this is why I only use Gnome2, but the dev environment of KDE has no parallel compared to the crufty GTK+ and its complexities. The Gnome people really need to create powerful dev tools as the KDE people have.
Considering that their main aim is to get IT people to write in-house applications in Java, the IDE doesn't really matter as Netbeans and Eclipse and quite good already.
From the C/C++ stand point, I agree with you. Glade is a nightmare, how does one make the interface? how do you resize widgets and place them on the window? why is it every time I place a widget, it takes up the whole Window? What is so hard with creating something either like KDevelop or even something as basic as Qt Designer?
I guess MS has nothing to fear from this Lin-strousity. Just another failed linux distro folks move on ! Nothing to see here.
I guess MS has nothing to fear from this Lin-strousity. Just another failed linux distro folks move on ! Nothing to see here.
So I guess the Telstra Australia is a real fool deploying it? infact, Microsoft was so concerned, Bill Gates came "down under" to try and stop this "terrible chain of events" from going any further.
Microsoft is concerned. Once you lose the corporate world, you lose the home user. They know it, I know it, SUN knows it. It it is the most well kept and well known secret of the IT industry.
Same goes for AMD. Once desktops in the corporate world start using AMD based machines, you then have a trickle down effect.
"Why should they support that? this is a corporate desktop, Joe Employee has NO right to install cd burning tools, and even if they DID want to burn a cd, they could easily put the CD into the drive and use the built in Nautilus CD burning tool.
The fact remains, a corporate desktop is looked down to the point the end user can only do their work and that is it. The fact that they can't install software or tweak the interface is a none issue when in the larger scheme of things, the whole point of them being there is to work."
Joe Employee may not be allowed to tweak the desktop too much, though I know many companies allow some tweaking, however the company/government/school etc. that it is being deployed in might as is often the case. Most times you will never see a desktop being deployed in a large company without any additional software installed or any kinds of customizations. Even the chinese government are not actually buying the DEFAULT Linux distribution from Sun. They are instead basing their Linux desktoos on it, but it will be quite dfferent from the stock one.
In addition, have you EVER tried to seriously use Nautilus 2.2's CD burning software? It is VERY VERY limited and quite buggy. Can you burn an iso with it, can you burn a dvd, no. Compared to Nero or K3b it is no good for any advanced task. Besides, this IS NOT ABOUT CD BURNING, it is about installing popular KDE/Qt applications in general. K3b is only one example of thousands. Just adding KDE libs to make this possible is all that was asked.
"Considering that their main aim is to get IT people to write in-house applications in Java, the IDE doesn't really matter as Netbeans and Eclipse and quite good already.
From the C/C++ stand point, I agree with you. Glade is a nightmare, how does one make the interface? how do you resize widgets and place them on the window? why is it every time I place a widget, it takes up the whole Window? What is so hard with creating something either like KDevelop or even something as basic as Qt Designer?"
Again this isn't about SPECIFIC examples of KDE applications, K3b and Kdevelop are but a few examples. In addition, if productivity matters, the IDE matters.
Creating something like Kdevelop and Qt Designer is not an easy job and takes many man years. Also, there is nothing "basic" about Qt designer, it is a very powerful RAD application that helps you easily make a Qt interface for virtually any application.
> "Glade is a nightmare, how does one make the interface? how do you resize widgets and place them on the window? why is it every time I place a widget, it takes up the whole Window?"
If you find the answer to that, let me know. Changing the sizes in the widget's properties window doesn't resize the actual widget in the test window. Terrible.
"Glade is a nightmare, how does one make the interface? how do you resize widgets and place them on the window? why is it every time I place a widget, it takes up the whole Window?"
If you find the answer to that, let me know. Changing the sizes in the widget's properties window doesn't resize the actual widget in the test window. Terrible.
Funny enough, I couldn't get an answer from the GLADE crowd. Actually being able to use GLADE must be the best kept secret in the opensource world.
