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Seattle Times Reviews Desktop Linux Distros
prostoalex writes "Seattle Times section on Personal Technology compares Xandros and Lindows as two alternatives to Windows for desktop computing. Their verdict: installation - excellent; OpenOffice - good enough; digital cameras, printers and other peripherals - excellent; CD burning - no problems; video playback - could be better (with more progress bars and support for Apple's formats); digital camcorders - poor; burning audio CDs - poor; Net access and Web browsing - no problems."
I think saying 'burning audio CDs - poor' misstates the verdict in the article, by the way. He had trouble finding how to copy .cda files directly, though burning from mp3s was fine. Odd, since you can just grab them right out of Konqueror IIRC, but still a long way from 'poor'.
I had the chance to play with a Lindows machine in the last month, and it left me impressed with the simplicity, but concerned about the mentality it's going to help keep breeding.
While not all windows users are the "luser" type, there's a massive amount of Joe Average users who can't troubleshoot their way out of a paper bag. Linux has continued to grow for more than a decade now, and has been doing well without these windows style distributions, and leaving behind a group of users with a wealth of knowledge that leaves any Joe Average in the dust.
What I'm concerned about is... with an OS like Windows, why would anyone need to learn to troubleshoot? They can jump from one candy handholding OS to another without going through any kind of knowledge gathering to do so. It's keeping up a culture of ignorance among computer users. That's a legacy I think will come back and bite us on the butt.
It can't really be argued that most of the gadgets such as palm's, digital cameras, iPods etc. work easily with linux. Most of them can be made to work with fiddling and some software that someone has hacked together, but at the end of the day the hardware vendors have more resources to throw at the software, and inevitably produce better software that works well with their product. Until they start producing software for linux, its simply too difficult for the average computer user to get things working on a linux desktop. Take my iPod for instance, with windows I just put the CD in, click install and its done - with a GUI that is _far_ better than gtkpod's (although gtkpod is great), whereas with linux you have to install different things, compile them in some cases, and its just much harder work.
THomas
I guess due to licencing/patent issues that these are not installed by default in the distros? Average user probably does not ./configure && make && make install
In using linux I've noticed that we have real problems with installing and uninstalling software (just image uninstalling mozilla on many platforms). This would have to be sorted before Linux could be used by the general public.
I hostly feel how ever that once this and other areas such as connecting devices have been delt with Microsoft have a big problem on there hands. Some projects that could sort the
installation/uninstalltion problem include autopackage zero-install and A-A-P
An "average joe" (or a reporter masquerading as one) had a problem. Therefore it's a problem.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
Why were only Xandros and Lindows reviewed? While I don't have a problem with Lindows, unlike most linux users. I think open source linux has better distros available then those two.
;)
My problem with the article is the possibility that a linux newbie might buy Lindows without trying Fedora, SuSE or SlackWare. What's the point of buying a Windows clone just so you can say you switched to Linux?
Although if Lindows were to change its name to something more respectable I might consider trying it out.
"Fortunately", the mis-conception of games being something only for kids is just that: a mis-conception. On the bright side, it helps keep politicians in the business of screaming about how _M_ rated games are some conspiracy to turn 12 year olds into serial killers, because surely noone in the _M_ age bracket would buy a game. But that's the only "bright" side there is to that mis-conception. Actual studies show that the average age for gamers is more like in the mid-to-late twenties nowadays. Like any bell curve, that extends both ways a lot. There are 50+ years old people in there too. (E.g., my father plays Counter Strike.) And that's not even taking into account the millions who play Solitaire or Minesweeper some online web-based Backgammon game or such. Those usually won't say they're hardcore gamers, but guess what? They're still playing a game.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I'm not too sure why they selected Xandros or Lindows over Mandrake for such a review.
Unlike either of the two, Mandrake is composed of 100% FLOSS, is freely available, and it simply "kicks ass".
In fact, I'm some what insulted they chose lindows at all. Lindows is a rather craptacular distro, with super annoying marketing practises, and a high yearly fee for people to get additional software.
Sunny Dubey
What I'd really like to see was a free linux distro among the tested versions. I have no beef with commercial linux distributions, but I'll never use one myself. It would be much easier for me to spread the word of the wonders of linux, if there was a free linux that would score as high as these two apparently does.
What I see here is two windows clones based on linux. If linux is so much better than windows, why try so hard to behave like windows?
So, what I'd really like to see is a Linux version that's easy to install, works out of the box, and stands on its own two legs. To the best of my knowledge, there's no such distro yet. Or what? I'd love it for someone to tell me that I'm wrong and point me in the right direction
Underholdning.info
The whole point of this article is to show that these linux distributions are fully capable of carrying out every day end-user tasks, and that there currently isn't a problem with worms, viruses, or spyware on Linux. So it most definitely is a compelling reason to give Linux a try, your embracing of a hellish computer experience of patching and babying your computer as opposed to doing real work notwithstanding.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
I think that the time for linking to every article that talks about Linux or compares it with Windows has passed. Linux is becoming mainstream. The time has come to focus about other aspects of it on slashdot.
