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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As so many others did, I snagged a copy after being alerted through Techbargains.com (love it). I burned it up, but never did anything with it until reading the review this morning.
I scrounged up an old Socket A mobo and Athlon 700, 512MB of SDRAM, an old Matrox Millennia 8MB AGP card, and a new 80GB Maxtor drive waiting for some project. Threw it into a case with a DVD drive and threw in a krufty Netgear PCI-->PCMCIA bridge card and wifi PCMCIA card. I'm writing this up on it now.
Synopsis: could be better, could be worse. I wouldn't _pay_ for it. Mandrake 9.2 is a lot better and more standard across the board. Could my Mom use it? Sure, I would bet it would be no more challenging than Win98 or OS X for her.
Not being a Debian guy, I didn't even think of apt-get. Thanks to the poster for alerting me to the apt-get sources file. The machine is now upgrading happily. Just like 'fink' on OS X.
It's ugly and Microsofty enough to not distress a Win2K or XP user. Breakout game works admirably on this wheezy 8MB vid card. WiFi is working great, much to my surprise. K-WiFi app crashes out, but the panel applet monitors throughput and signal fine.
I'd say it is an acceptable OS for those not accustomed to installing Linux and tweaking up their favorite distro. I wouldn't go out of my way to buy it for myself, but now having used it, I could see drop shipping a preconfigured new Lindows box to a relative or job site and knowing that the basics will be covered.
The lame lack of fdisk or any partitioning tool, claiming hte whole drive, was apalling. NEXTSTEP used to do that in 1990, but we only had 400MB disks then. After I finish playing with this evaluation, Mandrake 10B is going on. That might be a better comparison.