Regarding the JDS, could you find out whether or not they're using STSF or have simply stuck to the status quo of using xfs/fontconfig. If you have SUN contacts, could you find out what the time frame is for their Solaris (SPARC and x86) implementation of JDS.
"From the C/C++ stand point, I agree with you. Glade is a nightmare, how does one make the interface? how do you resize widgets and place them on the window? why is it every time I place a widget, it takes up the whole Window?"
You shouldn't dismiss something just because you couldn't figure it out after 5 minutes of tinkering. Glade takes a few hours to get used to. At first it is a bit confusing, no doubt. Once you get to grips with it, Glade does the job well enough. To answer your questions. With glade you layout interfaces, instead of painting them. You place widgets by creating container widgets like tables which hold the "real" widgets. The advantage of this method is scalable interfaces. What do interfaces consist of? Text, icons and widgets. If you use svg icons you have completely scalable interfaces with Gnome *now*. E.g. you rarely have to worry if text in less concise languages than English will fit on your widgets. Gtk will take care of it and dynamically resize the widgets at runtime. Users with bad eye-sight or running higher resolutions than normal can choose large systems fonts. Pixel-oriented interface design is primitive and a thing of the past.
"Glade is a nightmare, how does one make the interface? how do you resize widgets and place them on the window? why is it every time I place a widget, it takes up the whole Window?"
Hahahaha...lol. You don't even know how to use Glade, yet you call it a nightmare. That's like saying a Car sucks because you couldn't figure out how to open the door. No disrespect man, but at least figure out how to use the said tool before critisizing it.
If you go to the help menu, there's an option called "turbo start". It's a quick and easy way to acquiant yourself with glade. After using glade for two weeks or more, I'd like to know your assesment of it. Good Luck.
The reason I chose open source is that it provides me with choice. Nautilus takes away my choices. This is why, IMHO, KDE will always be preferred by power users and home users while the coporate suits will prefer to make employees use GNOME.
That's the nice thing about Linux, we all get to choose for ourselves and use what we like.
Having said that, I have to agree with the opinion expressed about Konqueror. Nautilus looks clean, simple and it is simple to use, but it does a lot of things; including burning CD-Rs. Personally, I prefer the polished look of Gnome/Nautilus to KDE/Konqueror. That's my opinion anyway, and fortunately, we are all entitled to those.
To comment on something on topic, I like the looks of Sun's offering. I'm pretty happy with Debian, but I wouldn't mind running this for a while to see what it's like.
>>Even the chinese government are not actually buying the DEFAULT Linux distribution from Sun. They are instead basing their Linux desktoos on it, but it will be quite dfferent from the stock one.<<
Is that true? Where did you read that? I'm surprised to see this.
J
It appears to me that the battle lines have moved. SUN has taken over the commercial role that Redhat played on the desktop. But the field is no longer black and white. SuSE now also has Ximian (Gnome) blood - truly living up to it's trademark - a cameleon. I predict that SUN will abandon SuSE/Novell and go it's own way. If SuSE is forced to abandon KDE then I predict a new distro will popup. It shall be interesting. Also to see if Fedora can keep up.
Sometimes it is always good to start at the very beginning....because it's a very good place to start:
Part 1 (Developing Gnome Apps with Glade)
http://writelinux.com/glade/
Part2 (Developing Gnome Apps with Glade and Anjuta)
http://eddy.writelinux.com/part2/
Enjoy!
btw, great review Eugenia. I'll be sending the URL to our in-house Sun reps and see what they have to say as i am due to get a copy from them soon.
cheers
peter
"From the C/C++ stand point, I agree with you. Glade is a nightmare, how does one make the interface? how do you resize widgets and place them on the window? why is it every time I place a widget, it takes up the whole Window?"
You shouldn't dismiss something just because you couldn't figure it out after 5 minutes of tinkering. Glade takes a few hours to get used to. At first it is a bit confusing, no doubt. Once you get to grips with it, Glade does the job well enough.