Finding a white box with no Windows shouldn't be a problem. If you're buying Dell or Gateway it's another story.
Money for nothing, pix for free
Good thing you never have to patch linux to keep it secure and up to date, right? I don't get why all the linux people are always acting like you just install it and its set for the rest of its lifecycle. While it may be inherantly more secure, and un-patched box is still an un-patched box; linux's saving grace is that its average user is typically more savvy than your average windows user is.
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
Isn't all this pulse checking getting boring already?
Hi we're a bunch of nerdy Linux geeks and Linux is rilly rilly kewl and 1337 to install (which I guess as an end consumer you're going to do a LOT of as a matter of course in your normal purchase cycle?)
So trust us, here's a bunch of distros that are all only about 40% harder to install and run than Windows and when you're done they will run more or less 80% of what you originally intended Windows to run more or less 90% as well.
Gamer vastly over estimates importance of gaming in home / office desktop PC market. Film at 11.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Worms and viruses and popups etc are THE main ways that windows manages to eat away at productivity.
The authors suggestion that worms, viruses and popups are totally a windows thing, and that they can very effectively be remedied by upgrading to a more thoughtfully designed OS such as linux is in no way false, and definatly suggest that a well written article follows.
Being able to avoid these annoyances is definatly a MAJOR reason, (but not the only reason) to abandon windows and switch to a more serious, productive work environment such as linux.
Remaining with windows, and "using better software", "patching your system" and having "better security practices" does make partial sense to me, but if you can recognize some benefit in abandoning IE and Outlook in favor of Mozilla or something (i.e. getting it half right), then whats preventing you from recognizing that this is the same idea behind abandoning windows in favor of linux?
Apart from you being a windows fanboy that is.
Do you realize that its the open source development model behind free software such as Mozilla, that makes it so solid and reliable dont you? You do realise that its the peer review process thats lacking in Outlook, IE, and windows itself thats to blame for the shoddy design and poor security of these programs?
Save yourself hassles now, ditch windows, it really is a crap OS.
I don't know, the only thing I know about Windows Media Player is that it usually attempts to download the necessary codec, and sometimes it even succeeds and gets the file playing.
But for QuickTime on Windows, AFAIK the Apple software is really needed, yes. So actually this is not just a Linux problem. The only problem is that you can download Windows QuickTime straight from the Apple website, while they still probably don't distribute Linux MPlayer modules on their site.
It would be nice to put a little downloader-and-installer for these modules in the fool-proof distributions though.
LOL, you're telling some newbie "average joe" to open up and command prompt and start typing in all this gobbley-stuff???
/usr/bin/mp3burn line 414.
user@linows:~$ mp3burn -o 'dev=x,x,x speed=XX' *mp3
bash: mp3burn: command not found
"Hmmmm..." User somehow manages to find and install this app.
user@linows:~$ mp3burn -o 'dev=x,x,x speed=XX' *mp3
*mp3 does not exist or invalid audio file at
"Hmmmm..." User is sorta smart so they figure out they need to be in their mp3 directory. "How do I change directories???" Lets say they figure it out.
user@linows:~$ mp3burn -o 'dev=x,x,x speed=XX' *mp3
cdrecord: Bad Option: speed=XX.
"Uh?? WTF???"
Then they'll get to the dev=x,x,x crap. Hell, I know what I'm doing and I rarely remember the fricking raw scsi device number. Screw that...
Shame...
Ya see, this is the problem. No "normal" user is going to want to use command-line tools like this to burn CDs.
They want to pick tracks from a graphical file manager, hit "burn", and have a fnished CD 10 minutes later.
And why shouldn't they? Though i'm sure someone will try to prove me wrong within minutes of posting this, there's really no reason to have a friendlier interface than the command line for things like this, assuming it's done fairly cleanly. Eschewing graphics in lieu of (percieved) performance increases is all well and good, but not if it locks out potential users.
How well did they rate "Using non-standard hardware." Including printers, laptops, and virtually unknown brands of cdroms, ethernet devices, win modems (Ok maybe this one doesn't matter much anymore), windows keyboards (how much function can you get out of those functions), etc.
I'd like to know how well speed step performs in linux. Can a laptop hibernate if it needs to? On my i8k in Mandrake it allows either battery or external power. If I plug in / detach the cord, the computer freezes (although the battery does kick in because whatever was on screen stays on screen). I can only assume everything worked by the high ratings given. Also I can assume from the ratings that the system instantly recognizes when any new USB/Firewire/PCMCIA device is hotswapped, and in most cases can identify it. Right? I mean, I did see the word "excellent" so I think it should at least be equal with Windows.
