Review: Lindows 2.0 Dissected

Bob the Knob writes "Extremetech has done an in-depth review of Lindows. The guy who wrote it didn't think too much of Lindows before looking at it but he seemed to like it after doing a hands-on."

Comments

7 min install

[bjschrock]

I think the most impressive thing I saw in the review is that Lindows installed in about 7 minutes. My old Windows computer used to take about a third of that to boot up...

This is fine for someone with the right hardware..

[intermodal]

but lets see someone pull off a 7 minute install and get a fully working hardware set on a Compaq or god forbid a Gateway...who knows what crap hardware much of Lindows' potential market has.

Good Review, Seemingly Good Product

[perrin5]

Although they appear to be saying that the whole "runs windows apps" was a load of crap. Perhaps there's a list somewhere of what windows apps it runs, if any?

I think the click-and-run feature is a bigger deal than these guys seem to think. They're targeting a market of people who are used to Windows, and many end users don't even understand "shortcuts" let alone icons. Click and Run may sell more copies for Lindows than any other service/review.

Also, running as root may not be ideal for Linux people, but end-users would just get irritated if they had to enter the root password everytime they wanted to change the system configuration or mount the cd-rom...

I agree on the firewall, tho. In the interests of protecting everyone, there should be some sort of default "safe" firewall that people can disable...

just my $.02 (a review of a review, what comes next?)

Spotty Perfermance

[gurnb]

Although the Click-N-Run Warehouse for Lindows is a great idea in theory, real-world users will run smack into the many ragged edges of open-source software. None of the Click-N-Run applications have been developed by Lindows.com, the creator of the Lindows operating system; the company is merely gathering open-source software from elsewhere on the Web and putting it one place for easy access by LindowsOS users.
I downloaded several Click-N-Run applications, using my cable modem connected to the Microtel PC through my home network. The downloads were fast and the installation always unfolded smoothly.

But the applications themselves were a decidedly mixed bag.

I first tried out GIMP, a photo-editing program that strives to match the popular Adobe Photoshop. GIMP did indeed have many Photoshop features, and even copied the look of many Photoshop icons, but the onscreen instruction manual was spotty. Instead of feature descriptions, many pages only said: "Our apologies. Sorry, but the help page for this item is not yet written.''

I then installed OpenOffice, the Linux response to Microsoft Office. Again, the look and feel of OpenOffice closely resembled its better known cousin, and the program did succeed in opening Microsoft Word and PowerPoint documents. But OpenOffice didn't include the same fonts as my documents, forcing the program to select alternate fonts that messed up the spacing between words. When I fixed the spacing and re-opened the documents in Word and PowerPoint, the spacing was now messed up by the return to the original font.

I also tried instant messaging. The first program listed in the instant messaging category of the Click-N-Run Warehouse was Kinkatta Instant Messenger, which claimed compatibility with the very popular America Online Instant Messenger, also known as AIM. But Kinkatta didn't work with my AIM account and I only discovered why in exploring Kinkatta's Web site: a technical change by AOL in February is blocking Kinkatta from communicating with AIM.

So I had to download the second instant messaging program on the Click-N-Run list, called GAIM, to make the AIM connection.

It is now my desktop of choice

[codepunk]

I have been using linux for over 5 years and I admin linux clusters for a living but on my desktop I now use only lindows 2.0 . I do tweek mine to run as a user vs root and I remove the click and run garbage. What is left is a very souped up and productive debian environment. If you need software you will be pleased to find that apt-get is available for your use. Do yourselves a favor and test drive it I think you will come to love it.

Re:Lindows Bashing

[An Onerous Coward]

Further investigation dredged up this:

Does Lindows Comply With Open Source Agreements? and The Lindows License Agreement. The latter points out that the GPL allows the charging of a fee for the transfer of source code, but omits the fact that such a fee must cover only the actual cost of distributing said source code.

I still don't know what to make of it. I looked for info on the "evaluation version" I heard rumored, but all I can find are mentions of a general release sometime down the road.