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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."
Audio CD's are no problem with applications such as K3b. Heck, even regular cdrecord burns audio cd's without a problem.
Seriously, Audio CDs - Poor ????
K3B is the best piece of buring software that I have ever used.... makes nero seem pretty shocking....
tom-george.comBecause geeks rate higher t
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.
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'.
"video playback - could be better (with more progress bars and support for Apple's formats)"
how is mplayer and xine not sufficient? mplayer has OSD progress bars even and quicktimes movies has never been a problem.
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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Yeah, great, I really care about digital camera support. How compatible is it with games?
In the first paragraph he suggests that worms, viruses and popups are somehow the fault of and only restricted to Windows, and using Linux will solve all those problems.
This is not the reason to switch operating systems, it is a reason to use better software, patch your system, have better security practices etc. Articles that start with this proclamation don't warrant reading any further.
I.O.U One Sig.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
porn surfing is better with Linux and I'll say why.
Most of the times I sign up to a website only to find that I can't download the videos. I have to watch it streaming from the Internet. This is of course very fraustrating because it is slow and it forces me to keep my membership. Usually Media Player is the default player so it opens it and obeys the website's command and streams.
Programs like Download Accelerator help a little, but the sites have gotten smarter as well.
Now with Mozilla and some video program running I can bypass their system and usually get to save the videos. If not, usually linux video player save the video on disk in the cache somewhere and those can be easily recovered.
Now the only thing I'm trying to get around is the annoying link to a page that contains the picture you want to view, so there is no way to leech the site of pictures. I'm too lazy to write a program to crawl... and wget doesn't do what I want to do sometimes.
Oh well. It's all about choices I guess.
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
They're right on the back of the CD jewel case, usually on an orange sticker about 3 inches across.
creation science book
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.
> The good folks at RealNetworks have an opportunity
> to become a de facto standard but they should run
> right out of the box
I never thought to see "good folks" and RealNetworks so close in one sentence...
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.
Let's face it...if a desktop operating system doesn't come with a great thumbnailing preview app, excellent support for streaming media formats, and the ability to survive having the keyboard and mouse suddenly being disconnected to have semen cleaned out, then it really isn't up to scratch. In future, I'd propose to reviewers evaluating desktop Linux systems a few extra categories:
Disabled accessibility: Many operating systems have features designed to make them easier to use for the blind, deaf, or just plain stupid. But can the interface be easily manipulated using one hand only? Can the video player be precisely controlled with only a few fingers, while the other hand is wrapped around the user's own few inches?
Web brower pop-up enabling and tracking: While most users claim to clamour for browsers which block annoying pop-up ads, in reality they crave what these pop-ups are offering: free porn. Does the desktop OS under review offer a browser platform which makes following these pop-up nuggets of jizz-candy easy to follow and track? Can the browser in fact follow its own trail of pop-ups, closing those containing circular links, and launching the download manager when a rare find of actual porn is found?
I'm sure the Slashdot community will have plenty of other ideas to contribute. I look forward to hearing the community's response!
camstream is a nice collection of tools for webcams and other video-devices that uses video4linux2. Combining it with some Image Processing Library(gimp?) and a fancier gui should make it a decent enough tool.
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.
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.
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?
Before we jump on the bandwagon and start shouting "But I can burn audio CDs really easily" - we should remember that the people reviewing this are our target audience. Sure, **we** can do it, but they had problems with it, and hence it's these problems that we should be addressing.
Get your own free personal location tracker
And 10,000 Microsoft employees cancel their subscriptions in protest to their communist tendancies the next day.
It's a joke. Laugh.
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.
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
I was like, burning some audio cds from my mp3s.. and it was like BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP, and I was like, what happened? And it went BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP again and the next thing I knew, my mp3s were gone. They were some really good mp3s.
Best death? What, die from a naked lady avalanche?
Why are there always "installation and first steps" reviews? Sure, you have to install the systems, and sure, you have to burn CDs or write letters... but I would like some mid-to-long term review, including differences with Windows or Mac OS X regarding security problems, upgrades (two fields where linux should win hands down), integration of new hardware (which I suppose could be way more problematic), installation of new programs (which could be either way)...
I think long-term reviews would be far more interesting to convince people of the possiblities of the system in the long term, as a stable working environment, not just as a weekend-hobby.
