Cobind Desktop Reviewed, With Interview

An anonymous reader writes "Cobind Desktop takes a remarkable turn from other Linux distributions by being one of the first to include Mozilla Firefox 0.8 and Mozilla Thunderbird in their first release. Though Cobind Desktop only uses XFce and not the more popular KDE, its entire design is based on a clutter-free workspace. Flexbeta.net took the time to write up a review and conduct an interview with David Watson, Co-Founder and President of Cobind Desktop. He mentions how the entire design concept of Cobind Desktop is based on a book called the Paradox of Choice, by Barry Schwartz, who is a professor at Swarthmore. David Watson believes that this concept can be applied to software design, and produce more usable products as a result." (We mentioned Schwartz's book earlier today.)

Re:Umm, how is this 'remarkable'?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Sneakernet" is an old term referring to running data between locations on floppy disks, for anyone who didn't know.

Re:If they've already switched to a Unix variant..

[The Irish Jew]

Umm, are you sure yuo're not thinking of XPde. XFCE is nothing like windows XP. XPde however is.

Re:So they illegally BUNDLED Mozilla?

[Anonymous Coward]

What an uncreative troll.

Cobind doesn't own Mozilla, whereas Microsoft owns Internet Explorer and uses their desktop dominance to force the browser onto the ignorant masses.

Re:So they illegally BUNDLED Mozilla?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, you have no clue. It is not illegal for any company to provide a complete browser/os/etc solution unless they are a monopoly and including a browser undercuts competition in a significant way because of the monopoly status of the company including the software (microsoft).

Before you start throwing around accusations of people being hypocrites, you should a least have some understanding of what you are talking about. Since MS does have a monopoly on the desktop, they are treated differently because they are in a position to entirely wipe out competition just by including a browser (or media player) even if their competition is better. There is no level playing field for browsers when ms is involved because their os is the playing field. That is why they must be artificially constrained in ways the other companies are not.

Get a clue, please.

Re:So they illegally BUNDLED Mozilla?

[Zardus]

Konqueror and Mozilla share the gecko rendering engine, which is a desperately needed step in the direction of the open source community focusing on depth, not breadth, in choices (applause).

They don't actually. Konqueror uses KHTML [kde.org], which is a pretty nice HTML engine (Apple chose it over gecko for Safari). As both engines are very nice, I guess either the OSS community isn't taking desperately needed steps or we got enough people to work on a few implementations of things at the same time and make them good.

Having used both browsers extensively, I think the latter is true.

Re:Screenshots

[BiggyP]

that'd be XFCE and Abiword, they don't include Openoffice.org

media player

[Rutulian]

Yes, multimedia is certainly something we'd like the desktop to do well. However, it's not realistic to expect comprehensive multimedia support from a Linux desktop today with open source software. It's a very difficult and costly problem to solve comprehensively. There are some positive signs, such as helix community, but you don't really have a single piece of software that does it all as well as the Windows variants.

Ummm...I'm not sure how to respond to this. How about mplayer? That has to be the best movie player I have ever used. And didn't it receive some sort of award [mplayerhq.hu] recently? Or how about Xine?

Let's see...what else? The GStreamer framework is coming along nicely and will probably mature before the end of the year. There are [xmms.org] several [sourceforge.net] audio [nongnu.org] players [rhythmbox.org] available, some more usable than others, though. There are also more specialized programs like the Bedevilled Audio System. [gtk.org] So I would hardly say linux is deficient in multimedia software.

Re:XFCE vs. KDE

[chthonicdaemon]

FluxBox , based upon BlackBox, is more feature rich but still very fast. No graphical pager though ;-)

Try this Graphical Pager [sourceforge.net].