Linked by Phil Hall on Thu 5th Dec 2002 00:35 UTC
I'm a long-time Windows user, but for years I've been searching for an intelligent alternative. Macs are actually a great choice, but have you priced them lately? I don't have two grand to spend for another system. I had been reading all the hoopla surrounding Xandros Desktop for a number of months and decided to take the plunge. I had been burned two times previously trying to install other Linux distributions. Their tech support was non-existent. I'm essentially working in a vacuum. When something has gone wrong in the past, I've found that I was on my own. 
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Hi,
Thanks for the review, it was good one. It's fascinating to see what Linux newbies think of their new desktop when it's all "just worked" and they haven't had to invest enormous effort to get it going. A few things:
As a previous poster has already pointed out you can change the sounds in the KDE Control Centre. Look at kde-look.org for the Clear Skys soundset which is excellent, far better than the default windows sounds imho.
In Mozilla you press Ctrl-L instead of alt-D to get to the address bar. This isn't very obvious unfortunately.
To install more software you can use "apt-get install whatever" : being based on debian stable means a lot of the software you get that way will be out of date, but it will be more solid than it otherwise would.
Downloading software from the net *is* a pain in the ass, if you don't use apt. You'll also find that not all software can be got via apt, and that if you switch to another distro, apt may not be available at all. I'm working hard to address this issue, but it's a big one. There will be an article on OSNews shortly I hope that explains why this is and talks about my own project a little.
Wine - heheheh. The developers are wine are truly the unsung heros of our age. You said you don't know how to use Wine, well when you installed MS Office that's exactly what you were doing. It's kind of a shame that when Wine works correctly, it's almost entirely seamless and people don't realise what a technological miracle it is. To put things in perspective, to allow you to run MS Office apps in Linux, the Windows APIs have had to be reimplemented from scratch. There are over 10,000 of these APIs, though Wine/CrossOver doesn't do all of them. Wine itself consists of over a million lines of code and 160 libraries. The fact that you can run any Windows programs at all in the way you can is unique to Linux. No, Wine isn't perfect. At the moment, there are enough bugs that we have to concentrate on one app at a time to get it running. The more bugs that are fixed, and the more APIs that are implemented though, the more apps start working.
The Google toolbar issue sounds like a bug. I run IE6 with CrossOver pointed at WineCVS here, so I'll install the toolbar later and see if I can see the problem. Note: it's not a good idea to use IE for web browsing. IE really, really sucks as a web browser, if you use it on Linux it's probably because either like me you need it for web development or because it's just what you're used to. If it's the second, then learn Mozilla. It is miles better, safer and has more features.