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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."
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"
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
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