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."
More Information (Score:3, Informative)
Rox -rocks (Score:5, Interesting)
I placed one of these in the general sales work area and I have recieved tons of comments on how fast it is. One person asked if it was prototype hardware that you couldnt buy yet because it was so fast.
I reccomend everyone give Rox a try. it mates with several light windowmanagers and makes an awesome desktop that is easy to lock down and configure.
Re:Rox -rocks (Score:3, Funny)
Tell that person I have some waterfront real estate to sell them. Chance of a lifetime.
Re:Rox -rocks (Score:3, Interesting)
I even have wine on there running one of the special research apps (nielsen data) and they like it's speed. (granted it crashes more, but it's because of the same bug that crashes the app on windows.)
If users demanded that their new P7 with 2 terebytes of ram ran unbelieveably fast instead of putting up with the added bloat that slows down that super fast machine to regluar speeds again, things would be different.
KDE is un-useable on this machine... That's what I tried to install on it first. ROX+windowmaker makes is super fast, and look nothing like Microsloth.
Re:Rox -rocks (Score:4, Interesting)
windows, nautilus, konqueror, -- all have the same problem -- laggy and non-responsive when you have tons of files in a directory.. rox just blazes through it.. my only complaint -- when a file has an executable flag - it automatically runs it -- but i'm sure there's a option somewhere to turn that off... I just havn't looked..
sure, windows XP, nautilus, etc might be an eyeful.. but... performance is what I prefer.
Re:Rox -rocks (Score:1)
Re:Rox -rocks (Score:1)
Isn't that the, ehm, point of the executable flag?
Re:Rox -rocks (Score:3, Informative)
The Options box would be a good place to start ;-)
Try Options->Types->Ignore eXecutable bit for known extensions.
Also, for text files, click with Shift held down to load it into a text editor instead of running it (this works with other files too). Shift + right button click to get a menu of possible applications to send it to.
Re:Rox -rocks (Score:1)
ROX is one of the main elements of my Linux distribution, since the appdirs mechanism is the most flawless I've ever seen (sources at http://phatboydesigns.net/devel/0sys/0sys.tar.bz2 [phatboydesigns.net], 360K or so download). I'm particularly interested in the potential it has to being a killer file manager on small devices.
(Shameless plug) For those of you who are too lazy to get PyGTK or can't have it, check out my Linux distribution's souces--There are some rather interesting goodies in desk/ written in Bourne shell, using some of my own Gtk+ apps as a scriptable replacement to the PyGTK-based ROX library. Warning: My distribution is a little sparse on documentation, but there are manual pages in there for some things.
Re:Rox -rocks (Score:1)
It definately is fast.
Re:Rox -rocks (Score:3, Informative)
LOL. But in fact ROX will never be as fast as what inspired it - the RISC OS desktop (mostly) hand-written in ARM assember. Acorn's 8MHz ARM-based desktop was in fact faster than almost anything short of a Sun workstation back in 1988 when RISC OS came out, but most of the _feeling_ of speed came from the OS being implemented in assember, and on ROM so it loaded instantly. Legend has it the windowing code was written by a games programmer - perhaps the best person to pick.
Is anyone keeping an official list of 'desktop software that looks good and isn't horribly bloated like almost everything else seems to be these days, not like back when I were a lad' (tm)? I nominate Dillo [sourceforge.net] and Icewm [icewm.org]; I would use ROX-filer if I needed a file manager (I've become accustomed to using the shell now). I can't bring myself to give up XEmacs though :-(.
Repackaging common apps as AppDirs? (Score:2)
That, combined with a nice replacement for
Re:Rox -rocks (Score:1)
I agree! But instead rox i recommend emelfm [sf.net] which is fast and powerfull "nc-like" file manager.
Then gqview for image browsing, gnumeric as spreadsheet and LyX as word processor.
Er... you wrote "looks good" - so maybe LyX isn't a good example here
Re:Rox -rocks (Score:2)
Archies only had cooperative multitasking, like old macs and most Forths, where each task has to yield the CPU.
