Ximian Desktop 2

First impressions were of the clean interface it provided. In fact the fonts seemed even better. And the professional version for USD $99 includes Windows(Tm) fonts from AFGA so everything looks it's best.

If you go with having Ximian change everything then you'll have new menubars which can easily be reconfigured back to the way you had them. This is the suggested route to prevent any weird setups you had before from conflicting with XD2 later. My printer settings were copied over but sadly I posess a Lexmark Z12 printer which I've never really got working under Redhat yet.

My menus were even better organized and I appreciate the work that was done here to get things arranged in a more logical manner. In fact XD2 had actually picked up things KDE did not when I installed them such as Kopete and Mozilla and even ones that were installed with the OS such as Quanta but KDE never showed it.

Redcarpet really looks cool and the one thing I missed from Mandrake was it's clean way to manage rpm's and RedCarpet fills that void completely. It's much faster than the stock Redhat RPM manager and unlike it's cryptic counterpart it's a cinch to manage what you install. Though you may have to wait a week for XD2 (I havent verified this) you'll have near instant access to the updates when they're available.

If you buy the Pro version you get many things installed by default such as Adobe Acrobat reader, Macromedia Flash, Java Runtime, and much more along with a year of updates and support. Here's a good op for someone to bundle say Redhat or Mandrake into a Home Edition which will provide a clean desktop for the user and they dont have to install all the extra programs to get on the web and surf.

So all in all Ximian seems to stand as the leader of the Desktop for the corporate enviroment though for the 99 dollars it really stands as very affordable for the home user also. I'll definately support them with my money and you can download and install it free over the internet if you have wget installed open a terminal su to root and type in

... wget -q -O - http://go.ximian.com |sh

without the periods of course :) and their sleek installer will download and launch. It takes care of everything if you're using a Redhat or Mandrake distro that's fairly recent.

This is definately a pick for me, try it just pray it does not spoil you!