Thoughts on Ximian Desktop 2

I remember running redhat 6.2 and needing to install Helix-gnome to get a gnome-1.2 release. The deliberatly different packaging of such crucial components as mozilla drove me to distraction and eventually I gave up and when redhat 7.0 was released I didn’t install ximian-gnome anything on it. I did however cave in and install red-carpet and evolution.

Well, I’ve decided to give Ximian Desktop 2 for RedHat 9 a try. I’m pretty impressed with the installer, there were no annoying circular dependencies, or random uninstallations. They’ve bundled everything I feel I need in a desktop, i.e a Mail Client and a Web Browser.

Everything looks beautiful, and galeon as the web browser means that everything fits nicely. However, evolution doesn’t have Bayesian spam filtering, so I’ll have to install spamassassin again. It might just be me but the content based approach was just wrong far too many times, I think if I stick it out a little it might get better.