The Archie's font antialiasing was a joy to behold, though.
They support MacOS X style app wrappers! (Score:5, Interesting)
App-wrappers are a system which solves many of the application installation problems associated with the Windows Registry and systems like RPM. By locating all of an applications files under a single relocatable directory, installing an application is as simple as dropping the "app wrapper directory" on your filesystem.
Lets all hope this concept finally takes off on Linux, so it can pave the way for simple 3rd party application distribution.
Re:They support MacOS^H^H^H^H^HRiscOS wrappers (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow, I just took a look and the ROX Filer is truly revolutionary. This is the first simple example of the powerful Nextstep and MacOS X concept of "app wrappers" brought to Linux.
Funny you should call them MacOS X style app wrappers because they are based on a much older system from Acorn RiscOS :-) Hence ROX - Risc Os on X.
Other really nice things are the Drag-and-drop save - why the hell hasn't this caught on elsewhere? After all, we drag things into windows to indicate the movement of data from one window to another. We drag files into apps to load them. Why hasn't dragging a 'file' out of an app to a filer window caught on as the most obvious way to save a file?
As an avid user of Acorn RiscOS back in its hey day (when men were Real Men, women were Real Women and real furry creatures from Alpha Centuri were Real Furry Creatures from Alpha Centuri), ROX allows me to get passed all the normal windowing cruft and really allow me to use the desktop.
As someone else has already said, ROX rocks.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Re:They support MacOS^H^H^H^H^HRiscOS wrappers (Score:2)
Re:They support MacOS^H^H^H^H^HRiscOS wrappers (Score:1)
Re:They support MacOS^H^H^H^H^HRiscOS wrappers (Score:1)
Not Missing In OS X... (Score:2)
Have fun,
Justin Dubs
Re:They support MacOS^H^H^H^H^HRiscOS wrappers (Score:2)
Funny you should call them MacOS X style app wrappers because they are based on a much older system from Acorn RiscOS :-) Hence ROX - Risc Os on X.
Does Acorn predate classic MacOS? Because the Mac has worked this way for as long as I can remember. Long before Mac OS X.
Re:They support MacOS^H^H^H^H^HRiscOS wrappers (Score:2)
It's had resource forks, but those are an entirely different implementation of a similar concept.
Re:They support MacOS^H^H^H^H^HRiscOS wrappers (Score:2)
I didn't completely understand the feature before. Classic Mac OS had the feature that applications were relocatable, and that's what I meant. The Microsoft Office 98 install consists of just copying the directory from CD to your hard drive.
Resource forks are another thing.
Note that Linux supports a feature that is non-standard to UNIX that makes it possible to make relocatable application directories like this: a process can determine the full path to the file that contains the executable image it is running. In general, this isn't possible under all UNIXes, and thus not completely portable. I'm very curious as to how these bundles work on non-Linux systems.
Re:They support MacOS^H^H^H^H^HRiscOS wrappers (Score:2)
There are two caveats: first, Carbon/Classic apps do not all implement this functionality, as it was only introduced in Mac OS 8.5; and secondly, those Carbon and Classic apps that do sometimes don't have an active proxy until you've saved once, for whatever reason. However, once the proxy is active, it works just like RISC OS did, flaws and all.
Re:They support MacOS^H^H^H^H^HRiscOS wrappers (Score:2, Funny)
All they need now is a 'Filecore in use' error every now and then.
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:They support MacOS X style app wrappers! (Score:2)
>You can have hundreds of copies of the same library in all the installation directories.
This sounds like a job for Perl, MD5Sum, and ln.
- MugginsM
Re:They support MacOS X style app wrappers! (Score:2)
the block level file server, blocks are hashed before storage, if the hash is already present no disk write need take place so duplicated data in the namespace doesn't duplicate data in the file store.
And that's just one feature.
the horse's mouth [usenix.org]
Re:They support MacOS X style app wrappers! (Score:1)
Actually, the ones who know the original thing won't even notice your reserve.
