User Interface Freespire polished the kde interface a bit. Its still kde though and has 9 million options. You have to dig through 500 menus, pulldowns, and other random configuration items to do the simplest thing. When you right-click on the desktop there has to be at least 12-15 options on there. Ubuntu's Gnome UI is much more streamlined and polished.
Score +1 for Ubuntu.
Graphics Freespire doesn't realize my graphics card and or monitor is capable of greater than 1024x768 resolution. I can't change it to anything higher via the gui whereas Ubuntu did automatically.
Score +1 for Ubuntu.
Click-n-Run Freespires much vaunted Click-n-run interface just plain blows, or at least for me it does. The interface is clunky, has too many options, menus, and whats-its going on, and half the things I tried to click-n-run were more like click-n-crash. - Ubuntu has Synaptic (and plain Apt-Get and yes I know you can get it in Freespire too, but its not there by default).
Score +1 for Ubuntu
Firefox Freespire renamed Firefox 'lBrowser'. Please. Please stop with the lWords. Even the Freespire Firefox theme sucks. They even have a.mozilla folder in your home dir, but thats not where the profile etc is, no, thats in the.lbrowser folder. eek. Ubuntu just gives you Firefox and doesn't mess too much with it (other than a decent theme I think).
Score +1 for Ubuntu.
Multimedia. Ubuntu and Freespire both seemed to support mp3 playback out of the box so thats a draw. However, Freespire did support most win32 video codecs right out of the box. It takes some configuring to get Ubuntu to support them (not much but some).
Score +1 for Freespire.
lSongs lSongs lSucks. The interface is crappy and it seems like a crappy rip-off of iTunes. A really crappy rip-off at that.
Score +1 for Ubuntu.
lPictures lPictures lBlows. Give me Fspot or Picasa please. Same UI issues as lSongs. And if I have to tell my wife to launch lSongs to listen to her jazz music she's gonna lPunch me in the lNose.
Score +1 for Ubuntu.
Install Freespires installer was pretty smooth other than the partitioning part. Its a lot faster than Ubuntu's installation but the partioning part is worse.
Score +1 for Ubuntu due to ease.
Score +1 for Freespire due to speed.
I'm only on my 2nd day of reviewing Freespire so maybe I'll find some more things I like, but as it is right now I'm thinking I'll be reinstalling Ubuntu tonight.
It never ceases to amaze me how almost LITERALLY every other post has at least one misspelling. You'd think Slashdot, being frequented by generally smarter people, would have a higher literacy rate, but I guess not. *sigh*
My point being that I shouldn't have to study anything in order to install an OS. It should be click click click yes yes ok ok done. I shouldnt have to spend hours reading just to install the damn thing. I dont have time for this I have kids and a job and a life. I am not using the OS to learn how to use the OS, I am using the OS to enable me to do the things I really want to do. Its like if I had to read a book about how to use a toaster. Its a damn toaster. Just toast the bread so I can have warm crunchy bread. I'm really not interested in learning the internal wiring diagrams of the thing, I just want warm crunchy bread.
Well I'm only running a 1.1ghz athlon w/700~ ram so I can understand why I might be slow. If I were on a 2500+ I suppose it might be a tad quicker.
Also, are you running KDE or Gnome or something else? I can see how one of them would make the logging in part slower though I don't think they'd have much to the general boot time.
Oh wait, I forgot, I have also used Suse quite a bit. The reboot/login time is comparable. I don't know why it has to take so much longer, but it does. Maybe Linux in general doesn't like a lot of peripherals or something.
I have 3 hard drives (scsi, ata, & ide), a dvd burner, a cd burner, a usb mini hub, a printer, a usb optical wheel mouse, and usb microsoft keyboard, plus soundcard, video card, and all other normal hardware. I don't know why, it just takes a lot longer to boot into various flavors of linux than it does XP.
I have tried Redhat, Mandrake, and Lycoris, and they all take substantially longer to boot and log into than XP. I'm in no way saying that Windows is better because it boots faster, but it still bugs me either way.
Sure mine can have a nice simple clean look too but I wasn't really complaining about a simple clean interface.
