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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."
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!
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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.
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.
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Schrodinger 's Cat : wanted dead and alive
When I used partion magic on it, it got confused (or something) by the complicated set up and screwed up the partion table, making the system unbootable. Fortunatly, I had backups of the data, but not the entire disc, so I could restore my documents but had to re-install the OSes, resulting in a new system layout (one without BeOS).
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.
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.
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.
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$tar -xvf
"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.
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