True. I am sure, with enough learning, I can get used to a new way of doing something. I'm probably just used to doing something one way resulting in that any other approach used seems foreign to me, oh well.
To answer your questions. With glade you layout interfaces, instead of painting them. You place widgets by creating container widgets like tables which hold the "real" widgets. The advantage of this method is scalable interfaces. What do interfaces consist of? Text, icons and widgets. If you use svg icons you have completely scalable interfaces with Gnome *now*. E.g. you rarely have to worry if text in less concise languages than English will fit on your widgets. Gtk will take care of it and dynamically resize the widgets at runtime. Users with bad eye-sight or running higher resolutions than normal can choose large systems fonts. Pixel-oriented interface design is primitive and a thing of the past.
True, just a little confusing since most of the programming I do is in Java and via a the eclipse editor; for some reason I could never get the interface builder to work properly. Netbeans is alright, however, its responsiveness is shocking to say the least. Lets hope that something is done about it because from a technical stand point, it isn't too bad and with enough tweaking its responsiveness could be improved.
Eugenia, did you try entering applications:/// into Nautilus and seeing if the representation of the gnome menu appeared? Although start-here:/// may be eliminated (because it probably duplicates the functionality of Sun's "My Computer" deal), applications:/// must still be there, I'd imagine.
Regardless, I'm sure this product has its bugs, and there is no real point to it, IMO. If I were a corporation looking for Microsoft replacement, I would definitely go with Xandros over this thing. Xandros packages Codeweavers products, makes the UI look and feel like Windows, and actually has some clever hacks to the system. I'd never use Xandros personally, but I could see a corporate manager who might like it, and plus, it's built on Debian, and Debian, well, rocks.
The theme is not 100% uggly. However, Sun should aim more for a theme like Blue Curve, something thinner and more elegant.
Long day workers will get annoyed buy such an heavy theme, too many blending and embossed bars makes the eyes and mind get tired sooner.
This has been studied. For example, Microsoft knows it.
My 0.02 cents.
> where's the java in JDS?
Sun is pushing Java Desktop System as its preferred platform for developing and running Java apps. It never claimed it was written in Java, although I wouldn't be surprised if more Java apps were included in future releases.
"With glade you layout interfaces, instead of painting them. You place widgets by creating container widgets like tables which hold the "real" widgets. The advantage of this method is scalable interfaces. What do interfaces consist of? Text, icons and widgets. If you use svg icons you have completely scalable interfaces with Gnome *now*. E.g. you rarely have to worry if text in less concise languages than English will fit on your widgets. Gtk will take care of it and dynamically resize the widget
s at runtime. Users with bad eye-sight or running higher resolutions than normal can choose large systems fonts."
This is inherently wrong. You are pretending as if this is something Qt Designer doe snot do and also spreading incorrect information.
It seems to me what you describe looks pretty like the use of QLayout and derivatives...
Whatever it looks like, Gtk *is* pixel-based. Have a look at classes : QVBox, QGrid, QLayout, QHBoxLayout, and so on... and of course you can use them in designer.
Also, Qt comes with default widget spacing, avoiding
having to specify it in "a million places" when coding
a UI.
When it comes to fitting non-Enlish text and i18n.
Have a quick look at Qt Linquist. You do _not_ need to
be a programmer to be a Qt translator.
What GLADE is doing is nothing special and neither is the design, from my experience with both, Qt Designer rules hands down.
What is the performance like of this package? I've got SO6 and it's a whole lot faster than Open Office 1.0.* or 1.1. Yet I hear them saying SO7 is based on OOo, which is not a good performer on my system.
Besides the fact that Qt does the same thing too in a much simpler way, it has had this since the 1.x days.
oesn't everyone have an application that creates XML for interfaces these days?
