LindowsOS is not your traditional Linux distro. It was never meant to be one. LindowsOS (as well as Lycoris) are created to simply power home PC appliances. This is why functionality on Lindows is so limited (always root, very few pref panels, very few options in general). It is meant to be this way. LindowsOS is not for geeks and it was never meant to be a product for them. In fact, you sir, you that you are reading this article right now on OSNews, a site primarily populated by geek readers and developers, you would probably never have a real interest running LindowsOS other than for pure curiosity! I would not suggest buying LindowsOS to any geek/developer. It does not come with developer tools, Lindows.com's marketing line is to NOT advertise the fact that LindowsOS is based on Linux and at the end of the day, other systems can probably give you much more flexibiliy and power over what you want to do with your OS.
However, for people like my brother, my cousins and the rest of the non-geek customers, LindowsOS can position itself favorably, and I personally welcome this product to that specific market. Both Lycoris and Lindows can fill up a niche: The absolutely cheap OS alternative that comes with dirt cheap PCs in the form of a "home PC appliance." Yes, ladies and gentlemen, LindowsOS can make some money and be successful in this niche market. It can even be more successful financially than other "Linux distributions" that you might favor.
Other readers were unhappy by the fact that Lindows.com said that it would run Windows applications, then they said they will support some of them, and then they dropped that marketing line altogether. This situation has angered some readers. For me, it is only natural: WINE can't run all Windows applications because of the hidden APIs, and to even support a few of them well, it needs quite some work specific to these apps (as Transgaming and CodeWeavers taught us). I can clearly "see" Robertson, 1 year ago, having lots of ideas and pushing the idea of running Windows apps among his engineers as this would have been essential to his product, and after months of engineering he would find out that it would not be possible to develop and maintain WINE in such a level with less than 35 engineers (and Robertson not being a programmer himself would add up to having misconceptions of what WINE can and can't do). So, I would assume that the WINE plan was dropped quietly, but people do not forget neither forgive. In this specific issue though, I feel that I understand the incentives and the natural way of things happened overtime behind the scenes so I don't feel bad about it (in fact, Lindows.com have returned a lot of code to the WINE project from the days they were working on it !)
Another issue that people don't feel happy about is the superuser issue. Well, in that issue, I am 95% on Lindows.com's side. Apparently, the first thing you see after you boot for the first time to LindowsOS is the "first time wizard" app where it has a big, blunt button to setup new users. So it is indeed up to the user to click that button and add accounts for the rest of the family or for his/herself. Please do not forget that WindowsXP's default behavior is also the exact same and MacOSX's behavior on the issue does not differ much either. However, there is a problem here. Except that terrible behavior I experienced and described earlier when I created the "eugenia" account, several applications installed via Click-N-Run were not installed correctly. While in order to launch CnR you have to give your root password (and I did so) after installing Star Office 6, only the root user was setup with the application and it was the only user that could run the app. Any other user would get an error message for missing files and it would load the "repair SO6" application. And if that was not enough, a bunch of applications (like KreateCD if I remember correctly) were hardcoded to write their needed files on the /root/ directory instead of the current ~ home dir!! I find this both hilarious and sad seeing the LindowsOS engineers having "ported" and modified applications to behave this way! Again though, I have this feeling that Lindows.com wanted to only have a single user account in the past (root), and now, as people are shouting about the issue all over the place, they are trying to slowly revert back to a multiuser-on_demand scheme, but applications they have written/ported/modified months ago do not play anymore well with the new scheme! I guess, they now pay for their earlier design decisions...
The last issue I will tackle here, is the price of the OS and Click-N-Run. In this issue, I will have to fully agree with the... usual suspects (I mean, whiners ;). LindowsOS+CnR price is outrageously expensive for a "cheap" alternative to Windows. It is $129 USD for LindowsOS and one year of CnR, while you would normally not pay more than $25-$30 USD for WinXP OEM that comes with your PC. This is not just way more expensive than the Windows/OSX and their freeware/shareware market offerings, but it truly feels like a rip off for essential things like "application enrichement of the OS" (which is what makes the OS at the end of the day - BeOS' failure to captivate markets proved that years ago already). Whatever Lindows.com tries to tell you about CnR, I proved and mentioned above that it is not perfect, neither it includes the whole range of quality applications found in the Linux development community and market. CnR feels restricted (not many apps, neither newest versions), limited (not enough CnR-application options, UI is weird at times) and buggy (crashed it twice already, StarOffice was a pig to get it installed with fast cable line). And at the end of the day, we should not be forgetting that the kind of people who will buy a PC with LindowsOS on it, have no clue how to use (the included) apt-get. Their only solution to enrich their OS with needed apps, will have to be CnR, as it is unfortunate that the default installation of LindowsOS has very few applications in it (I wish they would include KOffice 1.2 and a Calculator by default at least!). The whole deal sounds like "we don't put many apps in the OS, so you will buy the CnR services." It looks like a trap and feels like a rip off to me. For this case, that's not the way to go, Mr Robertson.
- "First Contact"
- "Using the System"
- "Click-N-Run"
- "Analyzing the... Lindows Phenomena"
- "Conclusion"
