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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."
. 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
Just making another distro isn't enough to be "Linux's answer to the desktop." It'll require more products, more "wizbangs", easier installation, and general "user friendliness" on all aspects. I'd concentrate on more products, ensuring you can go seamlessly between Windows and Linux flawlessly (Word docs as a minor example), before making a distro to be the "answer."
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
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
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 -%]
that every "easy to use" Linux distro is actually only an easy install for the user?
Real work needs to be done in helping the user in case an application fails.
Also, every one of the distros seems to be very superficial; they simply include some nice skins and applications that resemble those in windows, but many of these applications are hardly as functional as their "hard to use" counterparts.
Shouldnt these companies put more of their money behind making powerful products easier to use?
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?
They don't have to ship the sources with the binaries; they're only violating the GPL if they refuse to provide the source code to a customer that requests it. They can even charge a fee for providing the source, and still not be in violation of the GPL. You can read the GPL here".
Check it out.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
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.
Anybody attempting to design a truly user-friendly Linux distro needs to start by making IceWM the default window manager. IceWM gives the average users What They Want: a simple clean desktop. The taskbar isn't filled with junk (well, maybe a little, but the distro should default it out), just a set of simple buttons. Yes, it looks a lot like Windows, but that's not necessarily bad. What's important is that it's a clean interface that users can understand right away. The desktop war is won or lost in the first minute that the user looks at the screen and decides if s/he understands what's going on.
Miko O'Sullivan
I could be completely off my rocker here but wasn't it ALWAYS possible to use swap files instead of partitions?
... /swap
/etc/fstab like:
/swap
Now I don't necessarily mean swap files directly supported by the kernel, but if you _really_ wanted to use a swap file instead couldn't you create a file, format it as a linux swap and then mount it as a loopback device?
Something like:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/swap
# mkswap
Then put an entry in
/swapfile swap swap defaults,loop 0 0
And finally:
# swapon
I just tried this on slackware 8.0 with kernel 2.4.18 and it works. I don't know if this is a "new feature" or anything but I'm pretty sure that as long as your kernel supports loopback devices then this would work.
Maybe someone with better kernel knowledge could provide some better insight.
P.S I still don't see why you would want to do this. Espcially considering that in any good install program geared towards end-users they would not have to worry about partitioning (and even if they did it seems to me like paritioning would still be easier than doing what I described above). At least I know that I would still prefer a swap partition as opposed to a file anyway...
--
Garett
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!