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Lycoris Desktop/LX update 2 Released
David writes "Redmond Linux Corp has just released Lycoris Desktop/LX Update 2 (build 46 final). Relatively user-friendly, loads of goodies and nice features. Should give Lindows a run for its money. Who says Linux is dead on the desktop? ;-)"
I went with an earlier version of Lycoris as my first distro, and dropped it after about three days. One of my favorite things about other popular distros is the shear amount of apps you have to choose from. The Lycoris install, while allowing you to play Solitare while it chugs away (very cool), leaves you with ONE word processor, ONE web browser, etc. While this may be nice for newer users, it just doesn't quite appeal to me...
So how come everything they do is worthy of being copied
I don't think the interface to the Windows OS was ever something people complained about (minus that damned Paper Clip..). The more ghastly problems are not in the UI, but the underside that the user doesn't see (VM subsystem, TCP stack, etc), and the coding methodology used to develop it. So not 'everything' is worth being copied...however a GUI that people are familiar with might not need too much improvement, and may make people more willing to try something new, and more comfortable in general.
--Kylus
Idiot-proof something, and Life will build a better Idiot.
Unfortunately to get Linux on the desks of many businesses two things have to happen (actually 2 or 1 thing). First, it must be an identical experience to Windows. I don't understand that as much of Linux is from the user standpoint (ie tech support handles installs etc...)Businesses do not want to interrupt a known good proccess without an obvious ROI. Second, Microsoft itself must provide motivation (they are working on it with their licensing scheme).
Alternatively, if a big group of corps start using it other people will too.
the everyday win/mac users don't really know what options are available. the big things keeping linux off the desktop are:
drivers: people are using new hardware all the time and have a perceived image that linux doesn't have drivers for their hardware (wireless network, usb mouse, video, sound, etc).
installation: the install programs NEED to be able to identify hardware on a users system and configure drivers w/o user intervention. being asked what type of network card i have on my box isn't something i should know much about, let alone what integrated sound chip i have, or what kind of mouse i have. to sum it up, linux will find more spaces on the desktop when the installers and drivers are as upto date as possible.
I'd say that the most intelligent people trying to get away from Windows aren't doing it to get away from the kludge-y look-and-feel. I don't run Windows because I don't agree with their business tactics and their "get it out the door before we're sure it works" development model, not because I abhor the start menu. If emulating the look and feel of Windows over a free and open operating system draws more home users, then more power too them. Linux users have always had a love/hate relationship with it becoming a prominent desktop OS, and that's sad. If the community wants Linux to be a desktop force, then we're going to have to unify on how that is possible. To be possible, yes, we're going to have to swallow a little pride and make it more user friendly.
--- What
I disagree... my wife was in here at the weekend and she saw that I was in Mozilla on a site categorizing the food by country (http://www.recipesource.com/), took over the keyboard, found some Thai recipes she had been looking for and printed them off.
I pointed out to her that she had been using Linux (the rest of the machines in the house are currently 98 or XP), and she agreed that it had been no effort.
So this 'Linux on the Desktop' thing is less about Linux and more about having screen furniture, File menus, browsers, printing, etc, working in a consistent and normal way. I am using KDE3 and it really isn't far away from where it needs to be.
Sure there are games and specific apps that won't come over from Windows despite Wine and Crossover Office (which fixed the problems with Quickbooks 6 in wine for printing), but I was very pleasantly surprised with how far everything had come since I last looked a year or so ago.
I remember one of the big things they claimed the first time around was that the network config would easily let you share your internet connection through the Lycoris box. But it turned out not to be the case, you had to go manually edit some files. (fortunately they had a pointer to a decent howto, but not the same as click-and-share).
So, does it work "correctly" now?
And my Karma Whoring for the day:
it's probably pronounced "Licorice". Some people like Licorice, other's don't.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
As I have said before, my wife and I have moved to using SuSE 8.0 exclusively in the house, we have NO windows products. My wife is visually impaired so this is not a move we would make lightly. We use KDE 3.01, Mozilla and KMail amongst others. For us it is great. My wife particularly likes the zooming function with Mozilla.
Linux may not be fully alive on the desktop, to get there it requires people to stop talking about it, drop Windows and get on with it. As far as games go, I have a copy of dungeonkeeper that I would love to get running, I will just have to be patient!
As far as "Windows clone" distros go, we are not interested. This would be a move back to the propriatory software that we are deliberately moving away from.
I can't see this stuff appealing to corporates either. Will linux run my windows apps? The answer should remain "No", far better than "Maybe". In terms of support "Maybe" is a real non-starter.
at a customer's worksite. Yesterday I took a win2k workstation, blew off the OS and installed SuSE 8.0. Then I downloaded the Citrix client for Linux and installed that and configured it for the user. Today we'll take the box to the client and put it to work.
The biggest problem we've encountered with Linux on the desktop isn't using Linux (I've used it on my desktop for years) but interfacing it with the applications that have been sold to businesses that only work with MS operating systems. This particular customer uses its main application over a Citrix server and we convinced them to give Linux a try. After all, there isn't much difference between using Citrix on a Win2k box than on a Linux box... but the websurfing will be done with Linux (Galeon)... and email with Evolution.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
"So this 'Linux on the Desktop' thing is less about Linux and more about having screen furniture. File menus, browsers, printing, etc, working in a consistent and normal way."
/etc ghetto, and applications are broken up by content (binaries go here, man pages go there, configuration goes elsewhere), instead of staying atomic wholes. This is entirely different from how a GUI presents an application, as a whole, with help and configuration integrated. Mac OS X seems to have overcome this hurdle with a workaround called "bundles". The user experience is not provided solely by "screen furniture". This is an elitist idea. The OS has to have the desktop user in the picture from the start. Unfortunately since it is "good enough" for most Linux/Unix users, who have themselves already learned to work at the command line, and have spent a lot of time (often painful)accustoming themselves to Unix, there is little impetus to "fix" anything at the OS level. I certainly do not begrudge the KDE or Gnome projects, I think they are valiant. But grafting wings to a tank does not make it a fighter jet. I never understood why the open source crowd decided to hop on the Unix horse. Proprietary Unix is no better than proprietary Windows, or proprietary Mac OS. So why do we persist in insisting that Unix should be the basis for a desktop OS? Fortunately there are projects like Atheos, Open BeOS, Cosmoe, etc., which are trying to tackle these problems. Microsoft will keep laughing to the bank if we continue forcing Unix on users without trying to meet them half way (well, ok KDE/Gnome is probably half way, but if we really want to have an open source OS on the desktop, we will certainly have to go way further than that to displace Windows). That's the end of my rant, flame on. And send some flamage to that know-nothing Miguel de Icaza for writing "Let's Make Unix Not Suck" while you're at it.
For a coherent GUI to work in a "consistent and normal way" it is imperative that the operating system also work in a consistent normal way which hopefully reduces the impedence mismatch between the GUI and actual operating system abstractions. AFAICT, Linux, and Unix in general, is horribly horribly inadequate to match a decent GUI. Linux/Unix has no component model and everything feels like a one off - APIs are flat, configuration files get dumped into the
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