“Would you give your grandmother a PC with Linux as its main OS? The developers of a Linux startup, Lycoris, have been trying to make the answer a more likely “yes” with their Linux package.” Read the review at OnLamp. On a related note, Update 2 of Lycoris Build 44 should be available in 1-2 weeks.
Lycoris – A Linux OS Good for Grandma
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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<The Network Browser, an enhanced version of Konqueror that allows Desktop/LX to seamlessly integrate into the file sharing on Windows networks.>
Do they donate all those changes back to the KDE community?
= Click and Run?
I wonder if it’ll be subject to a $100 p/a fee as well..
No, IRIS comes with the purchase of the Desktop/LX. It is not a per annum fee. When you purchase the distro, you get the right to use IRIS automatically. You are free to install the distro on all your home PCs (unlike Lindows), but IRIS will only be activated for one PC. You are free to use the OS without the use of IRIS if you want. IRIS is merely for the convienience of users who can’t install RPMs by themselves or they do not know how to satisfy dependancies.
Click-n-Run on the other side, comes for free for only one year, after you purchased Lindows itself. If you have gotten Lindows through a WalMart PC or via another OEM source, only then you will need to purchase Click-n-run seperately for $99 per year.
As you can see, IRIS is more flexible.
I have to say, that Click-n-Run and IRIS are services. And these companies need to survive. They do not sell enough copies to keep them alive. And especially Lycoris, has done an *outstanding* job to bring Linux closer to Joe User, and I recognize that. I hope you too.
I really do not get it why people over at the Lycoris forums who they jump up the horse when they have to put their hand in their wallet and pay for a product. These are companies we are talking about. They have employees who have families. All the good additions, clean ups and debugging in the linux land are done by companies, not by individuals. The “open source community” only wants to code new features. No one wants to debug their sh*t, we have Red Hat, SuSE and Mandrake employees for that, right?
What I am trying to say is that there are companies who are doing some real work, as in the case of Lycoris, need a pay back for their work. This means that you might have to pay for their product, and this is absolutely fine. And normal.
All the community-only projects, like Gentoo, Sourcemage, Crux and Debian, are nowhere near the ease of use of Lycoris. Therefore, the Lycoris do have something unique that they can and should sell.
Time is 12 AM in the night over here and I just got some emails back and forth with Joseph, the Lycoris CTO and main coder. He still works at this time. Now tell me, doesn’t this guy deserve to see his company stay alive?
There is constant confusion regarding “free software”, “GPL”, “LGPL”, “BSD license”, “Netscape license”, “yet another license” and “open source”.
Does the average Linux user know the differences/similarities in all of the above?
And at the same time there is still a big shift going on from the dotcom era of “free” to the current reality of “pay”.
It is even more important for Lycoris to put out clear and simple messaging to the Linux community on why Lycoris Desktop/LX is “pay”. And how this is a good thing for the Linux community.
As Desktop/LX is a very fair price, of $30-$40, I think some messaging could be added to the Lycoris site to make things more clear for longstanding Linux users/fans.
Lycoris will do its best to find a viable business model. If there is too much resistance to “pay” in the Linux community, then these are not your customers for today.
I hope Lycoris is able to find a way to stay alive. Desktop/LX looks pretty good. I think I’ll have to check it out when I get the Linux box finished. Which will happen after I send that graphics card to a certain someone 😉 Tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow.
#m
Lycoris is currently looking for funding.
Lycoris positions their company and Desktop/LX as “Linux for everyone”.
“Everyone” is not a market segment. The target customer has to be precisely defined. You’ve got to know who this person is. In detail.
Is it the Linux experimenter looking for ease of use? Is it the budget PC buyer looking for an affordable OS? Is it a Windows PC owner looking for cheap OS for an additional machine? Is it the Indian government looking for a great simple to use OS for their cheap PC platform?
Why would I buy Desktop/LX vs. a different flavor of Linux?
I’m touching on just a few topline points. Lycoris doesn’t have anything I could see on their website that positions the company and the product very clearly.
For Lycoris to be as successful as possible is raising their seed round / 1st round, they need to have crystal clear marketing and a well understood and mapped out sales process. In order to have such a sales process, their target customer must be identified and understood.
