“For years, it has seemed that the GNU/Linux desktop was right on the cusp of being ready for the mainstream desktop out of the box. Recent distributions, such as Mandrake Linux 9.2, bring the desktop to the mainstream, but something is still lacking: complete unity.” Read more at OfB.biz. Update: On other Ximian news, the first release of Dashboard is coming along soon.
Ximian XD2: The Way Things Ought to Be
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
24 Comments
2003-12-07 4:44 pm
2003-12-07 6:19 pm
2003-12-07 7:34 pm
Anonymous
Anyone claiming replacing those icons are trivial has obviously never drawn any high quality icons themselves 
2003-12-07 8:29 pm
but something is still lacking: complete unity.
a unified theme in their distribution that makes GTK+ and Qt/KDE applications feel somewhat more alike
it has to do with the limited distribution support provided by Ximian. As of this writing, only SuSE 8.2 and Red Hat 8/9 are supported in XD2 – Fedora Core 1, SuSE Linux 9 and Mandrake Linux are all left out of the loop
Ximian is easy to use, convenient, well polished and robust. In many ways, it exemplifies the way things ought to be.
1- Choice is the big point in Linux graphical enviromnment. Don’t kill that with an unified theme;
2- Ximian should have had some “distribution agnostic” orientation. Some .pbin or .tar.gz binries were in order, unless this was some compiled software to be on the mainstream distributions;
3-Ximian looks and feel and works very nice. Too bad it will be Novell to make decisions about it from now on. This might mean: some get it all others get nothing.
(Just my opinion)
3-Ximian looks and feel and works very nice. Too bad it will be Novell to make decisions about it from now on. This might mean: some get it all others get nothing.
Well, it depends on the decisions Novell make. If Novell says, “screw this, we’ll be arrogant and do things OUR way” then they’re going to muck things up, HOWEVER, if they decide that they don’t have the skills and bring in the appropriate people, then they’ll have a winning combination.
Why can’t I have the choice of a unified theme? By fighting a unified theme, you are taking away choice.
XD 2 is pretty old now, in OSS time and there are themes that make TK and Qt applications look the same.
XD2 isn’t just a theme, the applications that make it up have had their interfaces tweaked so everything *fits*. That is unified, not having just a theme laid on top of everything.
The XD2 version of Openoffice for instance looks far far better than the vanilla ones. They’ve replaced all the dodgy (and somewhat crap) icons in OO and it just looks beautiful.
Seriously, it is my favourite interface feel of any I’ve used, Linux, Windows and Mac. I heartily recommend giving it a go if you haven’t already done so…
When you have to choose between OOo 1.1 and an old slightly interface tweaked Ximian-OOo 1.0 – which do you choose?
yay for Dashboard.
I was a bit despondent there for awhile, thinking Nat had forgotten about it. I think it could be a really powerful tool in future desktops.
Replying to myself…
Announcement here:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/dashboard-hackers/2003-December/msg0…
Source here:
http://www.nat.org/dashboard/src/
I built Dashboard from CVS about a week ago. It was pretty rough, not sure how ready it is even for a “development” release.
“When you have to choose between OOo 1.1 and an old slightly interface tweaked Ximian-OOo 1.0 – which do you choose?”
Have you tried the Ximian version? I’m guessing not because I have and would choose the XD2 version of OOo (1.0.3)
Why do you feel that you are losing your right to choose?
Don’t you still have a choice of RedHat/Fedora, SuSE, Debian, etc? No one is twisting your arm to buy this particular product. The idea is that, for many people, we’ve already chosen and we want our choice to be improved.
So someone does the market research to determine that many people have chosen a particular DE and they decide that, if they can polish it, they can sell it to these people. I think it is a great idea.
No one is forcing you to use this. There are more kinds of pizza than pepperoni – if someone comes out with the perfect pepperoni pizza, the pepperoni eaters will be happy, the ham and pineapple eaters will have to find someone to perfect their chosen flavor or be content with what they have (or switch to pepperoni). Lots of choices.
why don’t we just forget about a unique look and feel and make applications look individual, it don’t work anyway, a dream which will never come true. In Windows (which I use mainly) there is old crappy look, XP look, tons of skinned application, and rarely other applications using things like swing, QT etc. that usually feel strange or crappy, in Linux the diversity is similar. The cure for this are individual look and feels for every application enabled by things like XAML and XUL. Windows future will be XAML anyway. There is a need for a new toolkit anyway because most of the current ones are not very portable, in the future portability will be much more important for many developers because of the growing popularity OS’s other than Windows. Imitating the look of another toolkit is imo a bad idea same as wrapping native toolkits, computers get fast enough so speed is not a issue here. Next best solution is imho #WT which is a .NET wrapper for GTK+/Win32 but until there is a IDE integrated form designer it’s useless. My personal development solution for this UI and portability mess is simply do no UI programming until there are better solutions (at least I won’t start a new project
“The cure for this are individual look and feels for every application enabled by things like XAML and XUL. Windows future will be XAML anyway”
Absolutly no. XAML doesn’t specify how a button is painted. It descibes just a composition of widgets, not how the widgets will look.
Check it out:
http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=7131
dude, that should be part of both KDE and Gnome’s Theme system.
Maybe if each distro didn’t do the same thing, just in diferent ways. It would be better, the distros need diferent fitures, & the same standerds.
I tried XD2 when I was using SuSE 8.2 and it really did suck. It was slower than the normal GNOME, it also interfered with my KDE setup. I ended up reinstalling Linux just to get rid of it. usr local bin’s GNOME is much better. I am just hoping that Novell don’t impose Ximian Disaster on the next version of SuSE Linux; if they do I will stop buying their Linux.
Odd Matthew I had the exact opposite experience using Suse 9. Listen Suse never integrates yast2 into the gnome control center or even the start-here:// location like RH9 does. Not only that but Suse refuses to ship the vfs-extras like samba support and other smaller things.
Ok, that said I do like usr.local’s packages but I have had more quality issues with those pacakages than I have with Ximian’s. Abiword-2.0 borking randomly or gstreamer packages with no shared libs and other minor annoyances. Honestly Ogsley’s support of the Suse-bound gnome folks has been so important and nice I hate to even say anything honestly.
I like the fact that they clearly marked Personal Setting and Administration settings. I hate the My Computer label but I like the view. The printer stuff is great and I hope it is the shape of things to come in admin tools. For the sake of community distros and the sanity of admins everywhere there should be a distro agnostic group of sys admin tools. KDE has some tools but more are needed. It just felt put together better and tied together better than the default gnome desktop. Plus, samba support worked. This is a pretty big deal. Yes, they should securely cache the password so you are not prompted as often but this is the first version of gnome that actually had the samba support working correctly.
I took the LinNeighborhood icon of my desktop for the first time in years.
Slower than the default gnome? It launched slightly slower than the default but once it got going it rocked faster in terms of app response especially the XD2 version of OpenOffice. It was noticably faster.
I find your conclusions odd and must say I have experienced the exact opposite in my daily use of Suse for months at work.
Yeah, but what I still want to know is what makes it worth the $100 if all it does is look nicer than Gnome. Is it that XDE2 is for office workers who haven’t much experience with Linux and might be confused by Gnome?
Check it out: