Slashdot Mirror
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."
isn't xandros capable of integration into the existing windows directory and can use it to authentificate the users ? That would be a great thing to be able the authentificate users with their windows passwords (without using pam_smb)
Spelling mistakes: My is english spoken not tongue of mother.
Whenever I burn audio CDs and CPU load or harddrive load jumps at least a bit up, the audio track gets broken, stuttering, breaks, noises...? It's not like buffer underrun, a small peak like at opening Xterm, less than 1/4s, is enough to cause problems!
Will CloneCD employ Realtime Linux extensions to prevent that? I'd like to see it!
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
I like the table at the bottom of the article best.
Installation - last year @ 30 minutes versus today @ 5 minutes. I think it was closer to five minutes last year that that, but it is getting harder to remember the days of 45 minute installs. Look at how far we've come!
You are receiving this message because your browser supports Slashdot Sigs and you have Slashdot Sigs enabled.
That summary could be applied to just about any Linux distribution, not just Xandros and Lindows.
Interesting how in the "normal office" uses (i.e. OpenOffice, Net access and Web browsing) Linux is now seen as at least good enough.
From the article, I suspect the author is comparing installation of Win XP *without other apps* against installing Lindows/Xandros *with multiple bundled apps* - this would mean that Lindows/Xandros installs are actually even better than stated given that nobody installs Win XP without also installing other apps afterwards.
Personally, I've found that installing a "home" Windows PC takes about a day, by the time I install Windows, install service packs, critical patches, MS Office (including finding serial numbers) and sundry apps. With Knoppix or Mepis, it takes me about an hour to get to the same point (i.e install OS to disc, install netselect, find fastest host, apt-get update, apt-get upgrade). Furthermore, installing the Windows PC requires me to actually be sitting in front of the PC doing stuff for a sizeable amount of the time, whereas with the Linux distros I spend very little time actually in front of the PC itself.
Yes, but to make them work, you have to install some additional codec files which can't be distributed freely with the operating system because the license does not allow this.
When I first ever did a Linux install (about six years ago, with very little knowledge of partitions or anything) I went with manual partitioning. It's not hard. And every recent distro that I've used allows you to do advanced, manual partitioning from within the installer (graphical or otherwise) - you just need to choose the right option. Personally, I normally run fdisk or cfdisk to create the partitions and then specify how to mount them in the installer.
By manually partitioning, you can come up with some seriously wierd multi-boot configurations. My most complicated set up was: /hda1 - FAT32 - 8GB - Win98 / shared data
/hda2 - NTFS - 10GB - Win2K
/hda3 - ext2 - 100MB - /boot partion (for linux)
/hda4 - extended partition, containing:
/hda5 - ext2 - 10GB - / partition
/hda6 - ext2 - 2GB - /home partiton
/hda7 - Swap partition - 500MB
/hda8 - BeFS - 2GB - BeOS5 personal edition
(/usr etc stored in / partion)
My point is really that to set up such a structure using fancy tools is rather difficuly - the tools keep trying to get in the way. fdisk is the way to go.
The system above used a number of boot loaders to get it going. The MBR had XOSL with an option for each OS in it, and used keyboard commands within it to control subsequent boot loaders. Win98 and Win2k booted by Win2K boot loader, installed on the Win98 partition. LILO on /hda5 and the Be Boot loader /hda8. I would never let an automatic tool anywhere near it. The only reason I don't still have that configuration is because I tried using Partition Magic on it once (to test it for a friend, I then recommended against it on the grounds that is screwed up my system) and learnt my lesson.
video editing is in a poor place at the moment on linux, so true hero's are those who help the jahshaka project get it's editing/compositing project better.
http://www.jahshaka.com/
windows movie maker 2 is actually pretty good, and we know iMovie is rad - we need to compete
Till the gaming industry supports windows, it seems unlikely to oust Windows from the Desktop computing market. Given that these alternatives offer the same functionality, the support for gaming would definitely be where they loose out. And most people(non-slashdot readers) wouldn't want to take the trouble of installing 2 operating systems.
--
Schrodinger 's Cat : wanted dead and alive
Not everyone has the time it takes to learn about computers, nor do they care to. I know that I, for one, won't take the time to rip apart my VCR or DVD player when it stops working. Instead, I'll just go buy another one. At $300 for a computer with Lindows on it, I'd say that we're rapidly approaching the point of having people buy computers just as they would buy a DVD player or VCR, or toaster, or microwave.
I don't think you're right in your assessment of this coming back to bite us in the butt. Indeed, you're missing one of the points, that those of us with skills will continue to be the handyman of tomorrow. What we need to worry about is when computers get cheap enough to throw away, rather than fix. That's when the handyman/fix-it shop will no longer be viable, and when our jobs will be in danger.
Author Paul Andrews comes to this conclusion:" Lindows has a slicker interface and emulates Windows so well that it repeats several of my pet Windows peeves. Xandros' user-interface has more obvious Linux legacy to it but shouldn't stymie the first-timer." These are the usual conclusions in our days, deciding whether is something worth to use or not, by having a look at the outside (here the interface). That's one of the reasons of the "success" of Microsoft operating systems. They have put a lot of work and money in their style-guides.
What I would like to know is... if this average joe would also complain about difficulty in burning an audio CD with Nero. Maybe the only CD burning software he's tried is Windows Media Player or Roxio Easy CD Creator or something. Or maybe he just uses Nero Express (the easy to use front end of Nero). What I would like to really know is what his reason for difficulty is. Maybe he just wants a simple "wizard" like application that asks him questions. Disclaimer: I've never used K3b, but I hear it's as easy as breathing.
Actually, I don't see that as bogus at all.
The way to interact with an application is through its interface. When someone uses your program, they don't directly work with your clever code, they work with its interface.
The exact same product, with the exact same capabilities, can be a breeze to use or a bloody nightmare that needs you to spend days learning how to even get started. The difference between the two is the interface.
The thing is: Joe Average doesn't have a Ph.D. in CS, and shouldn't need one. He just wants, say, his pictures copied from his shiny new digital camera to his hard drive, and from there archived to CD-R. He also wants to send some of them per email to the kids, and to print some on his shiny new ink jet printer.
And he wants all that done with the absolute minimum of fuss and frustration. He doesn't want to learn new skills, he doesn't want to gain a ton of clue in how to compile the kernel and 20 libraries, and he doesn't find it great fun to experiment and tweak either. He just wants the job done. That's it.
Which means: he'll want some obvious buttons to click on. Which means: a GUI. That's what he'll interact with. And it's the GUI that can make this job a no-brainer 5 minute exercise, or a 7 day nightmare that includes reading outdated, incomplete and obscure man pages.
_If_ that 7 day nightmare is the best that you can offer him, he doesn't even want your product. It doesn't matter what cool hacks happen in your application, it doesn't matter how you cleverly coded your own uber-efficient image processing library to deal with your files. What matters is that he had to go through a lot of inconvenience to get a simple job done.
Hence, reviews that start with the surface aren't bogus, nor a bad idea.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I'd think you should send that question to the editor's desk over at the Seattle Times, rather than in addition to posting it here. Maybe they'll post a follow-up article. More linux coverage in mainstream periodicals is a good thing.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
The opening paragraph:
"Don't you wish some days you could just toss that Windows computer out the, er, window and try something else? Something where viruses and worms weren't everyday occurrences, where you didn't have to suffer through lockups and crashes every few days? Where the screen wasn't cluttered with pop-up ads and strange spyware programs, snooping on your every move?"
I find it interesting that the newspaper on Microsoft's home turf, where Microsoft pumps hundreds of millions (if not billions) into the local economy, feels free to speak so negatively about MS software. If Seattle isn't full of passionate Microsoft devotees, what city is?
If anyone here reads the Seattle Times, is this typical?
Who is RTFM and when will he help me with Unix?
apt-get install package
apt-get --purge remove package
It's never failed me yet. Since the two reviewed distributions are Debian under the hood, the respective package management tools should work every bit as well.
Um you got it right basically.
;-)
... 6 CDs?], etc, etc, etc.
Linux distros are hard to install as ice fishing is hard for warm climate southerners. Wrong market.
That and the average computer user could just be better served with a typewriter and a vic-20 or something
What gets me about articles like this are the summary judgements that will be based off it... E.g. well some magazine jerk said Linux is hard to use. Must be true. Ok school, let's renew your assraping windows licenses!
I mean seriously.... specially at vocational schools where people are training to be professionals why not use professional tools and not he "user enabled" ms ones?
For example, writing a manuscript? Great, use TeX not Word. Developing a program? Great use a free multi-platform C compiler [e.g. GCC] not some single platform Intel friendly MSVC [which is just huge bloatware
There are tonnes of quality free software out there that professionals of different fields can use. They're just too lazy to put up with development. Sure gimp isn't photoshop but I'm sure if Gimp had more active feedback [and say donations] the authors would be really motivated to get 2.0 out the door. At the end of the day Gimp is free and the professionals [say artists or whatever] are rewarded with a tool they don't have to re-license with every computer/new year, etc..
Of course all of this requires a bit of long-term thinking and not the usual standard issue 9 second knee-jerk reaction americans come standard with.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Hmm, despite having Red Hat as the OS, you still get a copy of Roxio EasyCD creator with the CDRW
How very useful
Slideshow of all porn found in last week:
Slurp a site:Find duplicate images:mplayer/mencoder can easily concatenate a series of wmvs when a pornographer splits them up. Mozilla has good gesture support and the Magpie extension is meant specifically for efficiently snarfing image galleries. glitter is excellent at slurping newsgroups and konqueror is quite good at organizing images by thumbnail (and there are quite a few GNOME/KDE image organizers available as well). mplayer precisely fits your criteria for keyboard control.In fact, *nix is so superior to Windows in this regard that when my main home box had to remain in Windows for a longer period of time (doing quite a bit of Windows programming lately), I needed to download cygwin + X11 + xv + mozilla + mplayer in order to keep from rebooting constantly.
the hardware vendors have more resources to throw at the software, and inevitably produce better software that works well with their product
Depends.
A friend of mine bought a Sony Cybershot (which is certainly no cheap digicam at over $1000) and the software that came with it is outrageously bad and just plain stupid. A special, severely crippled download software instead of using Explorer on the USB storage device; a viewer that behaves irregular at best (zooming into previews and the like - looks really great).
Anyway, nowadays more often than not, the software that comes with your favourite device is outperformed in both function and usability by independent third-party software (be it Open Source or Closed).
--- The light at the end of the tunnel is probably a burning truck.
I recently installed Fedora Core-1 on my new machine. Always I have a habit on VideoCD on my computer and thought I will try it with GNU/Linux. I came to know there are two applications on Linux to view that ie Xine and Mplayer).I dont have internet at my home ,so I downloaded xine and mplayer from my friend's machine and put it in my flash drive.Now my probelm started.When I plugged in my USB drive ,fedora didnt respond to any keyoard events on the first time. Second time when I booted it was shown as a drive.And it happened for the same sequence every time. I came to know Fedore Core -1 doesnt support hot plugin as Win 2K ,but it is supported in latest linux kernel (2.6 >).When I tried to install xine and mplayer it showed endless dependencies,and finally I succeeded in installing xine.While watching a movie ,I felt sound is ahead of picture ! and finally I had to stop that after I started getting echo .And picture quality is not as good in Windows Media Player(full screen mode).
,even for some what experianced users,sometimes getting things working can be nightmare.
What I am trying to say
And why shouldn't they?
Let me reply to this as a Mac user. When OS X was being rolled out (over?) the Mac using faithful, it was understood that while the CLI was present, it's use (and understanding) should be regarded as a feature, but never never to be required. To require the use of the CLI for any task was to be considered a failure of the software HCI design.
No software that's installed by default, and in fact, almost no software that wasn't originally Unix based, uses the CLI as a primary tool of interaction.
Now, maybe Linux doesn't want to be as "dumbed down" as OS X--fine. But until Linux is able to be run for day to day operation without the use of the CLI at all it will not gain mass marketshare acceptance. Either live with niche desktop usage, or change the way the apps work so that no CLI is required.
--
$tar -xvf
Last time I looked your TV didn't allow you to do anything other than watching TV, didn't allow you to add things at will or anything like that.
The PC is a flexibe architecture. Flexibility involves complexity.
You want a really easy to use PC for word processing? Get a typewriter
Want a multimedia player? Get a DVD player
Etc...
The PC is the jack of all trades
Just to add to this. kuickshow is a very good porn browser.
Media players on Linux (such as xine) tend to be much more capable - No waiting for buffering on many formats.
wget is also useful for getting other things like movies. Just set the --accept options to the type of files you want and let it go to work. Even better that you can put entries that you visit every day and use cron to automatically download them for you.
Mozilla also has a cool addon called "refspoof" which allows you to spoof the referrer. A lot of link list sites will post links, but the host server will block downloads from anything but the local servername. With refspoof you just right click a menu option and you're good to go.
"If you are not a joe user but you still want a good destkop OS to get your work done you should try the power of Gentoo."
To start with the punchline: actually that should IMHO read "if you're a masochist and want the computer equivalent of a kick in the teeth, you should try the power of Gentoo." Yep, that's some real power in that kick.
"Its fast, modular, not too hard to install (just read the docs, it holds your hand) and free."
Heh.
I was recently persuaded by some co-workers to try Gentoo on my Athlon 64 system. Now the thing that should have made me think twice is that said co-workers are hardy fronteer men. Real Men (TM) who edit source code in vi, will only configure anything with vi, and use a text mode browser. In fact, they start X and KDE to get a news ticker, then fire up xterm and lynx to browse the web.
I guess at home they sleep on a heap of rusty nails too, because using a bed would be too much like those lusers who want comfort. I guess the kind of people who, back in their age, had to walk 5 miles barefoot through the snow to school. Uphill _both_ ways. And they _liked_ it.
So I try it too. The first impression is that the install CD dumps me to a text mode prompt, with only a text file and links2 as a text-mode browser to download and compile the rest of it.
_That_ primitive. In fact, the only way to be more primitive would be to make me feed punched paper tape into the computer and toggle switches on the front pannel to make it load. Like in the good old days in the 70s.
The philosophy of Gentoo seems to be "why automate something, when it can be done by hand in text mode?"
E.g., it has a tool to find the best mirrors, but they don't even let you use it until later. First you have to use the text mode browser to go to their site and manually find a mirror to download stuff.
E.g., it has the tools to configure the network, but it's too stupid to launch them automatically. No, I have to read that text and launch them by hand.
E.g., if it knows that I'll have to create this and that directory and chroot, why the heck can't it provide a nice front-end that does that for me?
E.g., if it has 3 syslog demons total that it can install, and a recommended one... why can't that be on a nice page with 3 radio buttons? Why do I have to launch scripts by hand just to choose 1 option out of 3? No, seriously. I want to know.
The whole thing except maybe configuring and compiling the kernel could jolly well be automated. But no, let's be Real Men (TM) and do that by hand instead. Just having a user-friendly ncurses front-end wouldn't be macho enough, I guess.
And what's the point of the whole exercise spanning several days of recompiling everything? Just to be able to put my very own "-O3" in the compiler flags? (Which half the ebuilds will tone back down to -O2 or -O anyway.)
Why not just get Mandrake which is already compiled like that for you?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Unmentioned in the article, but central to Xandros' value is the Xandros File Manager, which was written from scratch by Xandros. It is very good: every useful file association has been pre-configured so that even a newbie can simply click on a file to do something useful. It just works. And, BTW, it includes very simple CD burning. I'm using Xandros, so are more of the PCs in my company, and it is stable, fast, and professional.
It's commercial - $40 - but that is really worth paying for software of this quality. Xandros really continues the old Corel tradition of excellent software at a low price.
Switching from Xandros to Lindows is painful: Lindows just looks cheap and nasty. And every other distro has the same hurdle: they require technical skill to install.
I've seen Xandros installed and used by a person who had never before in his life used a PC, and watched me doing it once. It is that good.
My blog
The Deluxe version of Xandros comes with this program, which runs most Windows software we've been able to throw at it (MS Office, Photoshop, etc). I'm shocked that this article overlooked this feature, which would arguably be a huge boon to Windows users looking to switch to Linux. Of course, maybe his editors would only pay for Standard, so maybe he never saw it.
This is a huge milestone. The media at this end of the globe is traditionaly scared to piss off Redmond. Even the virus alerts have a positive spin. I think of all the Wet Coasters out here who's faces go blank when I mention Linux (usually during a 'pop-up' or 'computer virus' discussion). To have this kind of mention, let alone positive endorsement, out of a major West Coast publication stuns me. Typically, what happens next is that once the other media organizations see that the Seattle Times does not burst into flames they pick up the story themselves.
I was immediately impressed with the availability of open source software. A year later, I installed Xandros 2.0. It's even better. I haven't missed Windows at all (no surprise, I hated ever Windows version I ever used). I do wish there was a Linux version of QuickBooks accounting software. The Win version runs in Crossover, but it's a bit ugly. All other applications I need for my small engineering business are native Linux aps.
Xandros demonstrates that Linux is ready for the average desktop user now. The few remaining hassles of Linux seem less important to me than the Outlook worms and crashes most Windows users suffer. And the issues with Linux are disappearing rapidly. It has the potential to be almost as low hassle as a Mac in a year or two, while running on low cost generic PC hardware. I don't see what Microsoft can do to stop Linux. Even with the FUD campaign, SCO, etc., Linux marches on relentlessly. It's the nature of open source software to continuously improve.
I have a few issues with Xandros.
I wasted last weekend watching the five DVD set of Stargate season six. Xine worked reliably, but only after I shut down most other applications. Xine's user interface is slow on my PC. But playback is smooth and of good quality.
I used a couple of different CD burning applications in Xandros 1.0. They worked well, but there wasn't one application that was good for audio and data CDs. I was glad when Xandros 2.0 integrated CD burning into the excellent Xandros File Manager. Unfortunately, my first attempts to copy audio CDs resulted in one good CD and five coasters. Maybe I need to learn how to use the CD burning features. Or maybe I need to install K3B until Xandros refines their CD burner.
Unlike the article, I have no trouble playing Quicktime videos. Mozilla handles them automatically too. Even crappy Realplayer seems tamed in the Linux world where it is prevented from taking over my PC, although it's probably still spyware.
Putting aside glitches in multimedia that most operating systems experience to some extent, I'd have to say that Xandros is an excellent platform for businesses, where the main uses will be word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, email, and internet browsing. Xandros has always done all of these things very well, and will only get better as OpenOffice matures and Firefox makes it's way into Xandros.
The biggest item left on the To-Do list is repealing the Microsoft tax. I resent the fact that I can't buy a name brand notebook PC without being forced to give $80 to Microsoft for an OS I do not want and will not use. Just think how bad it would be if the US Department of Justice had LOST their antitrust lawsuit.
>> My ultraviolent Linux switch video.
From the article: Don't you wish some days you could just toss that Windows computer out the, er, window and try something else? Something where viruses and worms weren't everyday occurrences, where you didn't have to suffer through lockups and crashes every few days? Where the screen wasn't cluttered with pop-up ads and strange spyware programs, snooping on your every move?
OK, I just have to get this off my chest... every time I see one of these "average Joe" reviews of Linux they ALL seem to include the same stupid cliches: "Windows crashes a lot." "Oooh, BSOD!" "Scary viruses and spyware everywhere." The thing is, I run some Windows boxes and some Linux boxes and OS X and FreeBSD, and while I love the configurability, extensability and power of Linux (I wouldn't think of running my file server on Windows), I have to say that I don't ever have any of the problems mentioned with my Windows boxes either. I use decent, stable hardware, I don't run untrusted executables, all my Windows boxes are NT codebase and are thoroughly patched, unnecessary services and ports are shut down, and I keep all the boxen behind a router/firewall. These are measures I take regardless of the OS. The only people I know who have major stability/security issues with Windows are people who, to be quite blunt, could fsck up any computer they touched. Before the Linux community blindly advocates that everyone must move over to Linux/BSD/whatever, we should probably ask ourselves if we are actually ready for an influx of clueless users and whether we are making promises that should really be qualified with: "in the hands of a competent user..."
</rant>