You know, this is a common argument. However, one from someone who obviously doesn't have the facts straight.
1. How compatible is it with games? Many games are made for WindowsXP. You expect OS developers to make them compatible? Why not ask the companies that make these games why they don't make a Linux version. Many companies do make Linux versions of games without a problem. It shouldn't be our job to make software built for one OS for another OS.
2. When will Microsoft make Ximian Evolution compatible with Windows? Oh, they won't? And why not? Because Evolution is not developed by them, and they don't care to port it.
3. Running Linux doesn't mean you stop playing games. I play lots of games: Unreal Tournament, Neverwinter Nights, Enemy Territory. But I prefer playing games on my PS2, as I have a bigger monitor, and a couch to sit on.
So continue using Windows, and continue making excuses why you don't want to switch. If you don't want to switch, by all means, don't. But don't pretend that it has something to do with your "games" that you must have, and place blame on those that shouldn't be responsible. Rather than demanding game companies be compatible with Linux, continue to support the lack of choices.
AC Morons...piss me off.
Jason Lotito
So what are any of the "average users" who use the same version of K3B supposed to do? Be told they can't burn MP3s? That's completely ridiculous! I'm not an "average computer user" in the least, but why the hell should I be forced to figure out new commands and their options everytime I want to do something? Shouldn't an audio CD burning program, you know, just work? I have more important things to do in my life then read MAN pages or online documentation - I want it to burn the bloody CD so I can get on with whatever I'd prefer to be doing.
Sorry for the rant, but sometimes I can't stand the arrogance. Of course, now someone is probably thinking to themselves, "Why don't you program something?" or "Why don't you work or so-and-so open source project?" Which is, again, a major problem with the Linux community (at least, some people within it). I don't, because that's not what I'd like to be doing for hours and hours on end?
Which is, again, a major problem with the Linux community (at least, some people within it). I don't, because that's not what I'd like to be doing for hours and hours on end?
Soooo... let me get this straight. YOU think it's a problem because OTHER PEOPLE don't want to do the job YOU just said YOU don't want to do but YOU'RE currently griping about?
Quit your bitching. If you actually thought it was a big enough problem to care about, you WOULD go program something. Shit. You could even *gasp* SELL IT AND MAKE SOME MONEY.
If you don't want to participate in OSS short of using other people's hard work for free, fine. Stop whining about the shortcomings unless you plan on contributing something though. It would be one thing if you were asking someone nicely to do it, but you're not. You're being a whiny bitch and complaining because nobody ELSE programmed something YOU think would be nice to have.
Boo hoo. Cry me a river there big fella. I'm really gonna concern myself because you're complaining that nobody else spent their free time making something for free that other people might think would be "nice" to have.
And before you give me shit about "pushing it to the masses": FOSS is not a commercial venture. The point is to make a useful, open system, not please ever computer-illiterate wonk out there that figured out how to press the power button. You want to get pissy about the CD-burning capbilities in Lindows? Go bitch at Lindows since they're the ones selling the system as "user-friendly", don't direct your ire at the FOSS crowd that has better things to do than worry about ESR's poor "Aunt Tillie" who can't get her goddamn printer to work on a system that wasn't built for her anyway.
Was that "arrogant" enough for you?
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
takes about a day
Here's my breakdown for an average win2k machine. I'm sure some uber nerds could do this blindfolded and quicker, but this is just for comparrison.
-Win2k vanilla install with basic configurations, 45 minutes (w/reboots).
-Windows Update Service Packs/patches = 1 hour (cable modem).
-Average office software (MS OFfice, Firefox, Thunderbird, ZoneAlarm, Symantic Anti-Virus) = 1 hour.
Heck, you could include the time it takes me to actually build the computer (1.5 hours) and it would not be even close to a day.
Note: These timeframes are for a home office machine.
Sig it.
This is probably the most asinine comment about software development I have seen in a long time. Here's the way free software works. You purposely leave out features? Someone comes along and fixes that for you. If you tell them "Hey guys, leave this out so teh users will get l33t and l34rn to h4x0r L0L!" they will ignore you and add them anyway. Why? Because people won't learn the CLI if they don't want to. Computers are tools to be used as we see fit, not the other way around. If a user wants to never touch the CLI it's not your job to try to force them to do otherwise. In fact, if you think it's your job someone will come along and remind you that it's not. That's be beauty of free software, it's a free market.
So by all means, leave out features to get users to use the l33t CLI. It'll just mean I'll never have to worry about using your software.