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Xandros Recruiting Beta Testers
An anonymous reader writes "Looks like the folks at Xandros are getting ready for a new release of their Linux desktop. They're recruiting beta testers so those of you who like to try something new, you can sign up from here. No details about when or what to expect in the new release. Xandros always lets the other distros get the bugs out of the latest bleeding edge software before they do a new release so this should be another solid release with updated KDE, kernel, X, drivers, etc. Can't wait. Gotta get me on that beta list."
....I'd run Windows.
Before you mod me funny, think, perhaps I was insightfully funny?
These guys sure do know how to blow everyone away with an operating system that is slightly less functional that Windows for the average user, and only half as attractive! All of this for a price too. If it weren't for the virus/spyware factor (which is honestly nearly enough... sadly) this sort of distro would have absolutely no foothold.
When I run Linux, I run WindowMaker/GNUStep. It's really nice to have someone actually wonder what OS I'm running... instead of the chameleon act of a desktop environment that nearly all major Linux distros go for today.
Why doesn't anyone work toward developing something beyond Gnome/KDE Windows look & feel emulation? If only the Linux community adopted the slogan of "think different," there might be some more compelling reasons for people (read: people who use Windows out of a percieved lack of options) to switch. Until then, the only reason is to NOT experience some nasty things. Rarely have I heard someone sing the praises of what their desktop Linux distro can do, besides run Windows games in WINE!
Not to defend Xandros but what the heck is wrong with a smaller focused beta? Perhaps they find that to be more productive than just throwing a beta out into the wild hoping that people actually test it out and report bugs. I see nothing wrong with this on the surface and its a Very common practice. Quit your bitching already.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
If I had a $1 for every time a linux-head answered a question with "thats easy, you just... " and then typed a sequence of line noise... well, I'd be doing ok.
Xandros provides a simple way to get a user up and running with all the *main* needs met - word processor, browser, a well laid out control panel etc. Sure, down the track I'll figure out how to install that weird app I really want, but I'm up and running without so much as a mod-probe or apt-get.
Go Xandros!
1996 called and it wants its Cathedral back. That arguement was and is simplistic and lame. So what are open source workers in large corporations? People who copulate in the Cathedral? And what about commercial vendors contributing to open source - are they throwing their sacred shrines and implements out onto the street bazaar? This is the same sort of bullshit fad thinking that lead to the .com boom and bust.
Linux works because:
1) There is a good accessible model to base it on - UNIX.
2) It attracts extreme types who generally have little social skill but lots of technical skill. Instead of sitting around bored they decided to write software - oh and look there's some free projects out there. These people are motivated zealots.
3) A lot of people jumped on the bandwagon and thought they could make a ton of cash out of Linux
4) The alternatives are damn expensive to own and run, and give you no control if you're a tech headed geek. The alternative is something where you can fix and change the code if something goes wrong...oh and it costs next to nothing. It requires techy skill but shit they already have that and it'll keep their friends and family talking to them even though they smell funny.
Cathedral and Bazaar peh! Religion and BS.
Windows users want things to be installed as easy as they installed windows (but without the inherent security complications, heh).
./configure, make, make install and a bunch of NEEDLESSLY COMPLICATED things that an automatic program SHOULD provide? And what if the compilation breaks something? Do you really expect a common housewife to burst in tears, frustrated just because some stupid misconfigured .h header file got a line (i.e. an application path) wrong?
;-)
As a dummy average Joe-user Windows hobbit, I just want to insert a CD and let it do what it has to do. I'm NOT supposed to know about filesystems, nor the directory structure and how to configure the xf86watchamacallit in case the GUI blows, nor what cryptic combinations of keypresses to do to make the frigging ctrl+shift+numeric keypad arrow work as it SHOULD.
I just want a friendly box which lets me open my apps and play my music without having to mess around and compiling an ALSA XMMS plugin because XMMS takes about a minute to play because some by-default misconfiguration in the KDE.
I want to be able to download a program from the internet, press a few clicks, and get it installed in the appropriate directory without having to enter the command line.
In other words, I want to be able to run my favorite apps, word processor, stylesheet, multimedia apps, without having to know ONE SINGLE DETAIL of how Linux works.
Ok, let's summarize this in two words.
IDIOT-PROOF.
Sure, Linux is much more stable than winblows, it doesn't get viruses, etc. But what use is this rock-solid stability if the user has to go to the command line 10 times per day, become a super-user, and navigate in the creepy branches of the directory tree just to adjust something? (Linux Parody here)
Look at windows. You just open the Control Panel, click on an icon... and adjust a few sliders. Is that too hard?
