Internetling

 

Disclaimer: I never met anyone from either company, so here are only my views on the matter. I hear the former CEO of Linspire said it’s going to ruin the company, because the shares will become worthless. While I’m no expert on shares etc. and since I’ve never been a CEO, the guy’s probably right about this. But for us users, what we’re going to see, is a new direction for the not-so-popular Click ‘n’ Run and maybe even a new, merged distribution?

Click ‘n’ Run. Currently, what Linspire has done with Click ‘n’ Run, isn’t really impressive. I’ve got my APT, and so do Ubuntu users and all the other distros already have their package management systems. No distro is going to adopt Click ‘n’ Run, the organization around the distro wants to be able to control all aspects of it, right? That means Linspire had to do all the work for a something I’ve never seen anyone use. Since Click ‘n’ run is perhaps one of the most interesting assets of Linspire,maybe the guys at Xandros have an idea about what they’re going to d with it. hey must have a lot of experience, after all they are one of the oldest Linux distro-based businesses.

Distro. Face it, at the moment we’re witnessing the rise of Ubuntu, followed by cool distros such as Fedora, Debian, SuSe Linux, Mandriva and others. The last time Iv’e seen anyone use Linspire is when it was still called Lindows and Xandros got  help from the huge sales of the Eee PC. The Xandros OS is a horrible show of what Linux could do, it actually makes peopel turn away and choose the nicer-looking XP, even though everyone knows Linux could look and perform much better. Putting this aside, I think that a merged distro would be in order to challenge the other major distributions and finally secure a good place for Xandros + Linspire in the top 5. Is it doable? I don’t know. But if they don’t do something real fast, the others are going to run them over and everybody will forget Xandros or Linspire ever existed…

We need something USEFUL and INNOVATIVE! TRY HARDER!

(and good luck)

I hadn’t expected such a response to my article about choosing the right desktop environment when I was writing it, but as most commenters noted, it was a really quick write-up, a kind of a brainstorming session about desktop environments where I indicated the pros and cons. Well this time, I tried improving it. More info, more research and more work are contained in this post. Enjoy, and favorite it if you like in the case you’re in a dilemma with you Linux install.

There will be a follow-up post about Window managers, so if you’re interested in that, subscribe to my feed and you’ll be updated when it’s published!

Note these are my personal impressions, so feel free to post your opinion on the article but please keep it friendly, no flame wars/accusations/RMS eats babies etc.

We’ll start with the more popular projects.

1. GNOME

You will find GNOME available in most popular distributions such as Fedora, Ubuntu and Mint. The GNOME project must be doing something right! Choose GNOME if you want a robust, polished, simple and customizable environment. GNOME has everything a standard desktop user would need. I especially like GNOME’s configuration tools and stock apps – simple straight to the point.

If you like innovation though, I don’t believe GNOME is necessarily the way to go: it’s a big project with cool people working on it, but I’m not sure if they already know what the next step is going to be. GNOME still remains a default choice for most people and is the leading desktop environment, which makes getting support easier. There is also a multitude of sites on the Net with themes and add-ons for GNOME.
What I’d suggest is that they build an experimental fork of GNOME for people to try out new things. Stock GNOME became really boring in the past years. We don’t need Cheese, we need something NEW!

2. KDE 4

To most KDE 3 users, KDE 4 came as quite a shock: while it retains the KDE philosophy, which is ultimate configurability, some changes are so radical that it looks more like a fork than the next version of the second most popular desktop environment for Linux. That is why I can’t say whether I feel KDE 4 really is a step forward – but here’s the cool stuff: it looks great (Qt4 did the trick there), supports Plasma widgets, is pretty configurable (though not as much as its predecessor).The thing that I don’t like with KDE 4 is that it still has an overwhelming beta feeling to it. It doesn’t give you the impression of being production-ready, because it crashes a lot and still has some issues with GNOME apps and lots of other inner workings which I’m not really knowledgeable about. The only stable, polished and  usable version is probably the openSuSe KDE 4 desktop. If you want to experiment and see something cool, then sure, why not. KDE 4 certainly has vision, but is more or less still a thing to play, not to work with.

3. KDE 3

My first KDE experience was when I booted the Knoppix Live-CD. I liked it a lot, but it was so filled with options and icons I was a bit overwhelmed. That’s really the main difference between KDE and GNOME. You can do a lot with GNOME, but KDE really lets you customize everything. No, sorry, more than everything. It’s not really something for the new user – in my school ,where I set up a Knoppix machine, I erased and removed lots of icons and options, so nobody would be confused. It takes a while to get used to KDE. An ironic thing is that there is also a huge pile of themes and add-ons for KDE, but only the default theme looked nice to me. The cosmetics department will prefer KDE 4. In conclusion, whatever I say that bothers me about KDE 3 isn’t really credible, because most of it can be changed in the KDE control center. The only cons I can really think of is KDE’s mediocre speed and simply too many colors (inconsistent icons, especially in the tray).

