However, the main problems of CnR are the applications themselves. The quality, versioning and availability of application is extremely limited. There are applications offered there (a lot of them statically linked making them several MBs that they are usually on other platforms) that are _old_. KOffice is offered in pieces (you download each component like KWord or KSpread individually) and it is still on version 1.1.1. Others haven't been updated in many months and the developer tools are also dated. On top of all this, they have changed the naming of applications, so you don't download "Quanta" or "BlueFish" anymore, you download a thing called "HTML Editor" and I end up having two entries on my KMenu/Development with the name "HTML Editor." As for KWord is renamed to WritePRO or something, Gnumeric became Numeric and other such weird stuff that would only confuse users who already know these popular Linux applications.
There are a few Gnome applications offered via CnR like Evolution, Gaim and Gnumeric, but these are not many. Only GTK+ 1.2.10 applications are offered, and they are indeed very limited in number. I am sure that LindowsOS would have more quality applications to offer if they put more people to work in the CnR department. More applications need to be decided and brought in (there are many popular, quality applications missing from CnR), compiled, tested and uploaded to CnR. A very annoying problem I have with Lindows' approach to GTK+ applications is that Lindows uses by default the CRUX theme and it simply looks incredibly BAD (Gnome apps also load with huge fonts - I wonder if Robertson has a vision problem :-). Crux does not go well with Keramik -- it is dark gray and unsuitable to the default KDE theme. Even Red Hat 8 does a great job "merging" the look and feel of Gnome and KDE applications, but Lindows completely fails in that respect, even if Lindows is the "pure" desktop OS in this comparison. I hope Lindows consider use Geramik in the future and offer more Qt and GTK+ applications.
As for the quality of the packages, well, Heroes the snake-game, was badly "ported," it looks for its sound files on the wrong path and it creates 3 entries in the KMenu, while a single entry would be sufficient. Additionally, the /usr/games/ (where all games get installed) is not in the $PATH. Having a different directory for different kinds of executables is a good idea probably, but I don't see why they don't do it for more kind of applications, and moreover, why they don't add these new paths to the main $PATH. Another problem was that some paths on AbiWord was wrong or something, and Abiword was keep complaining about some fonts. The rest 20-25 applications I installed via CnR, were installed fine and with no issues.
Last problem I have with CnR is that you need to be root to be able to install anything. Of course, this is the Unix way (only the superuser can install OS-wide applications), but CnR should find a way to install packages for the specific user as well as for all users. It should at least ask upon installation. This is how MacOSX and WinXP work, and I believe that this way offers flexibility and power to the plain user without having to rely on a sysadmin or break the whole system.
