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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."
why would i want to give my phone/address/etc information, to do a beta test, for a linux distribution that isn't even free!
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
From the Xandros website: Xandros: Making Linux work for you So apparently Xandros uses the Soviet Russia PR Firm.
how much personal information do i have to give? this is absurd.
A friend of mine almost got a coop job working for Xandros. Would have been interesting to know from the inside what it is that they are doing over there.
As it stands, I havent used the distro, but I have heard that it would be very comparable to Ubuntu in terms of target audience. And both debian based too. With the VERY quickly growing Ubuntu community, and what seems to be bleeding edge software that is incorporated with it, does Xandros even stand a chance?
Sure, the article sais that they wait for other distros to make it bugfree.. but Ubuntu might get there soon, and it would seem to me, that no one uses such a distro for mission critial tasks, only as desktops. Most tasks/users of these two distros are likely already stable enough.
Anyone know what Xandros could offer that Ubuntu cant?
Okay, we, the readers of /. probably do not, but does this type of Windows-alike desktop environment really add anything to Linux? In my opinion, it does not. Windows users will find that Linux is a worse Windows than Linux, and experienced Linux users can install their own DE that is customized to their needs, either by tweaking KDE/Gnome, or installing a more minimal environment like Fluxbox, XFCE, FVWM, and adding apps as needed. This distro seems to target Linux noobs whose only previous OS experience is Windows, yet in a way that encourages them not to learn about Linux! I had that same experience with Redhat when I installed it, and I don't think it benefitted me in the least.
I admit, the Xandros File Manager looks pretty slick. But, a file manager does not a distro make. The summary notes that Xandros lets other distros "get the bugs out" first, making for a quality, bug-free release. If I wanted that, I'd just run Debian. (Xandros is based on Debian Sarge.)
I might download their file manager to check it out, but I'm not going to download the whole distro. It's just not worth it to me.
disclaimer: I run an ~x86 gentoo system here at home and love it.
http://neokosmos.blogsome.com
IIRC, they have CrossOver Office installed. You can go into the wizard thing and have it install Internet Explorer for you. Before it does, it will ask you to provide a legal copy of Windows to get the files from. It's a pretty slick setup. Might be nice in an office setting, which is what it's marketed towards anyway.
I thought that book was required reading here. Eric Raymond discussed that linux has been successful because it was released early and often. This compared to comercial software built in the cathedral style which takes months to get to a buggy release. This beta signup sounds like a cathedral style.
....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!
Does it cost $500 to participate in the beta test?
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
I am a KDE convert. Converted from GNOME to KDE and must say that I find KDE absolutely usable. I have the feeling to work under a true Desktop Environment and I detect new stuff with every minute I am using it. I am impressed about the consistency, speed, interoperability. I today found out that you can drag&drop files from konqueror (be it local, webdav, ftp, http or whatever) to your kconsole and voila it downloads them exactly in the dir where you have kconsole. These are the things that make life easier.
Also Krita is growing fast and hopefully will become a full GIMP replacement.
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
As an avid Debian user I wanted to move my parents from XP hell to a linux distro. But not having used (daily) any other distro in a long time I went looking for a polished debian based distro. After a quick trial of Knoppix I tried Xandros.
;-)
Basically I was amazed at how simply the install went. Four clicks, amazing. Way better than any other distro or OS for that matter. They love it. No problems.
So while Xandros may not get a thumbs up from hardcore linux users it's definately the most polished and the easiest (IMHO) distro to switch a windows user to.
btw, hint for ppl trying to install Firefox on Xandros, 'xhost +'
Actually no...
.net on it for a test, had the .net framework going and everything.
It also includes Crossover Office which is similar to but more powerful then WINE. I was even able to install visual studio
Even (just for fun) installed IE 6.0 so I could do "windows updates" for IE and visual studio... it was quite impressive and seamless.
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
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
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. -
I feel that I should express my personal experiences with various "easy to use" distros. My mother, who is quite unskilled with computers (what a surprise), kept on complaining how her computer wouldn't work properly. It was always down to spyware, or other background programs eating up resources, etc. I decided that enough was enough, that I didn't want to spend several hours per week cleaning the same crud off her drive.