4. XFCE

Home users might consider switching to XFCE if they think GNOME is a bit too slow or their computers. XFCE won’t be a huge performance improver, but it’s got all the basic stuff GNOME has, and provides excellent GTK+ integration, so your GNOME apps won’t look weird. XFCE also provides tools for configuration, though there is not an abundance of options. Most people that choose XFCE by themselves love it. For me personally, XFCE was a cute environment and I hear it is still in very active development. You should check XFCE out if you want to have a good-looking desktop that isn’t just a window manager, but still brings you some speed and simplicity.

5. Enlightenment DR17

There are two versions of Enlightenment. DR17 is the new Enlightenment, completely rewritten. What sets Enlightenment DR17 apart from other desktop environments is that it is focused on eye-candy while not (ab)using your computers resources as much as other DE’s tend to. Enlightenment is pretty popular these days, I know a few people who simply love it. When you install DR17, you’ll be able to decide… it’s gonna be a radical change for most of you, because of the approach that DR17 takes. You may find it beautiful, or kitschy. I belong to the latter, but maybe you’ll like it. You can use Enlightenment only or in conjuction with other environments, like GNOME. DR17 enables you to choose which modules of Enlightenment you want to use. There is also a Ubuntu version with a custom Enligtenment desktop avaliable. Try it out if you want and write your impressions in the comments section.
Well, that’s it, I haven’t had any experience with other complete desktop environments. If you do, please comment and tell us about it, I’d be glad to learn more about DE’s, and so would other readers.

What is your desktop environment of choice?

From this day onward only sub-notebooks will still receive updates for in my opinion one of the best operating systems Microsoft ever delivered (except DOS of course). Support for normal personal computers has officially ended. RIP!

This is what the first alpha version of Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex will look like. The 8.10 version of Ubuntu GNU/Linux won’t be a long-term support version, so Canonical will get a chance to test-drive some new features. Aside from the updated GNOME 2.24.0 and a new kernel version, kernel 2.6.26, the most notable feature currently is the long-awaited theme change. In the screenshots currently published on the Interwebz I can only see lots and lots of brown and I’m not liking it at all. How about you?

Well I guess I should join the Firefox 3 review bandwagon. I’ve been using Firefox 3 since beta 5, which came bundled with the new version of Ubuntu. I also upgraded my browsers on both my PC and MacBook, so I got an impression of the browser’s functions, bugs and most importantly speed on all of the three major platforms, except Vista of course, but Vista sucks, so why bother. Get your read on, I’ll be starting with:

Windows XP SP3

I’ve been using Firefox on XP for a long, long time and there were a lot of plugins which ceased to function. The most important ones worked, though. So I uninstalled all of the old ones and gave some alternatives a shot. The upgrade went pretty smoothly, although the plugin compatibility check took a considerable amount of time. What you can really notice is the increase in speed. As a matter of fact, it runs almost as quickly as on Linux. I don’t like the theme they used for XP, though it’s interesting to see that the larger Back button isn’t stupid design at all, on the contrary, it makes work faster.

Ubuntu Linux 8.04

Loads up in three seconds, a real rocket! Firefox 3 integrates with your GTK+ theme, so you’ve got some cool visual consistency going on which is actually an exception in Linux. A problem many reviewers forget to tell you about is that even though this is great for GNOME or XFCE, KDE 4 ain’t no beauty with FF3. It just uses the ugly default GTK theme if you don’t do any tweaking. Uuuuugly… If you want to use Firefox with KDE 4, I recommend you use this theme.
Firefox is a great browser for Linux and is probably the most widely used one, but note that even though the final version of FF 3.0 is far better than the beta, it crashes more and has more bugs than the other major browser, Opera 9.5 for Linux. I personally experience the worst crashes when trying to print stuff.

Mac OS X

It’s probably got something to do with my config: Firefox 3 needs about 8-10 seconds to load in Mac OS X. I like the way they changed the theme for the Mac, now it looks like a part of the OS, so thumbs up for that. Somehow, I can’t get ScribeFire to work with Firefox on the Mac – it’s a big problem for me, so currently I’m staying with Flock on the Mac, because FF 3.0 crashes repeatedly when I’m doing complex stuff, like running a lot of tabs with Java and Flash or have more than 10 tabs open at the same time.

Are you using Firefox 3? How do you feel about it?