Re:They support MacOS X style app wrappers! (Score:2)
There is your median. Of course, you have to have some sort of central store of dependency information if you want to warn users they are going to screw over apps by removing those AppDirs, but the amount of overhead involved with managing well-behaved AppDirs would be *much* less compared to the common methodolgy of scattering files all over the place and hoping the package manager can sort it all out in the end...
Re:They support MacOS X style app wrappers! (Score:4, Informative)
On RISC OS each app-directory had a file inside called !Boot which was run whenever the filer _saw_ the app. Normally this was (effectively) a shell script which set some system-global environment variables for associations with particular filetypes. Needless to say this action of silently running !Boot files was a great way to spread viruses. But surprisingly opening a directory full of apps was still pretty snappy.
This system extended to libraries - a library would usually be installed as an app directory and it would need to be 'seen' by the filer before anything using that library could find it. Later on even the temporary directory (called !Scrap) did this. That is cute - you can move the temporary directory from one place to another just by clicking and dragging - but it's a nuisance that these things have to be 'seen' on every startup. IIRC there was later some method to save a session file which would visit every application seen so far, and run this session file again next time.
Since ROX-filer is just a file manager and doesn't have to set system-wide things like file assocations, it doesn't suffer from these problems AFAIK. But is there any real _need_ for app-directories?
It seems to me that they were most useful when using a handful of floppies and maybe a small hard disk; when applications were small enough to fit on a single floppy and so just copying from one disk to another was enough to 'install' an app. But how do you deal with depedencies on a particular library version, for example? Using a package manager which can check these things looks like a good idea.
Maybe a fusion of app-directories and RPM/dpkg packages would be useful. How about a package which you can double-click on to run the application immediately, but also choose to install 'centrally' (perhaps by dragging it to some strange-looking icon at the bottom of the screen) to make it install as a package, with binaries in $PATH and all that stuff.
I dunno - I liked app directories on RISC OS, but I also like Unix-style package management with install and uninstall scripts and dependency checking. And I recognize that software packaging on Unix/Linux is more complex than it was on RISC OS or even on NextStep.
I wonder what OS X does in this area?
Re:They support MacOS X style app wrappers! (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, ROX-Filer does deal with that (although a patch recently appeared on the developer list to let it use the GNOME settings instead).
As an example, let's say you want HTML documents to load into Galeon:
You can also supply a command in the dialog box instead, eg galeon "$@".
Just a thought (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Just a thought (Score:1, Redundant)
Isn't this reminicent of... (Score:1)
Re:Isn't this reminicent of... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Isn't this reminicent of... (Score:2, Informative)
Bye.
Re:Isn't this reminicent of... (Score:1)
Re:Isn't this reminicent of... (Score:3, Interesting)
You can download the source code for it and compile the program yourself. FSV. File System Viewer [sourceforge.net] A Remake of FSN. The original from jurassic park [sgi.com]
Re:Isn't this reminicent of... (Score:1)
Erroneous writeup (Score:1)
Then it makes more sense.
ROX on PDAs? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:ROX on PDAs? (Score:3, Funny)
ultimative
That sounds wondermariffical!
~the Maple Syrup
Screen estate (Score:2)
Phillip.
Re:Screen estate (Score:2)
ROX doesn't implement reverse scrolling itself, as it uses Gtk's scrollbars. However, I have made a patch for Gtk. See the bug report on bugzilla [gnome.org] for the discussion. I don't think the developers realise how useful this is, though, so don't expect to see it in 2.0 :-(
Looks nice, reminds me of OS/2 (Score:1)
I'll find out in 10mins, apt-getting as I type.
Re:Looks nice, reminds me of OS/2 (Score:2)
The thing that is missing, and I'm sure will be fixed in later releases, is that if a file, say on your pinboard, moves, the pinboard doesn't know about it (other than it is now missing). Then again this trivial thing with WPS, PM, and SOM isn't quite as easily accomplished in the environment ROX runs in.
Macintosh philosophy (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Macintosh philosophy (Score:2, Interesting)
Its even closer to the RISC OS desktop - the icons are very similar, the drag file to a Filer window to save action. The names are even the same - Filer, Pinboard etc. ;)
The RISC OS Ltd. webpage [riscos.com] - they are the people who develop the RISC OS since Acorn Computers disappeared. There are some pictures of RISC OS 3 and 4 somewhere on the web (search for Graphical User Interface gallery in google, and lok in the mirror of the site that somes out top (if it hasn't returned)).
Re:Macintosh philosophy (Score:3, Informative)
The links:
RISC OS 3.11 [209.196.53.130] The one every british schoolchild will be familiar with...
RISC OS 4 [209.196.53.130] The current version, with fancier marble look.
Re:Macintosh philosophy (Score:1)
pah, BBC model B in my day
these kids today
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: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:Nice for expatriated Mac users (Score:1)
I can see why the file browser & the web browser got married, but sheesh, does it have to be slowwwwwww.
Re:Nice for expatriated Mac users (Score:2, Insightful)
Beats Gnome 4.0 (Score:5, Interesting)
First, it is VERY fast. No, make that EXTREMELY FAST. For once, my PIII-866 feels like a fast machine. Running Linux or Windows, my computer feels considerably slower. Rox put a smile on my face with that.
Second, this allows people to run multiple versions of applications, just like the mono project is supposed to.
Third, it's easy to configure - is it SIMPLE, but effective. You can copy an application by copying a simple directory. It simplifies the dll hell by making applications self contained. You could even have multiple versions in one directory if you wanted to. (http://rox.sourceforge.net/appdirs.php3 shows a simple example with tgif).
Finally, it works today. Mono is still several months off at the earliest, and requires chasing MS all over the place with regard to changes.
Re:Beats Gnome 4.0 (Score:1)
Re:Beats Gnome 4.0 (Score:2)
Give me a break. There are plenty of desktops out there that are seriously low in resource usage. As far a being userfriendly, easy to configure, Drag-n-Drop compatible (everyone wants to drop dragons right?) I've always recomended XFce. It uses up practically no system resources, looks pretty nice, and you learn how to do everything in about 5 minutes. It may be a CDEish clone, but it's much nicer by all accounts.
As a matter of fact, I tried out the ROX-filer as my file manager for some time, but I never liked it as much as XFce's built in file manager so I switched back. (Who want's to go to submenu after submenu just to get to the delete option?) XFce does everything much better.
But I shouldn't rant. These are the kinds of comments I expect from someone that hasn't used anything but GNOME and KDE.
Re:Beats Gnome 4.0 (Score:4, Informative)
There are a few things you can do about this:
I may make an option so that right-clicking a file goes straight to the context menu. For most users, though, it's better to show them the whole menu every time.
Re:Beats Gnome 4.0 (Score:2)
What ROX Lacks (Score:2, Interesting)
file manager for X. With that said, let me
tell you why I don't use it. It lacks the ability
to save view preferences on a per-directory basis.
A directory with one file opens up with the same
default view preferences as a directory with 200
files. There needs to be a way to save window
size, icon size, sort order, etc.
Actually, the real reason I don't use it, is
because a modern shell seems so much more
efficient at file operations than any
graphical file manager could be.
Re:What ROX Lacks (Score:3, Interesting)
The thing about the shell is true too, but ROX is so much closer to shell flexibility than any file manager I have seen.
Every action can quickly and easily be assigned a single key shortcut. And those actions range from opening up a terminal in the current directory, to filemask based file selections, to running arbitrary command lines in current directory, to navigation through typing paths with tab completion. Granted, you can't do the fancy things
like while and for loops with really fancy stuff, but with well written apps that can accept multiple drops, this becomes less of an issue. Now for applications such as highly configurable completion that extends beyond filenames into arbitrary sets, zsh is the command line shell of choice to complement ROX-Filer. Never been so satisfied with a User Interface design in my life.
Re:What ROX Lacks (Score:2, Informative)
Per folder (as in real directories on your file system), you can define any window size, icon arrangement, background colour, font, layout (free, grid, etc), large/small icon or just text, just about anything you can imagine.
Customization of colours, fonts, background is all via simple drag 'n drop if you wish.
Great step forward for Linux, but it's just catching up to something been done waaay back in the mid-90's
Re:What ROX Lacks (Score:2)
Agreed.
Actually, the real reason I don't use it, is because a modern shell seems so much more efficient at file operations than any graphical file manager could be.
Umm...ROX integrates BEAUTIFULLY with command shells. Try WIndow->Shell Command... You'll like it. You can also 'select if...' etc. VERY powerful.
Brilliant system... (Score:5, Informative)
And Python programmers should take a look at ROX-Lib. The primary bit that is really cool is the really simple API for creating, accessing and modifying xml configuration files that follow the same ~/Choices/ convention that ROX-Filer follows, which seems infinitely better than the standard of polluting your home directory with dotfiles and dotdirectories... Not only that, but also will generate a nice, usable GUI to manipulate those files without the programmer having to build it by hand (though the programmer has to provide a well hinted sample xml file, but this is *far* more trivial than writing the gui out by hand). Not only does this make things easy on the developer, but also enforces consistency among apps that choose to use it.
Also, the entire concept of AppDirs is very very nice. Installing an application simply involves dragging it wherever you want, and it doesn't scatter files all over the file system, making package management a moot point. The de-facto standard has been to scatter files all over the damn place right next to other packages and this creates a huge problem package managers have been trying to solve effectively, but it is never perfect (packages occasionally make modifications not tracked by these managers). AppDir as ROX is designed around and specifies keeps package files well separated, in its own AppDir, own subdir of a system Choices directory, or per-user Choices directories. Nothing stops a bad developer from breaking this convention, but there rarely is a need, at most placing a wrapper script in
Only issue with ROX-Lib is that it is python specific, so all that cool stuff is only for python developers, but I like python too
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:Brilliant system... (Score:2)
Re:Brilliant system... (Score:1)
I think the concept itself, of a standard place to map MIME types to applications, etc., is sound. But if folks are going to adhere to this particular standard, it would be nice to give it a name. That way, if ROX (among others) is using that "foo" system, it could be stored in a ".foo" subdirectory - not only with an easily identifyable name, but also hidden by default.
Oh, and ROX *does* use a "CHOICESPATH" environment variable (as I just discovered) which should allow the directory to be moved (I think), but ROX breaks when the variable is set :(
Re:Brilliant system... (Score:2)
Note that it's a path, not just a directory. If you set it to just ~/.choices then the filer won't be able to find its icons... (still seems to run OK, though, apart from that ;-)
Five minutes research (Score:2, Informative)
It defaults to ~/Choices if you don't set it to something else.
This is in Rox's FAQ on the project homepage.
Re:Brilliant system... (Score:2, Informative)
OS/2. No kidding, and you thought it was dead (it isn't).
Most apps are very well behaved, except for the compressed package it usually comes in, you are generally free to move stuff around as you wish.
In fact Serenity Systems (www.serenity-systems.com) has taken this and run with it. Drag 'n drop installation over the network. Deploy your apps to many workstations via a single drag 'n drop.
It can be done because nearly all the functionality is already built into OS/2's WPS.
It may sound revolutionary to some of you, but millions of OS/2 users have already seen this.
nautilus vs rox (Score:2, Informative)
Someone had to do it, sooner or later (Score:2)
I use ROX (Score:2)
and never looked back.
For the few times i need to use a file-manager (I usually prefer the command-line), ROX works like a charm. Plus it's not bloated and slow like Konqueror and the hideously bloated and slow Nautilus.