You can even evaluate those at runtime if you want.That's part of what KJSEmbed can do for you: Click some forms. glue it with JavaScript, be done. No need to compile it
It will be the best brandname Linux distribution and with Sun Microsystems technology it will be very secure and fast.
I am recommending it for everyone.
It's really amazing. Height years ago SUN had a desktop strategy based on the Openstep desktop and development environment (which is now used by Mac OS X) and was about to market it when they scrapped it in favor of Java, that was supposed to give them something better. Height years latter, they come with an hideous "Java desktop" which is not even written in Java for the most part of it.
In addition, have you EVER tried to seriously use Nautilus 2.2's CD burning software? It is VERY VERY limited and quite buggy. Can you burn an iso with it, can you burn a dvd, no. Compared to Nero or K3b it is no good for any advanced task. Besides, this IS NOT ABOUT CD BURNING, it is about installing popular KDE/Qt applications in general. K3b is only one example of thousands. Just adding KDE libs to make this possible is all that was asked.
Burning to a CD in Linux requires UDF writing, which is experimental, hence, it is not supported by Nautilus CD write until it becomes a standard "feature" with Linux.
As for installing KDELibs, that fact remains, and I re-emphasise this fact, the end users aren't going to install applications from outside the software supported by SUN.
Employees don't install software, and the likelihood for the IT department finding that the applications already included don't meet the requirements, they would have never chosen to go with the JDS platform in the first place.
The whole point of JDS is to have a working desktop out of the box not requiring extra tweaking and so forth.
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/031117/sfm143_1.html
Read the article and it seems that China is just the tip of the iceburg. Nice to see SUN realising that there is IT demand beyond the shores of the US. If I was SUN, I would give up trying to convert US business to JDS. They're a lost cause, run by bloated CEO's, clueless CIO's and lazy employees unwilling to upskill when required.
Asia and Eastern Europe, they're the emerging markets that a growing and looking for IT to integrate into their infrastructure. SUN is not heavily linked to the US, thus giving them an advantage over Microsoft, especially in the middle east, and better still, they employee local staff for development and support, meaning, SUN can leverage its "position" in the local IT industry to "persuade" local government to adopt their solution too.
Just look at Microsoft in New Zealand, they make $110million off a population of 3.8million people. This is where SUN could *EASILY* get into bed with Helen Clarke, promise to expand and establish and R&D facility in NZ, and in return the government moves away from Microsoft and IBM as their sole suppliers to SUN. Thats around $140million in the bank just through a bit of pocket pissing and brown nosing.
as someone who's done a lot of OOP programing in Java, and to a lesser extent Delphi and C++ I just have to say this.
You cannot do object-orientated programming in C
OOP requires encapsulation, polymorphism and inheritance. All the "OOP-like" implementations in C only support the former. While I imagine someone, somewhere may have found ways around the second and third, these are hacks. If you're using C, then USE C. It's a procedural language, and used in an appropriate way, can result in good, clean programs.
With regard to GUIs, I believe the OOP paradigm offers a very nice way to program them. I don't believe (as I have been assured in the past by teachers & the like) that an OOP framwork is essential, but it's certainly preferable, and it's what's everyone has been taught.
And having experimented with both Qt and GTK+, I've found it easier to get up and running with Qt.
GTK may be well written, I wont argue about that.
But most modern programmers are used to real oo languages.
They shouldn't have to do object orientation by creating an ideom in a non oo language. This feels like something from the stone age of program development.
There is gtkmm of course, but when a new version of gtk gets released the gtkmm version often lags behind.
And then we have we have differnces in GUI design tools.
QTdesigner beats glade any day.
I'm not saying that QT superiority will last forever and the Gnome desktop looks really nice these days. I find the simplicity of Gnome compared to KDE liberating so it is really a pity that the development tools for Gnome isn't quite there yet. Shudder, not to mention all plain old C gtk code you may have to maintain if you go the gtk way.