Yes I know, being a windows lamb is dangerous. But not all people were born to be hax0r leaders. You may know how to download a plugin and install it in your OS, but I betcha the 99.99% of Windows users don't know even how to configure their Windows.
And you want them to open a command line, type
It's the lack of standarization that makes Linux (i'm not talking of a particular distribution, but Linux as a whole) scary for your average windows hobbit. I mean, can't the Linux guys get together, form some kind of "ecumenic council" as seen in Lord of the Ring movies, and decide a "user-friendliness Linux standard" that all Linux distros should follow? The web guys did it with the W3C Web Content Accesibility Guidelines, what makes people think the Linux guys can't? I don't want to think that they're just lazy about it.
Maybe I'm asking the impossible. But think about this. If Linus Torvalds could make Linux, what makes it so difficult for his successors to agree on some points?
As I said, I (and I bet the 99.9% windows hobbits) just want a nifty idiot-proof Operating System that lets me do what I want.
And if Xandros is offering that to me, what's so wrong with it? (Too bad they want to charge for it, but that's a separate matter).
(Update: I'm looking at the 142 Ubuntu Linux Screenshots and it looks JUST LIKE what I wanted to express.
Hmmm. 146 images are worth a thousand words
IMHO, the "installation problem" has been solved for quite some time now. Most Linux installers (Debian excluded :) are easier to install than Windows. Therefore, it's also my opinion that distro developers are still spending too much time on initial installation and not enough time on the real problems. As I see it, the real problems right now are two-fold:
- Linux is still hard to come by pre-installed, so in that case you're correct - installation is difficult. That's relative, though, because the installation of a pre-installed Windows PC is 0, while installing Linux will always require some work so long as it's not pre-installed.
- Everything else. Applications. User interfaces. Hardware support. GNOME and KDE have made great strides in the desktop area, as have a number of applications, but there's still no coherent UI guidelines. As a developer, you get to make the choice between GNOME's guidelines, KDE's different guidelines, or something else entirely. Too often, applications opt for the "something else entirely" route (Mozilla's XUL, for example). That results in applications that don't share a common look & feel even within the same desktop environment. Part of that is due to the large number of environments (competition is a good thing, but it has plenty of downsides), part is due to the open source process itself (most developers have no UI sense at all, and the lack of oversight for UI cohesiveness doesn't help), and part is due to the fact that GNOME, KDE, etc are not cross-platform (Mozilla won't follow GNOME guideliness, because then it won't be right on Windows or OS X).*
I don't have the answers to solve these problems, but I'm confident they are solvable. The biggest requirement I see is a coherent user experience, which is where distributions become very important. However, so long as distro makers continue to focus on installation (face it, how many times have you seen a "review" of a Linux distribution that focuses only on the installation of that distro?), they're going to get nowhere fast.* To be fair, Windows has problems with this as well, and it stems from a large, diverse, and active development community. It also can result from ego. For example, Microsoft makes excellent Macintosh software, and they generally follow Apple's guidelines whether the software was for OS 9 or earlier, or OS X. Apple, on the other hand, is either completely ignorant of Microsoft's UI guidelines for Windows, or they don't care. Therefore, you get crap like Quicktime or iTunes on Windows that don't follow any of the standard Windows interface guidelines. They're not "bad" applications, but the best that can be said about them on Windows is that they're Mac apps wrapped in a Windows frame. Not good for the overall user experience, and shame on Apple in my opinion.
That is not the problem with Linux and Xandros haven't even pinpointed the problem.
.deb's and specific rpm's but it's not enough.
:p. I'm sure there are other reasons why it's hard to meet the needs of a migrating end-user and it would be interesting to know other people's point of views for me and you and YOU.
There are various problems on why Linux is "hard" for new users. The simple one that I can say is "UI". Everybody sees computer, that computer better have an interface like explorer or they are doomed! Let me go into detail with some points.
- no unified DE.
The silly "competition" of kde and gnome isn't helping too much. Having distributions lately taking preferences of a DE over another makes a user think that distro "A" sucks because distro "B" does not use what "A" use. In the end, they don't understand that it's all linux no matter what you choose.
- No universal "format"
This I'm afraid will take a long friggin time. Having rpm's for some, deb's for others, tgz for slack does not solve the main problem. Companies/organizations taking preference of a format/package over another. Look at ATI who take in favor of RPM-Based distros to provide their drivers (I am aware that they suck. This was simply an example). It's great to see that some provide
A bit out of context but just to tell people that, yes Xandros may seem easy for some people but it's still Linux. You will have to face a challenge sooner or later. Linux isn't windoze where you don't need to understand what a certain action does in the background or how we can improve it. It's still an enthusiast "Operating System" (or Kernel. call it whatever you want) if you ask me which requires nonstop tweaking and you won't manage to do all of that from exclusively clicking your mice.
