Linked by Tarmo Hyvärinen on Thu 5th Feb 2004 20:41 UTC
Lindows.com offered LindowsOS Developer Edition free for one day, GoogleDay (Whatever that is, I don't know, google's birthday perhaps?) so I decided to test it. My favorite distribution this far has been (and still is) Slackware Linux, which has always, well, just worked. I've been using Linux for some years now, I use Solaris at work (I work as software designer). Trying out Lindows after Slackware was totally different world, and here's some of my toughts after trying out Lindows.
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At the risk of coming off like a troll, nearly every time I read a review of a "desktop" linux distro here, I wonder: if the amount of time, money, and effort that has been put into "Linux on the Desktop" had instead been put into BeOS, where might it be today? The cruelly ironic thing is that, if these articles and my own personal experience are to be believed, BeOS in 2000 was more "ready for the desktop" in many ways than Linux is in 2004.
Hardware detection by mod probing every module? If anything, that sounds like a kludgy attempt to do hardware detection the way BeOS does it. If I am not mistaken, BeOS dynamically detects hardware and loads appropriate drivers on every boot, but it does it fast enough to go from POST to desktop in 15 seconds or so (I'm sure everyone's heard the "I took a HDD with BeOS on it out of one computer, stuck it in another, and the OS booted with out so much as a complaint or 'New Hardware Found' wizard" anecdote). Someone once told me it does this by directly probing the PCI bus rather than going through the BIOS for hardware info, but whatever method BeOS uses the results are the same and it's puzzling why no other OS (with the possible exception of MacOS) does it the same way.
Maybe I've just been spoiled, but problems with - say - mounting partitions, installing software, adding items to a programs launching menu, etc, seem completely inexcusable in 2004. Hey, I like Linux/Unix (admittedly, I find the *nix CLI much more comfortable than any of the *nix GUIs I've used), and I freely admit that in many ways it is technologically superior to BeOS, has better software support, better hardware support, etc. But in my "old age", I've lost my patience/passion for tinkering and want my computer to "just work", and am willing to sacrifice a bit of functionality to that cause. I think John Siracusa over at Ars Technica hit the nail on the head in one of his articles on OS X when he said: "User satisfaction with software can probably best be quantified as 'lack of annoyances'" (paraphrased).