I see some comments on Swing apps being hideousely ugly beasts, and thought I'd just drop a note to let you know about jGoodies, who has some really great looking skins, alhough they are mostly for Windows development.
Take a look at: http://www.jgoodies.com/
Slightly off topic:
Regarding Konqueror you write:
"I can drag and drop an image to my desktop and it will ask me if I want it to become a background or just a link or copy for example."
I just done some usability studies on this popup menu in konqueror drop targets. It's only liked by high end users that know how to ctrl click to do multiple file selections. Inexperinced user gets irritade on it very quickly. As the have to use it too often when they copy files one by one.
I even had one newbie computer user test subject who never realized that the menu poped up while she was copying a couple of files from one folder to another. She was completely focused on the next file as soon as the drop target accepted the drop.
Besides the menu items in the popup are in the wrong order, the average user do moving a lot more than she does copying or linking. So I think the first menu item should be move insted of copy. Then there is the big red cancel button of that menu that attracts far more attention than it should.
I had not access to eye tracking equippment when doing my study, but I'm conviced that this is the first menu item the user reads when he drops a file on something. And if you happen to copy your file to a directory where a file with the samne name already exists you get a dialog with 7 buttons and one unnamed textfield to resolve the situation.
It's things like this that makes even long time KDE user like me to go the Gnome/Nautilus way even if its harder to develop apps in gtk/Gnome than in QT/KDE. The Gnome people at least have a clue about usability.
The functioality still is lagging behind though, and their file selection dialog is outright ugly. I wonder what the patched Sun file selecter looks like. Any changes would be an improvement.
Slightly off topic:
Regarding Konqueror you write:
"I can drag and drop an image to my desktop and it will ask me if I want it to become a background or just a link or copy for example."
I just done some usability studies on this popup menu in konqueror drop targets. It's only liked by high end users that know how to ctrl click to do multiple file selections. Inexperinced user gets irritade on it very quickly. As the have to use it too often when they copy files one by one.
I even had one newbie computer user test subject who never realized that the menu poped up while she was copying a couple of files from one folder to another. She was completely focused on the next file as soon as the drop target accepted the drop.
Besides the menu items in the popup are in the wrong order, the average user do moving a lot more than she does copying or linking. So I think the first menu item should be move insted of copy. Then there is the big red cancel button of that menu that attracts far more attention than it should.
I had not access to eye tracking equippment when doing my study, but I'm conviced that this is the first menu item the user reads when he drops a file on something. And if you happen to copy your file to a directory where a file with the samne name already exists you get a dialog with 7 buttons and one unnamed textlabled textield to resolve the situation.
It's things like this that makes even long time KDE user like me to go the Gnome/Nautilus way even if its harder to develop apps in gtk/Gnome than in QT/KDE. The Gnome people at least have a clue about usability.
The functioality still is lagging behind though, and their file selection dialog is outright ugly. I wonder what the patched Sun file selecter looks like. Any changes would be an improvement.
Right - but those are not Swing but SWT (=IBM/Eclipse).
But you're on to something. What SUN should do is forget about GNOME,KDE,etc. and instead build a new desktop from ground up in Java. With all the time SUN and in particular Jonathan Swartz have spent running around in circles and hyping weekly new strategies they could have had several Java desktops done by now. But this time - maybe JDS is just premature labelling of real Java desktop in the cooking and GNOME is just a temporary stand-in.
Bryan Feeney writes:
<quoteblock>OOP requires encapsulation, polymorphism and inheritance. All the "OOP-like" implementations in C only support the former. While I imagine someone, somewhere may have found ways around the second and third, these are hacks. If you're using C, then USE C. It's a procedural language, and used in an appropriate way, can result in good, clean programs.</quoteblock>
Intresting, so all that programming I did with Xt Intrinsics was not proper OOPs, well I never. Could of fooled me but then I did compile my own C-Front on SunOS 3.5 and I suppose I would not know such things. Thanks for correcting me after all this time.