Until we find a perfect "format" (??), different people will always take a preference over another.
- package managers
We need a way to track down what we install, modify or remove. In other words, something like apt but more global. This again I'm refering to the last point I made. Maybe if we had a universal format, maybe then we'd see various package managers available to almost all distributions to make the user's life easier. YES COMPILING "MIGHT" BE FUN FOR SOME But in a world like today, does every user care bout gaining those extra secondes on optimization which they aren't even aware of? Why should they care. They want to know how to install/upgrade/uninstall programs. This is why I show people new to linux the Debian distribution. They don't regret it.
If I made mistakes of I need correction, please go ahead
I'm going to have to go with the parent poster on this. I've met a couple of the developers that work on Xandros (both past and present). Generally they are smart bunch of guys. I also used to work at Corel where this thing started, so I know the management as well. I will repeat the same question I asked back then...
Why on earth would I switch from a Proprietary Windows world to a Proprietary Linux world? It makes no sense. Perhaps you get a brief respite from viruses, etc. But without the benefit of a free (as in speech) distribution, what is the point?
Here's a Linux distro that's geared to look just like Windows. And it's proprietary to boot. Plus it's backed by a small company from Ottawa who could go under at any minute (although last I heard they were actually doing OK).
My point is, if I wanted a desktop solution that looked like windows and I was willing to put up with the assinine licensing that comes with it, why the hell wouldn't I choose the defacto standard in the desktop computing world and *choose windows*????
Even if they use some special config tools to manage the systems, even if it's not free, and even if they outright closed sourced all their own code - it's NOT pointless and it's NOT lock-in!
It's Linux. What is the biggest thing holding people to Windows? Applications. If you run your entire company off of Xandros, and run a bunch of Linux apps on it that people become dependant on - where does the lock-in happen that's implied by your use of the word Proprietary?
You could switch off of Xandros to something else fairly easily at that point. Once you're off Windows, which Xandros helps you do quite a bit more then some of the other distributions, you can then take another step onto, say, RedHat, or Mandrake, or SuSE, or whatever.
There's no lock-in, therefore there's no problem, in my opinion. I believe the core operating system and libraries need to remain open, GPL or what-not, in order to keep things going. But I don't believe that every single little aspect of the system is required to be GPL or even Open Source. I'd prefer it was GPL, for real. But it won't kill the market if it isn't.
You can choose to use it, or not. Either way, the software that runs on it will run on any Linux, and that's what seperates it from the Windows monopoly.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
That all sounds nice, but if I'm going to be subject to restrictive licenses, I might as well just run windows in the first place and be done with it. Xandros may or may not have a 'killer-app' linux, but its worthless to me because it sacrifices the core philosophies that make linux worthwhile.
That's useless reasoning. If you're going to be subject to restrictive licenses either way, then you go with the solution you think is better. So go with Linux if it suits you or Windows if it suits you better. Having to pay for software anyway is not reasoning just to go use MS products. In this case, that restrictive license with Xandros is a step into an OS that has no restrictions from the OS with the most and most good businesses will be willing to pay for software if it helps them.
Some of us use Linux because it's better, even if you apparently only use it because you're cheap.
-N
I've nothing to say here...
Config Tools ARE a bad thing if (and only if) every distribution uses a different config-tool for the same app. If you try out new distros every once in a while config-files stay 99% the same but config-tools are 100% different which is quite annoying.
Linux is not Windows
I think you have missed some of the point of an analogy--it is a simplistic comparison by nature. Almost EVERY analogy falls apart under in depth scrutiny. Accept it for what it is--an educational tool to let people understand the open source philosophy a little better.
I do agree with why linux works, even though that is hardly the whole of it. Remember, unlike unix or windows, if a single linux vendor dies, it won't matter because there are many others, and lots of people contribute. At some point, linus will need to hand over control of the kernel, but that isn't such a big deal--there are lot of very competent people who are already maintainers that could do the job with ease.
No, linux can't be killed, because of its bazaar-like qualities. It may have to evolve, and mutate, but overall, it will survive. The same may or may not be true of windows. IF windows survives, it will be by taking bits of the linux philosophy and latching on.
Enough said.
Back to Xandros--yes I signed up, and why not? If I can help them make their distro better, then I will! Everything we do to help any portion of the linux community is good. Even Xandros
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)