Xandros came with Firefox installed and on the panel also, but I downloaded a newer version and installed that but it didn't add itself to the panel/menu.
Sure Acrobat 5 can open PDF's, that wasn't really my complaint. My complaint was (obviously enough) with Adobe for not providing an equivalent Linux version to their Windows version. I'm only saying they didn't provide it because I went to the Adobe website and it only served version 5 when I told it what os I was running and it said thats all that was available. I didn't really feel like searching all over their site or elsewhere for it. I figured if Adobe said 5 was the best there is then thats all there is.
I was using apt-get via commandline and it said I needed to update the mirror list or something. To be honest I didnt do an exhaustive seach of the system to see if there was a gui method or not. I'm sure I could easily update the mirror list or whatever it was it said it needed to do but I was just tired of messing with it. I just want it to work, out of the box. If I had to configure Add/Remove Programs in Windows just so I could install something I'd understand that thats just the way it is, but I don't. It just *works* in Windows.
If apt-get will add to the panel/menu when used properly then I suppose I need to spend some more time figuring it out.
In general, I really like Xandros. It played DVD's automatically and in general is quite nice. It just irks me to no end when I see silly stuff like 200 screensavers but it takes me 5 times longer to reboot and login than windows. I see 50 different email clients but they can't figure out that the default clock looks like crap.
Maybe we can start a petitition to limit kde developers to something like 'no more than 10% of kde applications can have a K in their name' or 'for crying out loud please stop the k-nonsense!!!!' It really detracts from the professional appearance of it if every other app is k-app this and k-that. Do they really think its a *good* idea having everything named k-something?!?!?
Oh yeah and the *first* damn thing I do when setting up a KDE desktop is change the clock font. I completely agree with you. Everything else looks so nice yet the font makes the clock look like it did 6 years ago.
Or how about making it so transparent panels really *are* transparent and you aren't just painting the wallpaper on the panel? I want it so that if I drag an app down on the screen so that its behind the panel I still see the app through the panel, not part of the desktop painted over my app. Same thing with supposedly transparent terminal windows - they just paint the background into the window. If I have an app behind my term window I want to see it, as I would if it were really transparent.
Ok since I'm in rant mode I guess I'll go balls out...
Why does it take 5 mins to boot into Linux when it takes less than a minute in XP on the same machine (I'm dual-booting)?
Why does it take like a minute just to login?
Why does my mouse stop working after a screensaver kicks in? (Xandros 3.0COE)
Why does Xandros ship with *literally* like maybe a hundred different screensavers to choose from?
Why can't people like Adobe make sure their products for linux are at the same level as on Windows? In Windows I have Acrobat 7 something or other and its very nice. In Linux I'm limited to Acrobat 5, which is highly suck-tacular.
Why can't I have a button that says reboot? I always end up opening a terminal and entering init 6.
Why can't apps automatically add shortcuts to themselves to the panel/kicker/whatever the damn thing is called? I installed Firefox and of course no short cut. Had to do that myself. I installed Acrobat and of course no shortcut. I gave up on trying to install OpenOffice as the tar file contains a dozen different rpms and I dont know which one to install first or do I install all of them and then why won't it create a damn SHORTCUT!!!
Wow that was a rant. Ok, flame on.
Crap I almost forgot one. Why in the hell can't I have Shockwave work in Linux without having to friggin emulate Windows??? My kids live on Cartoonnetwork.com and 50% of the games on there are shockwave games which do not work in Linux so the kids always give me an evil glare when I try to get them to use Linux. They're like, "Gee hanks Dad for sucking all the fun out of my life. When can we *puh-leeeeeze* have Windows back?"
I always heard how awesome apt-get was. When I realized Xandros was Debian based I thought "Sweet now I can try out apt-get." So I tried it out. *yawn*
ok I think I'm done... till I get home and log back into Linux and realize the other 77 things that piss me off lol
I'm just wondering... why is it that if I hire you and pay your for 8 hours per day of your effort, its unethical of me to expect you to give me 8 hours per day of your effort. If you want to work on your own projects for two hours per day, and can only afford to give me 6 hours of your effort, then why expect me to pay you for 8? I just don't get this crap.