I’m sure Lyrcoris is working on the above as part of getting ready for their funding roadtrips, short or long as they may be.
Godspeed.
#m
While it’s great to see a company trying to get Linux out to the general users, the problem is that in the Linux comunity there is far too much re-inventing the wheel. We have more Linux distros than we need but until the average user can walk into a shop and purchase software and hardware that will be easy to install and configure then the average user is not going to be that interested in Linux. Look at what happened to Be, great OS, easy to use, but limited developer/software/hardware support. Whatever the OS behind the desktop is, lets learn from the mistakes that have gone before. Linux needs more commercial applications and more support from hardware vendors.
Linux people should move out of grandma’s house and get married instead of badgering her into validating their unseemly OS
I think I’ll never be a Linux maven.
I needed a solid back up OS that could babysit my Windows, had full functionality, little extra fat, and ease of use. So far Lycoris fits the bill.
I just cleaned up my senior partner’s laptop and wanted to add stability and survivability.
So I made room for an extra partition, and put in a minimal Desktop/LX: just the OS + a few basic apps, no networking, no multimedia, no nuthin’ else.
Then I took a snapshot of the freshly installed Windows OS and applications.
Now if Windows hit the fan, I can boot in Linux and use it to restore the full content of the Windows and applications partitions, without even touching the data.
At home I use Lycoris much more.
I already have some relative of “wine” (???) in place to run certain Windows based media players. No idea how it works… I just fired up this automated OS installer, then blasted off this automated demo which went off to the net and grabbed several .dll’s it needed.
I am even tempted to try some virtual machine layer and use Windows off Linux – but that’s way above my knowledge level.
First I need to understand how to install new programs properly… I have the new Mozilla and it works well, but I’d be darned if I know how to put an entry in the regular Desktop/LX menu… the regular KDE menu editor (which I knew nothing about until last week) appears not to be there, and I’m sure it’s so by design!
I did all this off a free downloaded CD image (*ONE* CD holds the whole thing), but I am definitely going to open my wallet to them, just as I did (and likely will keep doing) to Mandrake.
We barefoot users should count our blessings, and also the money MS costs us either directly and as lost productivity, and look at commercial Linux companies as the only possible bridge of the usability gap.
What’s happening with the Xfree86’s font issue in Lycoris? Does anybody know? Have they done something about it?
It seems Lycoris has assembled something easy to use.
To make a distribution idiot proof requires a lot of effort.
Of course they need to be payed. They are probably not driven by the same ideas as RMS, but one must recognized that the product looks nice and promising.
A proof of concept. There is no stopping a group of volunteers to make something similar, but more in the lines of FSF. But this rarely, if ever happens. Why?
I have tried Lycoris – it isn’t the distro for what I want to do (some high level development stuff along with some scientific work, and I *love* Window Maker), but I can see that an enormous amount of work has gone into it, and Lycoris deserve credit for what they have done.
It is easy to install (easier than Windows IMHO), and the surprising thing was when I looked at my windows partition, many of the applications ran through Wine quite easily. Frankly, I was impressed! The usability of it is little different from Windows, though still behind the old Macs.
I sincerely hope they do well.
“Look at what happened to Be, great OS, easy to use, but limited developer/software/hardware support.”
You cannot compare BeOS to Linux: Linux hast the widest developer support, pretty good software support and a million times better hardware support… well, only ease of use remains of your points. I really don’t see how you manage to mention both OS in one sentence…
to joopie:
If you downloaded the latest beta version of lycoris. then insert the cd (take it out and insert it again, so the autorun opens up). Then – look at the autorun page, and find and install the kmenueditor. It will help you.
to alex:
I don’t know what, specifically, they have done, but the latest beta (17/07 ISO) has truly good looking fonts.
Anonymous wrote:
> You cannot compare BeOS to Linux.
Of course I can compare BeOS to Linux. Your point about Linux having pretty good software doesn’t relate to my point that that software is not available in the same way as software for windows, i.e. off the shelf. Also, the software available for Linux seems to me to be not as good as similiar software available for Linux, though progress is being made. Again with hardware support, while it is getting better, it is still playing catch-up to Windows because it is not directly supported by hardware manufacturers. Both of these were also a failing of BeOS.