But it would be far more useful all round to tell me why. And congrats on your C-Front thingy.
Right - but those are not Swing but SWT (=IBM/Eclipse).
But you're on to something. What SUN should do is forget about GNOME,KDE,etc. and instead build a new desktop from ground up in Java. With all the time SUN and in particular Jonathan Swartz have spent running around in circles and hyping weekly new strategies they could have had several Java desktops done by now. But this time - maybe JDS is just premature labelling of real Java desktop in the cooking and GNOME is just a temporary stand-in.
They did develop a Java desktop. It was shit, slow and buggy. Get over and get used to it.
1) Solaris on the server, Linux on the desktop.
2) JDS is SuSE UnitedLinux + GNOME + Tweaking + J2SE 1.4.2
3) The big hype will occur when J2SE 1.5 is released, which will include shared VM, much better themeing and massively improved GTK/GNOME integration.
Read those three again and again and again until you get it through your head. SUN may love their Java, but they aren't GWB level stupid.
- do nearly all articles on osnews end up in a Gnome vs KDE debate?
I too am puzzled about the KDE support. They should of provided the Qt libs. But I'm most puzzled about the other comments. I think more people use KDE because it's a more complete and mature DE and a lot of distribs choose it to help the user coming from a Windows environment; but I don't really see any applications worthy of note apart from Konqueror and KDevelop. Most apps these days are GNOME/GTK, it's soon to be the default desktop for Solaris, AIX & HP-UX. I think most Linux desktop people run : xmms, grip, evolution, openoffice, eclipse, pan, sodipodi, abiword, gnumeric, bluefish, and lots more. These are very common apps, with not much competition. I think Sun have made the right choice on GNOME.
"This is easy to know. Go to apps.kde.com and then go to gnome2's repository and see the difference in the number of Gnome2 and KDE apps. KDE has more apps per day."
that's not exactly the best way to determine such things, and anyway, the fact that QT Designer and Kdevelop behave more similarly to visual basic and similar MSVS tools, this may make apps easier to write for less experienced programmers, meaning rapid development of lesser apps. in my experience GTK apps are almost always better than their KDE/QT alternatives(how ever many dozens of them there may be). GNOME office Vs. Koffice is a good example here.
anyway, ranting aside, this thing about including a modern version of QT, have sun already got a license for the version they're using? if so then i guess to update to a more modern version would cost them more money again.
GTK's more liberal license is another thing it's got going for it.
I just done some usability studies on this popup menu in konqueror drop targets. It's only liked by high end users that know how to ctrl click to do multiple file selections. Inexperinced user gets irritade on it very quickly. As the have to use it too often when they copy files one by one.
I even had one newbie computer user test subject who never realized that the menu poped up while she was copying a couple of files from one folder to another. She was completely focused on the next file as soon as the drop target accepted the drop.
"Besides the menu items in the popup are in the wrong order, the average user do moving a lot more than she does copying or linking. So I think the first menu item should be move insted of copy. Then there is the big red cancel button of that menu that attracts far more attention than it should.
I had not access to eye tracking equippment when doing my study, but I'm conviced that this is the first menu item the user reads when he drops a file on something. And if you happen to copy your file to a directory where a file with the samne name already exists you get a dialog with 7 buttons and one unnamed textfield to resolve the situation. "
This has no relaton to what I said. I ams peaking solely about dragging an image from the web browser to desktop.
"This is inherently wrong. You are pretending as if this is something Qt Designer doe snot do and also spreading incorrect information."
I never mentioned Qt. I've never used the Designer besides reading a few pages of the tutorial. I was merely explaining the container concept which got our Aussie friend so confused and led him to believe Glade was unusuable.
Whatever it looks like, Gtk *is* pixel-based.
Start a view Gtk apps, resize or maximize them. And then come again. E.g. start Grip with:
LANG=C grip and LANG=de_DE grip
and you'll notice with the latter the window is at least 30% bigger as the widgets resize to adapt to the bigger German labels.
