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Lycoris Desktop/LX Review
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."
Its only a repackaged Caldera with a 'xp-like' theme for kde.. with a much reduced package set.
I personally dont see the point.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'm not sure if I read it correctly, but did it read that the basic LX install did NOT include the source code? So are they shipping a version that violates the GPL? I did see that the upgraded more expensive version includes 3 additional CD's, with one of them being marked as the source code disk. Could someone clear this up for me?
Personally, this is the most uninformed and uneducated review of a linux distribution I have ever read.
However, I hope that future versions of Lycoris will use a file automatically for their swap space instead of a real partition - in addition to the / partition. This will greatly simplify the installation process for many users and won't fragment their hard drives.
What is that supposed to mean?
Am I out of the loop or does linux support swap files (as opposed to partitions) now?
How much 'simpler' would it really make it anyway. It doensn't fragment the disk, put the swap at the end and be done with it.
It get's better:
It took 2 minutes to mount two FAT32 partitions (9 and 18 GB respectively), while the rest of the OS loading did not take more than 40 seconds. A shame really - I hope this (inconvenience mostly) will be fixed or altered to a faster algorithm.
I don't know what's wrong with the mounting issue, but what kind of faster algorithm is he talking about here?
</rant>
Pointer
[%- PROCESS life -%]
I don't know why they'd include WINE in a distro, but i can see why WINE is a nice piece of software. I agree there are many native linux apps that you get free, but for that _one_ single stupid exe that you don't, that's when you can use WINE. jezzball.exe or something, i dunno. I personally don't like bloated distros, but i can see how winders people might like the convienence when something is included.
"i can never say no to anyone but you"
I don't know what's wrong with the mounting issue, but what kind of faster algorithm is he talking about here?
:) But then again, I only reboot when upgrading kernels so...
:)
He is a she, and like all (ex-)BeOS users, Eugenia is obsessed with bootup speed, because BeOS booted in about 12 seconds on most machines (it actually booted in 8 seconds on my BeBox during the DR days). A small amount of tweaking got me a 15 second bootup time in Linux (from the GRUB prompt to my X session manager, xdm), and that includes SCSI initialization. The main rule is of course is to avoid anything that starts with a K!
However, in all my Linux years I have never ever waited *2 minutes* for a partition to mount. So either Eugenia's box is terribly slow, or something is very wrong with that Linux distro, or she's lying
-adnans
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
>However, in all my Linux years I have never ever
:)
:)
>waited *2 minutes* for a partition to mount. So
>either Eugenia's box is terribly slow,
Dual PIII 450 Mhz, 512 MB of RAM. Lycoris is installed on a *fast* SCSI drive, while both the FAT32 partitions are on an also modern IDE drive.
> or something is very wrong with that Linux distro,
I read somewhere that their FAT32 code is still alpha. I am sure there is A LOT of room for improvement.
> or she's lying
You are very welcome to come and see it yourself if you are living in the Bay Area. You are warmly invited to our house and experience it yourself.
I briefly had this distro installed on one of my computers, that the family uses, and had it set up to look as much like Windows as possible. I had Office running through Wine (it just worked *shrug*), and I wanted to see if it would trick the family. Long story short, the major difference they noticed was the fact that the interface was incredibly slow. Click on the "Go" button, and you wait two or three seconds to bring it up, even on a 1.7GHz P4.
Windows flies, KDE drags. Linux won't win on the desktop until the interface can actually compete with Windows, for every user.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
It's not so much whether beginners find it initially easier to use, but that once the users learn the basics of how to use the overall system interface, how much can they apply those basics to quickly learning the interface of a new application.
That being said, there's a lot of bad decisions that one can make in interface design that are just plain stupid from a cognitive psychology standpoint and shouldn't be done in any interface on any platform in any circumstance. And microsoft is a frequent practitioner of this stupidity. Windows' Multi-row tabs are a perfect example, because they do not conform to the user expectation about how folder tabs are laid out: in a file cabinet, you do not have one folder tab above another and the visual search you do for a desired tab strictly on a horizontal plane. The even more confusing part about the multi-row tabs were that the widgets (i.e. the tabs) actually switch locations on screen, where the bottom tabs come to the top and vice-versa. Having widgets radically change their location on screen is a big no-no. In all fairness, Microsoft has recently been getting rid of the multi-row tabs, but why did it take them so long?
For years, usability experts have criticized Microsoft's UI shennanigans like multi-row tabs and Window-in-Window MDI, and Microsoft often does not make needed changes until 3-4 years later, if at all. Even if Microsoft gets rid of the bad design, 3rd party Windows application are by no means required to do this, and they often take even longer to purge their applications of Microsoft's bad UI than Microsoft.
There really is a double standard of design in the linux development community. If someone who knows nothing about OS design were to copy into the linux kernel a really stupid microsoft design that seriously compromised security and stability, something that OS development gurus and security experts have said for years should never be done, and do it all in the name of providing windows users with the same Blue Screens of Death and intrusions they're used to, they'd get burned at the stake with all the flames they'd get. If someone in the linux development community who knows almost nothing about interface design (which is really most of the linux development community) copies a microsoft design that seriously compromises usability and has been criticized for years by experts in the UI design field, they'd get a hearty pat by many in the linux community for "easing the migration for windows users".
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!