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Lycoris Desktop/LX Review

Posted by timothy on from the we-seek-the-grail dept.

JigSaw writes: "Lycoris Desktop/LX (formerly known as 'Redmond Linux') is viewed by many as the new big distribution in the "Linux on the Desktop" arena. OSNews features an extensive review of the latest Lycoris and outlines the good and the bad things of the distro. In short, Lycoris seems to suffer from the general GNU/Linux situation to not be ready to power a true desktop-oriented, easy to use distribution yet."

3 of 237 comments (clear)

  1. Why? by PopeAlien · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A good point of the distro is the inclusion of a WINE release. While I could only run correctly simple applications like notepad.exe and the Windows calculator, it is a nice addition. All the .exe programs are marked with the WINE icon and if you doubleclick them, WINE will try to load them.

    ..Uh, but there are far better native apps available for free.. Why would you ever want to run windows notepad or calculator? I understand the eventual goal of WINE to run all those exe's seamlessly, but why is WINE a nice addition in this distribution if it just runs simple programs that already have better native versions?

    --
    air and light and time and space
  2. Re:Heh, what did you expect? by niftyeric · · Score: 5, Insightful

    While I agree, I wish they would quit trying to "mimic" Windows. Linux != Windows. Not only do I prefer a GUI different than Win9x+, it might confuse new users as well, "This looks like Windows, can I run $favorite_application?"

    But I guess it does make the transition from Windows to Linux a lot easier. :P

    --
    proton != antielectron
  3. The Me Fallacy by fm6 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    but there are far better native apps available for free.
    You've heard of Legacy apps? Everybody has software that they just can't abandon. It's one thing for a hacker to hand-convert all his documents to KWord. It's quite another thing for a large company to abandon or convert hundreds of thousands of Word docs and Excel spreadsheets. Such a user will not even consider a solution that does not fully support the legacy data. In theory, you can filter all the data over to a new format, but I've never seen that done in any big way in the real world.

    I think both you and the reviewer are applying a fallacy I often see in online reviews and evaluations -- especially on Slashdot. I call it the Me Fallacy. This fallacy is the assumption that your own needs are the needs of the product's target audience. So you applaud and criticize when the product succeeds and fails to meet your needs -- even if that's not what the product is trying to do.

    I see this in the review (which does make some good points) when it criticizes Lycoris for not providing development apps. This is an end user distro, for Pet's sake! Of course, a developer might want it anyway (I'm going to try it in the hope that it will integrate with my company's IPX network better than the others), but such a user is perfectly capable of downloading apps -- and is more interested in how well the distro accomodates third-party packages than what specific packages the distro provides.