I think this is just a typo, but I believe it is build 45 that is being updated. LOL, at least it’s build 45 update1 I have now.
As a free software advocate, I highly encourage any kind of payed service. I don’t know what drives people to believe that they have a right to download stuff for free.
I pay around 5$ per GB traffic for my server (ok, it can be cheaper but still…) and one distribution download is about 500 MB at least. Now add all the countless software downloads. If you want comfortable, fast and reliable downloads, even 99$ for a year is a hell of a deal!
I guess many people have problems with this new “pay for service” spirit because now they actually have to pay, while with “pay for license”, they could simply warez it.
Why not pay for the air we breathe?
It is true that the Lycoris fonts are looking really bad (characters almost render on top of the other). This was the reason I emailed Joseph last night. I truly hope this is fixed before the release of Update 2.
I recently tried Lycoris (beta build 45) for a computer that my sister needed and I was very impressed. The install was a snap and my sister (age 10) loved it. The interface is easy to adjust to from windows and I would consider buying it and using it at home once things are smoothed out like the fonts.
I think payment is a good idea as the money goes into product improvement. I would rather pay for a good Linux distro than use a poor one for free. I buy boxed sets of the distros I like every once and a while to support the development. Linux needs commercial support to go mainstream, which is what some of the new distros intend to bring. Maybe some of these easier distros will get the OEM attention and market share we need to attract more software and game developers to Linux. I would rather have these options available at a price than not available at all. Such is progress.
This is wrong, nobody stops you from installing and uninstalling whatever you want. But if you want to use their servers and the software they package for you, then you have to pay them.
Nobody can stop you from modifying the installer software and finding someone else to provide you a server and packaged software. Unless the installer is proprietory of course, then it would be bullshit (you could still decide not to use it and use APT, RPM, compiling from source or any other method of installing).
Not for install / uninstall, but for the ability to do so without having to be botered on where are the files, what dependencies they have and if they install correctly or not, breaking everything or running seamlessly…
Of course, if you know how to do it without any problem, then you don’t need the service…
AFAIK, the service is usefull, specially if they make a “corporate” server that can serve the install process inside a corp and propose updates of “machine” images…
That was just an interisting idea… feel free to implement it in any distro…
Cheers…
Luis Ferro
P.S. and remember… ideas aren’t copywritable or patentable…
Straight forward installation is not a luxury item from my point of view.
Kevin
> Straight forward installation is not a luxury item from my point of view.
It becomes a luxury when other similar linux distros haven’t anything similar that can handle dependancies.
Sure, Gentoo, Debian, Slackware have good tools, but they are either command line, or you need to wait to recompile them which costs time. As for Red Hat and Mandrake, their GUI tools do not resolve dependancies automatically.
Therefore, IRIS and Click-n-Run do have an edge over the competition. Therefore, they will ask money for the service. Why not do so, when they do have something to sell that grandma could not do that otherwise?
Do not forget who the userbase of Lycoris and Lindows is. IT IS NOT the Linux users. It is the clueless Windows users. And yes, IRIS and Click-n-Run is a great service for this kind of users. And that costs. Naturally.
BTW, the selling of such a service becomes a must for these companies, when the sales of their distro are not enough to keep them alive. They have to sell something that can keep them afloat. Like Apple. They sell everything. They have to…
Well they better do something about it or they can forget about me installing Lycoris
“Sure, Gentoo, Debian, Slackware have good tools, but they are either command line, or you need to wait to recompile them which costs time.”
There are graphical GUI’s for APT. The whole point of APT is to separate the backend from the frontend, apt-get is just one frontend. Red-Carpet can also work with APT, not very good though. :/
Oh and Lindows is using APT AFAIK, not sure if their installer would work with usual APT archives though. Maybe they have done something different, but I guess nobody really knows what Lindows does. =)
BTW, the selling of such a service becomes a must for these companies, when the sales of their distro are not enough to keep them alive. They have to sell something that can keep them afloat. Like Apple. They sell everything. They have to…
Yes!
The First Law of Economics: There is no such thing as a free lunch.
And there really is no such thing as free (beer) software. It costs to produce, maintain, and distribute. If Lycoris doesn’t charge today, they won’t exist tomorrow.
My next profound truth: Knowledge is good.