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Lindows Reviewed
Well, the wait is finally over. Lindows, the system that promises to
bring Windows software to Linux, has finally been released in
sneak-preview form. You can catch a
first
hand review of the system on
NewsForge.
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From the preview, it sounds like Lindows tries to be both Linux and Windows at once, but fails on both counts.
...
The newbie user playing around as root (maybe without a password?) is an obvious problem issue, especially if rootage is required for running Windows software in the first place. I need hardly mention that it's a security issue if all those Outlook viriis get to run as root
Also, as most Windows apps seem to be nonworking at the moment, there better be a LOT of improvement in this field before release, or Lindows will be about as popular as a can of BBQ sauce at the three little pigs' house. It needs to run IE, it needs to run Office, and it would be just great if it'd run Windows games (yeah, right).
Btw, an oversimplified install might be just great for the newbies, but not for anyone else. I think the WinXP Pro install was oversimplified, but at least it let me add non-root user accounts and reconfigure hardware if I liked. Besides, I don't think Lindows is going to be used mainly by newbies - at least initially, it's going to be used by people looking to make the switch between Windows and Linux and wanting something that will let them run both kinds of apps, so they needn't convert 300 word DOCs to RTF or suchlike.
Congrats to the Lindows people for building stuff like autodetecting hardware into the installer - that stuff is always nice. Mandrake already has this and does it somewhat well, but I still remember the pain of having to feed Debian the I/O port adress of my CD-ROM back when last I tried to install it. I never did finish that install, as it was never able to find my bog standard Logitech PS/2 mouse. Oh well.
Conclusion: Get Windows apps to run and Lindows will be interesting! Ship it like it is today, and it will end up in the OS trashcan with BeOS et al.
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
That's just sillyness - both Windows and Unix support threads and pipes - they are totally different programming constructs that have little to do with each other.
COM and .NET
COM is a binary compatability standard, not an API. No amount of work on win32 will help in making COM run. .NET is based heavily on COM (among other things) and is also not supported by win32.
That's so wrong I don't know where to start. COM is a marshaling and interface standard. .NET is a lot of things - including a runtime, API, platform, etc.... It interoperates with COM but is certainly NOT COM-based - MS is essentially abandoning COM for cross-language integration and moving to the CLR instead.
Alas, I dont see COM being successfully implemented by the WINE crew, simply because it is too dificult to do without help from MS. I won't argue that COM is difficult to work with (it's really a bitch), but it's not because it's platform-specific - it was designed to be cross-platform, and implementations of it are available on other platforms - including Linux.