Now its fine and I understand it if for those 2 hours per day, even though you are working on your own projects, there is some expectation that I will one day see a return on the pay I am giving you for those 2 hours per day, in the form of some sort of usable/marketable product.
If however, for those 2 hours per day, you are doing crossword puzzles, or picking your nose, or working on freelance web development for your own personal business, I'm gonna be a little ticked.
Trust is nice, and should be encouraged, but my main priority is protecting my kids. I have three daughters, oldest is nine. I let her use the internet, but only in the living room. I also installed Norton Internet Security 2004 which has nice parental controls. I really don't think she would intentionally go to any questionable sites, but I taught her how to use Google Image search, since she frequently likes to use images for homework assignments, and I don't want her to even ACCIDENTILY get to the goatsex page... shit that damaged me, I can only imagine what it would do to her. Also, I installed Yahoo messenger for her so she could chat with a couple of her girlfriends, but I set it so that only her friends could message her and I turned on archiving so I could check in every now and then. I don't mind spying on her since like I said, my higher priority is taking care of her, not being her friend. Just my 2 cents.
Even the 'K-related word' is annoying... Just come up with some creative word other than krap like kpanel, KSpread, KFormula, etc etc etc... I mean, take the K off the words and see how ingenious the names are... hmmmm Spread for a spreadsheet app... Formula... blah blah and in response to what someone else said, yes, Gnome is almost as bad. For the most part I like KDE, and they do have SOME creative names (Konqueror, Kontour, and Kivio to some extent...)
I wish someone would come up with something truly new and creative, a new metaphor instead of desktops, folders, files etc... Don't ask me what that should be though;)
Slashdot Mirror
User Interface
.mozilla folder in your home dir, but thats not where the profile etc is, no, thats in the .lbrowser folder. eek. Ubuntu just gives you Firefox and doesn't mess too much with it (other than a decent theme I think).
Freespire polished the kde interface a bit. Its still kde though and has 9 million options. You have to dig through 500 menus, pulldowns, and other random configuration items to do the simplest thing. When you right-click on the desktop there has to be at least 12-15 options on there. Ubuntu's Gnome UI is much more streamlined and polished.
Score +1 for Ubuntu.
Graphics
Freespire doesn't realize my graphics card and or monitor is capable of greater than 1024x768 resolution. I can't change it to anything higher via the gui whereas Ubuntu did automatically.
Score +1 for Ubuntu.
Click-n-Run
Freespires much vaunted Click-n-run interface just plain blows, or at least for me it does. The interface is clunky, has too many options, menus, and whats-its going on, and half the things I tried to click-n-run were more like click-n-crash. - Ubuntu has Synaptic (and plain Apt-Get and yes I know you can get it in Freespire too, but its not there by default).
Score +1 for Ubuntu
Firefox
Freespire renamed Firefox 'lBrowser'. Please. Please stop with the lWords. Even the Freespire Firefox theme sucks. They even have a
Score +1 for Ubuntu.
Multimedia.
Ubuntu and Freespire both seemed to support mp3 playback out of the box so thats a draw. However, Freespire did support most win32 video codecs right out of the box. It takes some configuring to get Ubuntu to support them (not much but some).
Score +1 for Freespire.
lSongs
lSongs lSucks. The interface is crappy and it seems like a crappy rip-off of iTunes. A really crappy rip-off at that.
Score +1 for Ubuntu.
lPictures
lPictures lBlows. Give me Fspot or Picasa please. Same UI issues as lSongs. And if I have to tell my wife to launch lSongs to listen to her jazz music she's gonna lPunch me in the lNose.
Score +1 for Ubuntu.
Install
Freespires installer was pretty smooth other than the partitioning part. Its a lot faster than Ubuntu's installation but the partioning part is worse.
Score +1 for Ubuntu due to ease.
Score +1 for Freespire due to speed.
I'm only on my 2nd day of reviewing Freespire so maybe I'll find some more things I like, but as it is right now I'm thinking I'll be reinstalling Ubuntu tonight.