I no longer use either GNOME or KDE because of the poor performance, which doesn't seem to be improving with newer releases, and WindowMaker + ROX run all the GTK+/Qt apps, without the baggage of some stupid Windows-alike 'Desktop Environment'
It literally starts up in under a second on my P3-500, and does everything i need from a filemanager.
I don't use the other ROX components, but the file manager is perfect for me.
Appfolders (Score:1)
Of course, dragging and dropping apps to install is all very well for the user, but surely it completely removes the opportunity to use shared libraries? The reason Linux splashes files in different directories is to make them easy to share files with each other.
Of course, I don't know this - but I'd bet anything that the reason the OS X installer for Mozilla is 15mb compared to 9/10 for Windows/Linux is because OS X doesn't have the same concept of shared libs, so much more must be shipped with the product. Interestingly, once decompressed Moz on OS X is 35mb, compared to 15 on my windows/linux box.
Just a thought.
Re:Appfolders (Score:1)
Having said that, I've no idea whether the ROX method actually does involve using extra disk space.
Re:Appfolders (Score:2)
Additionally, who says you can't mix and match? Dynamic libraries as files in a directory and applications as folders? Kinda like windows does (except have a command interpreter that would parse those AppDir in the path and execute automatically AppRun programs in them to avoid large PATH variables)
Enlightenment Desktop shell (Score:1, Informative)
WooHoo! (Score:2)
And all this praise from a WPS bigot (you guys are getting there!)
Congrats again. Here's to doing it the right way (not following micro$loth, KDE, Gnome crap).
Rox is SOOoooo easily extensible! (Score:3, Interesting)
ROXFilter [homeip.net]
Re:Desktop (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Desktop (Score:1)
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)
Re:Desktop (Score:2)
In that case, I'd like all the open source guys to drop everything they're doing and provide me, the user, with the most friendly desktop possible. I'm not quite sure what that is yet, but I think it'll involve clowns and the color mauve...
And, I'm sure everyone else will love to make it the standard.
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:Desktop (Score:2, Funny)
There are so many medical billing programs out there that make my eyes hurt, I don't want to think about it.
Re:Desktop (Score:1)
Holy $#!` my heart stopped!
MEDIC!!! MAN DOWN! MAN DOWN!
you blasphemous heathen!
Re:Desktop (Score:1)
I'm not sure if there is a free version of it available, but I'm sure we could start a project to make one available under the GPL.
Re:Desktop (Score:1)
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.
Re:Desktop (Score:1)
You got it all wrong.
Standardisation does not mean conformity! It's fanatics like you who are keeping the Linux on desktop down.
Settle on a standard, write all programs to conform to that. Everyone else who doesn't like the standard desktop is free to write his/her own niche version of the program. It's free source, people!
Re:Great... (Score:2)
Instead of ranting, why don't you post some information links? Who or what are you talking about?
More importantly, why don't you stop ranting on Slashdot and innovate something yourself? Put your coding where your mouth is.
Re:Great... (Score:1)
Its a ripoff of Acorn Computers RISC OS, (now owned by Pace, the desktop version is developed by RISC OS Ltd). The RISC OS Ltd website [riscos.com]
However every person whoes been through the british education system in the last 10 years will be able to use it, as for a while Acorn computers were the mainstay in schools. However I found the drag icon to window to save system annoying myself.
Apparently some of RISC OS is still written in BASIC as well.
Re:Ouate? (Score:1, Offtopic)
What's it for? (Score:1)
If you've got a lower-powered workstation sitting around -- an old Pentium 133, for example -- you can put ROX on top of XFree and a window manager like Windowmaker to keep the impact light. This is also good if you're running a Linux box for a special-purpose (such as a firewall) and don't need all of the bells and whistles.
There was an on Slashdot in December on running a 'Lo-Fat' desktop that talks a lot about this. [slashdot.org]
Re:What's it for? (Score:1)
Anyone who runs any sort of desktop on a firewall or server box is living in a state of sin...
Obscurity (Score:1)
Re:Real Audio/Player sucks (Score:2)
The address doesn't bounce- they probably filter it all out.
graspee