Journal salimma's Journal: Ximian Desktop 2 - first impressions 7
Woke up yesterday to the news that Ximian Desktop 2 is out, and I must say it was quite a pleasant surprise, since the pre-release announcement promised release 'in the week of June 9th'.
Quickly started the installer I downloaded the day before, and was maxing out my ADSL connection, even though I was downloading from a nearby mirror (fr2.rpmfind.net), so I SSH'd to my university server and set it downloading there.
Went to do some work, burned the downloaded stuff, came back - news is all over Slashdot by now, and I found out that I was missing some channels. Great. Downloaded Evolution and Red Carpet, started the installer - by this time the main Red Carpet server is getting really jammed, and it timed out trying to compare some package signatures with the server values. Good thing there is a back button - I ended up removing the packages listed for removal and doing a manual install.
And thus we arrive at the gist of this post - impressions. I must say I'm really quite impressed. Open Office loads faster, fonts just work, the new desktop theme is really quite snazzy, Freedesktop compliance mean for once the non-Ximian-bundled apps still show in the menu (under More >>). Oh, and NFS + SMB browsing working out of the box. Really neat. I've been using Rawhide's Nautilus previously so the added feature of proper align-to-grid is not new, but still nice to have.
Nothing breaks too. Well, almost nothing. Had to manually link to the Bluecurve mouse cursor theme to get it working (the Ximian industrial theme looks really mismatched with the default black cursor). And I wish they would use Epiphany rather than Galeon as the default browser - I did not install Mozilla+Galeon since I am on Moz 1.4 + Epiphany 0.6.1 from Rawhide, and in any case, it's Firebird for now.
Having an RSS reader bundled would be nice as well. I have my own anyway, so no matter. Red Hat users would be pleased to note that XD2's XMMS behaves like RH8's - no silly placeholder MP3 plugin that one has to disable to stop it messing up your playback.
In short, thumbs up. Clean interface, with elegant features borrowed from both Aqua and XP. Let's hope we don't have to wait as long for XD 2.4 though.
What OS version? (Score:1)
Re:What OS version? (Score:1)
Re:What OS version? (Score:2)
Err.. is it not obvious that the Red Hat guy is a pale face? Surely Red Warrior would use Buffalo Linux
Re:What OS version? (Score:1)
Re:What OS version? (Score:2)
I used to like SuSE a lot, but since Gnome 2 came out their packaging of it started getting really poor (I recall getting broken help system under Gnome some time ago - 7.2 I think). Being forced to pay, the lack of cheap ISO (installer can't be bundled in a sold product) is a bummer too - while with Red Hat I can just purchase the version I want, or (even better) purchase an RHN subscription
Re:What OS version? (Score:2)
Oh, by the way, the Metacity theme for Mandrake (Galaxy) is up on art.gnome.org - I tried it to see what it looked like.
Not *too* bad - nice curve on the left, but buttons are a bit shoddy, but when I changed my theme and the titlebar colour failed to follow the change, I became much less impressed.
Still yearning for the days of Mandrake 7.x - it somehow felt much more solid back then.
Re:What OS version? (Score:2)
Mandrake 7.2 really felt like the high-water mark for Mandrake. The GUI tools managed to strike a good balance between power and ease of use. The default graphics were better and overall it seemed very stable and well-integrated.