Looks like the Google accelerator has resulted in my ip being banned from viewing slash rss feeds! Thats unfortunate!
Another example of someone who failed english class, all 4 times they tried.
It never ceases to amaze me how almost LITERALLY every other post has at least one misspelling. You'd think Slashdot, being frequented by generally smarter people, would have a higher literacy rate, but I guess not. *sigh*
My point being that I shouldn't have to study anything in order to install an OS. It should be click click click yes yes ok ok done. I shouldnt have to spend hours reading just to install the damn thing. I dont have time for this I have kids and a job and a life. I am not using the OS to learn how to use the OS, I am using the OS to enable me to do the things I really want to do. Its like if I had to read a book about how to use a toaster. Its a damn toaster. Just toast the bread so I can have warm crunchy bread. I'm really not interested in learning the internal wiring diagrams of the thing, I just want warm crunchy bread.
Well I'm only running a 1.1ghz athlon w/700~ ram so I can understand why I might be slow. If I were on a 2500+ I suppose it might be a tad quicker.
Also, are you running KDE or Gnome or something else? I can see how one of them would make the logging in part slower though I don't think they'd have much to the general boot time.
Oh wait, I forgot, I have also used Suse quite a bit. The reboot/login time is comparable. I don't know why it has to take so much longer, but it does. Maybe Linux in general doesn't like a lot of peripherals or something.
I have 3 hard drives (scsi, ata, & ide), a dvd burner, a cd burner, a usb mini hub, a printer, a usb optical wheel mouse, and usb microsoft keyboard, plus soundcard, video card, and all other normal hardware. I don't know why, it just takes a lot longer to boot into various flavors of linux than it does XP.
I have tried Redhat, Mandrake, and Lycoris, and they all take substantially longer to boot and log into than XP. I'm in no way saying that Windows is better because it boots faster, but it still bugs me either way.
Sure mine can have a nice simple clean look too but I wasn't really complaining about a simple clean interface.
Xandros came with Firefox installed and on the panel also, but I downloaded a newer version and installed that but it didn't add itself to the panel/menu.
Sure Acrobat 5 can open PDF's, that wasn't really my complaint. My complaint was (obviously enough) with Adobe for not providing an equivalent Linux version to their Windows version. I'm only saying they didn't provide it because I went to the Adobe website and it only served version 5 when I told it what os I was running and it said thats all that was available. I didn't really feel like searching all over their site or elsewhere for it. I figured if Adobe said 5 was the best there is then thats all there is.
I was using apt-get via commandline and it said I needed to update the mirror list or something. To be honest I didnt do an exhaustive seach of the system to see if there was a gui method or not. I'm sure I could easily update the mirror list or whatever it was it said it needed to do but I was just tired of messing with it. I just want it to work, out of the box. If I had to configure Add/Remove Programs in Windows just so I could install something I'd understand that thats just the way it is, but I don't. It just *works* in Windows.
If apt-get will add to the panel/menu when used properly then I suppose I need to spend some more time figuring it out.
In general, I really like Xandros. It played DVD's automatically and in general is quite nice. It just irks me to no end when I see silly stuff like 200 screensavers but it takes me 5 times longer to reboot and login than windows. I see 50 different email clients but they can't figure out that the default clock looks like crap.
*sigh*
Oh yeah, and about Gentoo... If I wanted to spend 6 months figuring out how to install an operating system it would be the perfect os.
Maybe we can start a petitition to limit kde developers to something like 'no more than 10% of kde applications can have a K in their name' or 'for crying out loud please stop the k-nonsense!!!!' It really detracts from the professional appearance of it if every other app is k-app this and k-that. Do they really think its a *good* idea having everything named k-something?!?!?
Oh yeah and the *first* damn thing I do when setting up a KDE desktop is change the clock font. I completely agree with you. Everything else looks so nice yet the font makes the clock look like it did 6 years ago.
Or how about making it so transparent panels really *are* transparent and you aren't just painting the wallpaper on the panel? I want it so that if I drag an app down on the screen so that its behind the panel I still see the app through the panel, not part of the desktop painted over my app. Same thing with supposedly transparent terminal windows - they just paint the background into the window. If I have an app behind my term window I want to see it, as I would if it were really transparent.