My journal. Mainly about freedom.
This just in... the RIAA and the MPAA are now strongly supporting Linux as their OS of choice.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
"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.
It feels much more polished than current Mandrake or Fedora do. Everything seems to just work. My only problem with it on the desktop was outdated Mozilla (1.4) but I found an upgrade script. Package installation via Xandros networks is an excellent idea for those who would be scared by apt-get install cryptic-package-name.
I tried CrossOver and most of the stuff installs and runs, including Quicken and Internet Explorer. Seeing Windows Update running in KDE is truly scary. Fonts on Windows apps are terrible.
Now, on my laptop Xandros did not shine quite as well. Once again, no proper power management support. I know for a fact, that if I get a recent Fedora or Mandrake I can get the power management to work (after tons of twiking), but I would except Xandros to take care of it for me.
If I could suspend/hibernate my laptop with Xandros, i would have absolutely no reason to boot Windows anymore.
Linux is good. It's better, faster, and more stable than it's been in years. The level of quality on existing applications has gone up considerably, and new applications are being worked on everyday. You can use it as an everyday desktop as easily as you can use it for web/file/print serving. Systems such as Debian, Gentoo, and, yes, even Red Hat, make installing applications and keeping them updated a breeze. You don't have to worry about viruses, and spam and pop up fighting is integrated into most available web browsers and mail clients. However: it's not perfect. And it still caters to a different type of person than what Windows usually caters to.
Here's the deal: a lot of things in Linux still require you to know about your computer, and the things that go in it. They require you to at least understand a lot about the inner workings of your machine and the software on it. This, however, means that your average Linux user must spend some time and effort learning these things and fiddling about with them, dropping into the command line, etc. etc. This is fine and good if you, like me, enjoy messing about with the guts of your OS. But most people, frankly, don't want to learn about their computers. They don't want to have to know anything about their system, its commands and file structures and methods and formats. They just want things to work, simply and with as little hassle as possible. And, for the most part, Windows provides that hassle-free day to day experience much better than Linux does.
Now, don't get me wrong. I don't mean it as an attack, or in a condescending way, when I say most people can't be bothered to learn more about their computers and spend time learning the format of some arcane commands. It may seem strange to geeks like me, but most people do have better things to do. If you're, say, a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant or, hell, even a housewife, there's a thousand things in your day and in your life that are more important than trying to figure out just what command paramater will enable you to finally view that picture of your grandkids that your daughter in law emailed you. These people, most people, in fact, want convenience. They want to sit down and have their machine work hassle free, and they dont' want ten billion options and configuration parameters, they just want a button they can click that will do what they want, or close enough to it that it doesn't matter. And I can't say I blame them.
Sure, Linux is free, both cost wise and speech wise. And that's a big draw for a lot of us. But it's still not as easy to use as your average Joe and Jane want it to be, and it won't be for a short while longer, at least. Because of thise, while you might not spend money on it, you'll certainly have to spend more time with it, both in education and work to get it to do the things you want to do. Linux can do anything Windows can, and then some... it's just that it's not always as easy as it is over in Windows land. Most people simply don't have the time or patience to deal with that, and they're willing to pay to have things just work, rather than use free apps that require you to spend a week learning them. Why spend hours trying to figure out how transcode, vcdimager, and k3b work and getting around each app's quirks just to put an AVI movie on a VCD, when on Windows, Nero Burning Rom can grab an AVI and slap it on a VCD in three clicks. Sure, Nero costs money, whereas transcode and its ilk are free, but with Nero you click three times and you're done, while even a computer geek like me has to spend a whole morning trying to figure out the command line formats of each command before I can even begin, and then spend time experimenting with it until I get it right. Most people would rather pay for convenience than have to suffer for a free program.
So here's the deal: I'm no longer going to hold Windows against Windows users. If you know about Linux but still want to use Windows, it's your choice. There are risks and costs in that, of course, such as exposure to
"Two things are infinite: the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the first one." - Albert Einstein
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
And the current practice of blaming the users for your program's shortcomings, and calling them names like "lusers" or even "idiots", is a sad mockery of what the vendor-customer relationship was supposed to mean.
... most of us wouldn't bother to take driver's ed either if we could just get the keys to the car and start learning on our own (making the roads as unsafe as the Internet has become).
