While none of this appears to be revolutionary now, the fact remains that Lycoris was the first to perfect the “desktop Linux” formula. Mandrakesoft, SUSE, Caldera and even please-use-windows Red Hat helped Linux greatly on its journey toward the consumer desktop, but it was Lycoris who perfected the formula for the first time.”
nope!
maybe in “theory”
but never in reality.
In the always announced “Year of linux Desktop” that various writers declare every January 1rst, Lycoris came along forced the whole community towards a friendler noob friendly approach.
I can only hope the progress in this area improves.
I hope to some day get granny on Linux..
Happy 4th all..
MrX
Yeah, that’s funny. Good joke
Anybody ever hear of Corel Linux??? Even back in ’99 it had better desktop usability than Lycoris has today. So good, in fact, that I still use it on my old PII 350MHz machine with WordPerfect Office 2000 and all of my Loki Games. I’ve never had a crash, even with WPO2000 running. Corel Linux also had automatic Windows networking back in ’99, years before anyone else.
Since we’re all stating opinions here… Lycoris was never more than a second-tier distro, a step behind the rest.
Well, for the first time ever, I decided to go check Lycoris out on the website, all I can say is.. What a Windows clone!
I guess they are lucky Microsoft doesn’t chase after ‘look&feel’ cloners like Apple does.
I guess I can see their logic with this.. try and captivate the windows users and all, but really, I’m not convinced that this is a good way to do it… after all, alot of people seem to dislike the Windows XP look and feel (myslef not being one of them).
When you installed Lycoris, everything worked out of the box (NTFS, Samba, etc…) Unlike Redhat, SuSe and the rest of the gang.
heh, about 3 or 3 1/2 years ago i tried lycoris desktop lx and funny thing is.. it installed and set up my networking and everything on my p.o.s E-machine celeron 1.3 which basically had no linux supported hardware
move ahead to about a year ago i figured i would try the new lycoris at the time…. i tried to install it on my p4 box that i built spacifically to play nice with linux and it couldn’t find my network card, detected my video card wrong, and set up my mouse wrong in the xorg.conf file (maybe xf86.conf… not sure)
anyway, not a big fan if i was gonna go with a newb friendly distor it would probably be simplymepis (everythign works, all plugins are configured, wireless networking works out of the box, and it is very easy to install.
the above post is mine, didn’t mean to be anonymous
The real trick here is for Lycoris to wrestle Michael Dell to the floor and sit on him until he signs a commitment to sell their Linux distribution. People are inclined to buy cases with operating systems in them not shrink wrapped cardboard boxes with 3 Linux cd’s floating in a vacuum.
My 3 year old uses linspire, and loves it, also my wife who doesn’t even know what a CPU is, loves using linspire,but strangely enough she likes suse 9.2 more
I’d say there are a handful of linux distributions out there which are ready for anybody’s grandmother
I prefer Xandros http://www.xandros.com/products/home/desktopoc/dsk_oc_intro.html as a windows clone as it’s compatible with Debian repositories.
The current desktop GUIs can’t be perfected because
1) They suck
2) Nothing can be perfect in a changing world
3) ‘perfect’ is entirely subjective
Oh come on, who’re you kiddin’. They did nothing more than making a distro which wouldn’t make windows nobrainers jump from their seats at the first sight. Which is Good (!) but stands nothing close to “perfection”. Maybe if you think Windows’ gui is “perfection”, but then you’re probably some blind freak without your medicine.
The best desktop experience [mostly fo newbies, granted] has been given for years now by Xandros and Libranet [both Debian-based]. Well, zealots will come and bash me for not having said Ubuntu [also a Debian exploitation], but that’s just because I’m not its fan, not even close.
My answer to ignorants longing for linux “desktop” is let me there, I’ll make a desktop to your needs, whatever that may be. The funny thing with linux is, you really can make that happen [well, not necessarily with gnome but that’s not the point].
Meeting consumers needs is more important than “who made it more user friendly first”. While it’s good that the developers at Lycoris made it easier for other OS users to transition to Linux in the end they failed to continually further develope the distribution on a whole. Though this is really not an issue now since Mandriva acquired the assets of Lycoris this past June which will then use the developement team to further develope Mandriva Linux. Only time will tell whether Mandriva made a wise move acquiring Lycoris assets.
dudes got lycoris on the brain….
not a bad distro, very pretty, worked fairly well… just didnt seem to take off and didnt have MR footing the bills so no huge publicity campaigns and stuff… not bad tho
xandros beats most commercial distros tho….
Actually, Xandros is related to Corel Linux because when Corel abandoned its Linux product, the site linux.corel.com redirected to xandros.com saying that Xandros is taking Corel code & stuff.
Downloaded the then latest Lycoris beta, installed it, connected to Lycoris’ automatic update site; it looked at my system and procedded to *downgrade* everything to a much older release.
Needless to say I quickly returned to Xandros.
Xandros owns the assets of Corel’s former gnu/linux business.
Lycoris has never offered a perfect desktop. As someone who used to develop with them, for about 2 years, I can safely asure you that Desktop/LX was a far cry from perfect.
The ONLY thing Lycoris had, was a spot on concept of what a desktop user friendly OS should be. The reason they sold out, more over, had to sell, was because Lycoris could never make that concept happen.
Sadly many worked within Lycoris with blinders on, having no idea what the user was asking for, what the competetion what and not focusing on providing a solid base to work with.
Desktop/LX is/was a decaying relic being held together with eye candy.
monkey
As always, a nice factual chronology Robert. Very fitting eulogy about the life and death of Lycoris.
Indeed, nicely written Robert.
Thanks guys. Sorry I didn’t get a chance to respond sooner.