Ok since I'm in rant mode I guess I'll go balls out...
Why does it take 5 mins to boot into Linux when it takes less than a minute in XP on the same machine (I'm dual-booting)?
Why does it take like a minute just to login?
Why does my mouse stop working after a screensaver kicks in? (Xandros 3.0COE)
Why does Xandros ship with *literally* like maybe a hundred different screensavers to choose from?
Why can't people like Adobe make sure their products for linux are at the same level as on Windows? In Windows I have Acrobat 7 something or other and its very nice. In Linux I'm limited to Acrobat 5, which is highly suck-tacular.
Why can't I have a button that says reboot? I always end up opening a terminal and entering init 6.
Why can't apps automatically add shortcuts to themselves to the panel/kicker/whatever the damn thing is called? I installed Firefox and of course no short cut. Had to do that myself. I installed Acrobat and of course no shortcut. I gave up on trying to install OpenOffice as the tar file contains a dozen different rpms and I dont know which one to install first or do I install all of them and then why won't it create a damn SHORTCUT!!!
Wow that was a rant. Ok, flame on.
Crap I almost forgot one. Why in the hell can't I have Shockwave work in Linux without having to friggin emulate Windows??? My kids live on Cartoonnetwork.com and 50% of the games on there are shockwave games which do not work in Linux so the kids always give me an evil glare when I try to get them to use Linux. They're like, "Gee hanks Dad for sucking all the fun out of my life. When can we *puh-leeeeeze* have Windows back?"
I always heard how awesome apt-get was. When I realized Xandros was Debian based I thought "Sweet now I can try out apt-get." So I tried it out. *yawn*
ok I think I'm done... till I get home and log back into Linux and realize the other 77 things that piss me off lol
I'm just wondering... why is it that if I hire you and pay your for 8 hours per day of your effort, its unethical of me to expect you to give me 8 hours per day of your effort. If you want to work on your own projects for two hours per day, and can only afford to give me 6 hours of your effort, then why expect me to pay you for 8? I just don't get this crap.
Now its fine and I understand it if for those 2 hours per day, even though you are working on your own projects, there is some expectation that I will one day see a return on the pay I am giving you for those 2 hours per day, in the form of some sort of usable/marketable product.
If however, for those 2 hours per day, you are doing crossword puzzles, or picking your nose, or working on freelance web development for your own personal business, I'm gonna be a little ticked.
Is that unethical of me?
Well aren't you pleasant lol
THIS is a modern game? I remember better graphics in games from 10 years ago...... Who would buy this?
Trust is nice, and should be encouraged, but my main priority is protecting my kids. I have three daughters, oldest is nine. I let her use the internet, but only in the living room. I also installed Norton Internet Security 2004 which has nice parental controls. I really don't think she would intentionally go to any questionable sites, but I taught her how to use Google Image search, since she frequently likes to use images for homework assignments, and I don't want her to even ACCIDENTILY get to the goatsex page... shit that damaged me, I can only imagine what it would do to her. Also, I installed Yahoo messenger for her so she could chat with a couple of her girlfriends, but I set it so that only her friends could message her and I turned on archiving so I could check in every now and then. I don't mind spying on her since like I said, my higher priority is taking care of her, not being her friend. Just my 2 cents.
sweet
Even the 'K-related word' is annoying... Just come up with some creative word other than krap like kpanel, KSpread, KFormula, etc etc etc... I mean, take the K off the words and see how ingenious the names are... hmmmm Spread for a spreadsheet app... Formula... blah blah and in response to what someone else said, yes, Gnome is almost as bad. For the most part I like KDE, and they do have SOME creative names (Konqueror, Kontour, and Kivio to some extent...)
I wish someone would come up with something truly new and creative, a new metaphor instead of desktops, folders, files etc... Don't ask me what that should be though ;)
I meant to say "k[insert really uncreative name here]"
Could they just stop naming every friggin application "k" ????? Ok the name Konquerer is cool... but the rest mostly suck.