Linked by Barry Smith on Mon 1st Dec 2003 18:34 UTC
This is the second in my series of reviews for debian-based commercial distros that might be appropriate for SOHO use. The first article covered my exploration of Lindows, and this one is focused on Libranet. Before I get started with Libranet I want to clarify a couple of points. 
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This review was somewhat better than the Lindows one, but it suffers from many of the same problems, I will list the top 3 most annoying ones.
1. Irrelevant rating system, the ratings are very specific and do not judge the overall dissapointment or pleasure of a feature. As Barry said they are either +1 or -1 for a specific feature it can't be +3 for something really great or -5 for something horrendus. For example, he only took of 1 point for the video card problem, this is quite significant and no newbie should be expected to fix this on their own, this should be -3 at least. Also a really cool feature should get more points too.
And furthermore it is still very much just "lala one point here and one point there tralalala"
For example
" And I am going to take off another point for forcing me to install a different operating system on my secondary computer. The first negative point was for trying to eat my hard drive, and this one is for making me go to the trouble of wiping and starting over. I am still unhappy about that one."
Okay, this really makes no sense, he has taken a point off already for this issue and installing another OS because of his problem IS THE SAME ISSUE, so if he goes by what he said and provides equal weight to everything, it should remain -1 for that problem.
"Libranet, as all know, defaults to IceWM. I had never tried this one before and was pleasantly surprised. Since the GDM login presents you with a selection to choose from, I started going down the list and trying them all, one at a time. I eventually defaulted back to KDE as my favorite, but I feel compelled to give Libranet a +1 for expanding my horizons. If they had not made the default something other than KDE or Gnome, I probably would never have bothered to check them out."
In all respect DEFAULTING to ICEWM should have been a -1 rather than a plus. What newbie wants to get stuck in an odd environment like that when there is GNOME and KDE? In fact I think that distributions should go for best of breed and integration ,not quantity. Only one desktop should be included with a DEFAULT install, but that desktop should be very well integrated. Normal computer users want to get their work done not play around with different desktops, that is just a waste of time and frankly I've lost a few Linux users that way. Too many choices, they just want an integrated system with the best of the breed.
2. No screenshots!!!
3. Not very well organized. It would be great if the article was split into sections like "Installation" "Administrative Utilities", "Applications", "Integration", "Support" "Company" etc. Also it would help if even in the current format he wouldn't pretend he is done with an issue than revive it later in an unrelated context for example the GRUB issue.