"Also, Qt comes with default widget spacing, avoiding
having to specify it in "a million places" when coding
a UI."
You can work with the defaults in Gtk too. But if you are not satisfied with the outcome you can force widgets into different dimensions.
"When it comes to fitting non-Enlish text and i18n.
Have a quick look at Qt Linquist. You do _not_ need to
be a programmer to be a Qt translator."
Again, were did I say anything to the contrary?
And with poEdit gettext translations are just as easy.
"What GLADE is doing is nothing special"
Which won't stop MS from hyping XAML through the roof.
"and neither is the design, from my experience with both, Qt Designer rules hands down."
Qt Designer look more impressive when you start it up. And certainly is the documentation that comes with it top notch. I wouldn't say that for Glade. But I don't miss anything in Glade in terms of features. Please, GUI programming is most trivial in the technical sense and hasn't much changed in the last 20 years. I was doing GUIs in 68k assembler on an Amiga 500 and didn't find that part particular challenging.
If you feel differently, I really don't want to see your backend code.
The difficult part of GUI design lies in the usability department.
Have you anything worthwile to say apart meaningless teenager phrases like "rules hand down"?
> [J2SE 1.5] will include shared VM
Last I heard the tiger VM wouldn't be shared between instances in any significant way.
I am tempted by STI answer but I won't. It was the first avaiable version of C++, it used a pre-processor that converted C++ into C, it came as source code and you built it yourself. As for why Xt Intrinsics well that was a OOPs framework for C that did have Polymophism etal created by some very cleaver people at MIT IIRC and it was at the time all that was avaiable without going outside the C world.
The author of this article is obviously and experienced Linux user but has clear prejudices against Java apps. Here are quoted lines from the review and my responses to them.
".. Java applications are downright ugly and out of place, no matter if this distro is called "Java Desktop System" or not.."
Have you (Ms. Author) ever used any of the following: JBuilder, Jedit, Weblogic Workshop, JDeveloper - pure Java dev. tools used regularly in the enterprise by developers ? They are all Java applications and they're not ugly.
"..It is one thing to have Java apps not look like the Gnome apps, but having 5 java apps and all look different from each other, well, it is too much for anyone to bear.."
Did you know that Java 2 has pluggable look and feel and in JDK 1.4, there is a GTK look and feel included. All you "ugly" Java apps can look like GTK if you so wish.
".. I completely fail to see the point of advertising the fact in the /Extra menu that these apps are "Java Applications" (or was that a warning?).."
No, that was not a warning Ms Author, that was to let developers like me know that these applications would equally well run on Mac OS X, Windoze, FreeBSD or any other OS, without recompilation, unlike GTK and KDE ones written in C++.
Apart from these comments, I thought your article was valuable in highlighting some potential problems in installing JDS.
Raju Karia
Avid Linux and Java developer
Answer to Raju Karia post.
"".. Java applications are downright ugly and out of place, no matter if this distro is called "Java Desktop System" or not.."
Have you (Ms. Author) ever used any of the following: JBuilder, Jedit, Weblogic Workshop, JDeveloper - pure Java dev. tools used regularly in the enterprise by developers ? They are all Java applications and they're not ugly. "
He is not talking about java apps in general, but those java-apps provided with the distribution.
"Did you know that Java 2 has pluggable look and feel and in JDK 1.4, there is a GTK look and feel included. All you "ugly" Java apps can look like GTK if you so wish. "
So why didn't sun default all them to the same look and feel? Or even force every app to have a specific look and feel (so don't allow the l&f to be overriden).
"No, that was not a warning Ms Author, that was to let developers like me know that these applications would equally well run on Mac OS X, Windoze, FreeBSD or any other OS, without recompilation, unlike GTK and KDE ones written in C++."
Really good. So the Extra menu is there for marketing then? To show that those are the great, advertised java-apps??
inflagranti