ROX Desktop Update 181
tal197 writes: "More than two years since the ROX desktop (a desktop based around the filesystem) was last
mentioned on slashdot, the second stable branch of the central
ROX-Filer
component has just been released. It's still pretty light and fast, despite all the
changes, and integrates well with other desktops too."
Re:Desktop (Score:3, Insightful)
There are the windows XPerience designers who want to lock everything down. Ok. That works with the closed source.
Then there are the open source guys who are afraid to/incapable of settling on a well defined, common standard that would bring unified desktop and improve user friendliness on Unix. Why? Because they are afraid of things getting locked down. But how could the desktop get locked down when everything is open source?! Settle on a standard and if anyone is not satisfied, let him/her compile her own programs and live outside the standard! Don't make us all live in the "download the most recent code and recompile it" hell. Some of us just want a desktop that works and looks good. We don't want to tweak our computers!
Re:Desktop (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Desktop (Score:2, Insightful)
People sold themselves into slavery with MS. There may have been some questionable (downright illegal) practices, but I don't think this really made a difference. Business owners and consequently office workers adopted one single interface.
Only after this mindset was established did MS have the leverage to really screw other companies out of business. CP/M wasn't a victim of anti-competitive practices. DR-DOS wasn't a victim until Win3.1.
Variety is the spice of life. Competition is a good thing, even in Open Source, where money isn't the motivator.
New ideas would never grow if there was only one desktop. No one likes branches in projects, especially just to try out usability features. The only recourse is to start a different project, or move to a different project, that thinks along the lines that you do. Once the features are tried, tested, and appreciated by one user base, then maybe the commitee that is the larger application might be convinced to try it.
If everyone decided to leave it to one filesystem, we probably wouldn't have any descent journaling filesystems, for instance. Ext2 was great, why use anything different? Why use new significantly new features in a system we already know and love?
Variety, competition, and choice are all good things, in life as well as open source.
Nice for expatriated Mac users (Score:5, Insightful)
I never managed to shake a nagging feeling of loss: I missed the Finder. Oh, I tried various graphical file managers -- Midnight Commander, assorted OS/2 and NeXT clones, and more recently Nautilus. None of them worked for me; I tried to use them but always found myself switching back to the shell to get anything done. Most recently, I tried MacOS X and had the same problem! My beloved Finder -- constant from System 6 all the way to MacOS 9 -- had been replaced by this strange marriage of Windows Explorer and the NeXT Workspace Manager.
What did I want that all these tools failed to deliver? A physical feeling of the filesystem. The idea that this directory is here... and this one is over there... and I can reach through the screen with my mouse, scoop up a bunch of files, and drop them in a new location. Also a sense of immediacy. The file manager must be lightweight and optimized enough that opening a new directory is, perceptually, a zero-cost operation. The interface must be sparse enough that you feel you are working in the filesystem, not through a bunch of widgets and menus. Sure, browsers like Nautilus or the OS X Finder support classic Finder-style browsing, but they don't stay out of your way enough for you to ignore the browser and focus on the files.
The introduction [sourceforge.net] on the ROX pages sums up some of how I feel:
One other system managed to give me the same intuitive feel for the filesystem, and that was the Be Tracker, a blatant but well-crafted Finder clone. Despite serious flaws (no hierarchal list views!), it was so nice to use that it was my primary interface into my computer when I used BeOS. The ROX Filer looks like a promising start. I will download it and hope, and contribute where I can.
Re:Desktop (Score:2, Insightful)
I think it'll involve clowns and the color mauve
If it meant that the clowns and the color mauve are standard across ALL the applications, I'd still use it.
The current "use whatever widget set you want" anarchy is just horrible.
Re:They support MacOS X style app wrappers! (Score:3, Insightful)
True, DLL Hell isn't much better, but there has to be a clever median between the two.
Re:Nice for expatriated Mac users (Score:3, Insightful)
If I want a web browser I'll open a web browser. I wanted to use a file manager. and this is where ROX fits in. If you kill nautlius (actually delete that nightmare from your drive) and place ROX in it's place as both the file manager AND desktop you increase Gnome's useability by over 50% in just the speed gains alone.
I firmly believe that both KDE and Gnome need to stop all development, take away anything faster than a P-II-450 from all the developers and work on making both environments lightning fast on that low end hardware. THEN you are allowed to add toys, but no damned integration...
remember this is linux... a UNIX style OS. and that premise that you havea lot of small fast apps that do one thing very well and very fast.
having a webbrowser in my desktop and file manager is not the brightest Idea anyone at either camp had.
Re:Brilliant system... (Score:3, Insightful)
The seemingly hard-coded use of the "~/Choices" directory is the one thing that irks me about the ROX-Filer. The convention of .directory is that stuff which needs some disk space but is used only by apps should be hidden from view so that I don't have to look at it when I list my home dir contents. Now, I'm stuck with the vaguely-worded "Choices" directory that would've been better placed in a ".ROX" directory so that I wouldn't have to look at it all the time, but would know what it was at a glance when doing a "ls -a".
Re:Nice for expatriated Mac users (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Brilliant system... (Score:1, Insightful)
He's saying, I understood, it should be a hidden directory.
That is the best way with preferences, policy and context, when they are implied and not explicit.