... computers ... and demand the ability to do so with little or no education or competence.
If that "clueless luser" had to call tech support to get your program to work, it's _your_ failure. It's that simple.
That is vastly simplified and in many cases flat out wrong. Yes, there is poorly written software that leaves users vulnerable, and requires users to know things they can't reasonably be expected to know. Microsoft is exceptionally guilty in this respect, as the plethora of viruses, worms, and trojans on that platform, and the tremendous damange they cause, attest to.
But users need to be competent to use a computer, and Microsoft engages in a rhetoric that actively discourages competence, replacing education with soothsaying and empty promises of future security and performance.
A more constructive approach would be for people to recognize that computers are like cars in some important respects with respect to what is required for a person to be capable of using them effectively and safely.
In order to drive a car you have to get several weeks of training, pass written and operational exams, and be licensed.
You have to not only learn the mechanics of operating a motor vehicle (how to turn the engine on, in both warm and cold weather, how to operate the transmission, windshield wipers, headlights, turn signals, how to parallel park, etc.) but also the rules of the road (when to use the turn signals, how to read the signage, the unposted rules of the road such as default speed limits in residential vs. rural areas, etc.).
Even in the more permissive countries with respect to driving (such as the USA) you have to take a semester long class in how to drive before you are remotely considered competent enough to take the state exam, and in Europe the training is even more rigorous (and expensive) than that.
Computers are machines at least as complex as cars, capable of doing far more diverse tasks than a car. It is the responsibility of the computer user to gain some degree of competence, and while not every car driver is a mechanic (nor every computer user willing to take the cover off of their machine), every driver does know the basic rules of the road and how to operate the vehicle. The same should be expected of computer users: they don't need to necessarilly know how to install a device driver, but they should be required and expected to know what a filesystem is, what a file vs. directory is, that different programs store information in different formats (mp3, avi, etc.), and the difference between persistent storage and RAM, as well as the difference between what is stored on their local drive and what is on the internet.
Microsoft has persued a philosophy of keeping the users as stupid and uninformed as possible, to their own detriment. The fact that this laziness is embraced by their users (and is no small factor in the spread of worms and trojans among these people) is no excuse
People need to be literate to read and write, and educated to operate a motor vehicle, and none of us expects to be able to do these tasks without being educated in the basic skills required to do so. It is absurd that we expect to be able to operate something vastly more complex and flexible
Today's windows user is like the illiterate peasant of the 19th century, going to the local scribe to write or read a letter because they can't. The difference is that, at least in Europe and the US, efforts were being made to teach the peasant to read and write. Today the opposite is true
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
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.
This actually appeared in a newspaper:
Commenting on a complaint from a Mr Arthur Purdey about a large gas bill, a spokesman for North West gas said, "We agree it was rather high for the time of year. It's possible Mr Purdey has been charged for the gas used up during the explosion that destroyed his house." (The Daily Telegraph).
Mandrake is a nice (and cutting edge) distro. Mandrake markets itself to Linux users who buy software for Linux reasons. By contrast, Lindows.com and Xandros market *directly* at people who would otherwise buy MS.
Criticizing LindowsOS/Xandros Desktop for not matching up to other Linux distros is missing the point. They are not intended to match up to other Linux distros. If you want to run Linux, forget LindowsOS/Xandros Desktop: install stock Debian (or Mandrake, Gentoo, etc.).
LindowsOS aims at people who want a cheaper alternative to Microsoft Windows. It is cheaper than MS Windows (that "high yearly fee" of $50 is cheap compared to paying $100 to update Windows and another $300 to update Office; it also gives discounts on various third party software).
Xandros Desktop is aimed at business users with an existing Microsoft network. It is designed to allow install piecemeal (buy one new Xandros machine at a time) by *MS Windows* admins (as opposed to more expensive Linux admins).
There are a variety of reasons to choose other distros over LindowsOS/Xandros Desktop. When reviewing Linux distros, this should be noted. The purpose of this article is not to review Linux distros -- it's to review alternatives to MS Windows. Lindows.com and Xandros have positioned their products in that light (largely because it is more profitable to compete against commercial software than shareware) and are reaping the benefits in terms of publicity.
For whom would you expect them to write articles? 3% of their readers? Or 90+% of their readers? Isn't it obvious?