I tried installing Xandros on her system. It installed fine, configured everything, and in general worked great out of the box. BUT, it was rather painfully slow, on a duron 1.6ghz + 256MB ddr box. There was not too much I could do in terms of optimization, without breaking the packaging system, and after several months of using this, I *did* manage to break it beyond reasonable repair. IIRC, it was something to do with trying the actual debian kde packages, and finding that reversing the situation was more trouble than it was worth.
I took the opportunity to try whatever else I heard was looking good, and installed yoper. It ended up working fine, quite a bit faster (probably due to the 2.6 kernel), but still had strange issues which seemed to appear out of nowhere: using the accelerated nvidia driver caused random lockups, and before long, trying to apt-get dist-upgrade would freeze up with no error messages, and would continue to do so in different places in subsequent runs.
I wiped it, thought "enough is enough," and installed slackware. It installed perfectly. I honestly don't think that the installation is significantly more difficult than the "easy" distros, unless you choose to make it so (eg. selecting to install all packages rather than individual selecting). I installed the 2.6 kernel from testing/, ran swaret to update all the packages, downloaded the nvidia driver, and it just *works*. No random lockups, VERY FAST performance, easy administration, and my mother has now moved on to complaining how the connection to hotmail is too slow.
After ranting for so long, I think the point I'm trying to make is that maybe these new distros are making things too complicated in their quest to make it more easy. To me, that's ultimately the wrong way to do things. You'll end up with "only one way to do it", unless you want to risk breaking whatever system the distro designers decided to prop the system up with.
With the slackware style, I seem to get more simple, *more transparent* packaging and set-up, while at the same time getting updates within the packaging system reasonably quickly (unlike with Xandros, which was often hopelessly out of date). Shouldn't it just be that simpler==better?
Just keep in mind Xandros (or whoever) isn't Linux and couldn't possibly be. I don't think your cathedral comment holds weight if you think about the thousands of hackers/developers working across the globe that enabled Xandros to do their beta. It boggles my mind when I think of how much work goes into any distro and I'm not even talking about the work done creating the actuall distro! Beta indeed! :)
Beta is when you CVS into the developers site, download; configure; make; make install and then take the time to politely post feedback about any tweaking you might have had to do to get the stuff to work on your system. And it can be a lot of fun (and sometimes you might have an idea that the developers decides might actually be a good idea and it get implemented).
And for what it's worth I did read the book, years ago. Most of these guys aren't as anti business as you might think they are. The idea being, even after the vendors have lost interest (if they ever do) we still have all the code. The Bazaar doesn't need the cathedral.
Quack, quack.
I used Xandros 2.0 for over a few months, and I loved it. Everything worked, I beat windows users at there own game, new hardware? plug-in and play, say why are you looking for drivers?, starting applications?, nice menu, Internet->Browser, Office->Writer, why are you looking at Start->Programs->MS Office->Word? :)
Really while running Xandros, I beat the snot out of any windows instalation, it is that good, I loved that part, and hated it most of all, because I felt that I lost my Linux Control, so I'm back to Debian and Gentoo.
But where not importand here, most of the Slashdot crowd has no problem using a distro like Debian and reading some manuals, where already using Linux.
Now enter my Girlfriend, who hates, I state here, hates PC's, if they don't work, if they slip, she gets mad, real mad at the PC in 5 seconds flat. She kept screaming at here MS Windows, and I kept saying, hey, Xandros is on another partion give it a try then. And after getting mad she did, now she still get's mad at Xandros once in a while, but that's mostly websites that don't work because there IE only, and she's more pissed that she as a customer isn't getting respected for using an OS that does work.
Since she can complain about absolutly everything, I signed her up for the beta test, because I believe she can saddle up the Xandros people with enough things the "average" user cares about that they have enough for Xandros 4.0!
She found plenty of things she wanted "fixed", now ofcourse I fixed it, using "IT Ninja Tech Support" ( SSH ), but I think she sees the stuff we, the geeks miss.
I don't care what system someone else uses when I don't have to fix it, but if the average user starts using Linux, we win also, because hardware will get Linux support, we can demand open source drivers ( hey, you want native support for 15% of the market and growing?, then you better get of you horse and give is stable debuggable code ).
Not to mention that websites start taking care of there HTML code, maybe even force IE to be standards compliant, force MS Office into supporting KOffice and OpenOffice.org documents
We might not like it, but we need these average users to be seens as Full