“If you’ve used GNOME, you know that it has always had a big
cool factor. But more likely than not, you’ve experienced problems
with stability, installation, and keeping synchronized with
changing dependencies and releases. That’s been my experience at
least.”
“If it’s been yours as well, I have good news. The cool factor
is still there in GNOME 1.2, and the stability of GNOME and GNOME
apps is much better than it was that time last year. GNOME 1.2
comes with dozens of out-of-the-box apps, some of which are the
best of breed for Linux and one of which is the best I’ve seen
anywhere….”
“The Helix GNOME Desktop, if you don’t know, is the primary
offering of Helix Code (see Resources for a link), a company formed
last year by GNOME architect Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman.
Helix Code found financial backing for its enterprise in the form
of seed money from friends and a first round of investment by
venture capital firms.”
“Friedman and de Icaza have set very ambitious goals for Helix
Code. When I spoke to de Icaza by phone last week, he said, “We
are trying to make free software easy to use, easy to install. We
want to reach [those] who have been afraid of Unix in the past, who
have been afraid of Linux.“