Submitted by ExtremeTech takes a look at Ark Linux, and concludes: “Ark Linux holds its own in most respects compared with distros such as Xandros and Ubuntu. But I got the feeling from using it for a while that Ark is not quite as polished – that it needs just a bit more development work to make its overall experience from beginning to end as slick as the other two.”
Nvidia drivers: not every distro wants to ship closed-source drivers with their product so this is no big surprise. Personally I would not pin the fault on the distro for not installing a proprietary driver for me.
Kynaptic is part of the KDE suite of apps. If it’s buggy or doesn’t work properly then its maintainers have some work to do. Why is the author blaming the Ark distro? If he’s saying this particular version of KDE is not stable, well gee golly what do you think the people running Debian Unstable are doing? Testing and improving.
Although I understand that Ark Linux is a KDE distro, I think it’s a mistake at this point to use Konqueror as the default browser.
And if it were a Gnome distro, the default browser would be Epiphany.
I really don’t see how he can pin this as a fault of Ark Linux. It’s like saying “shame on Microsoft for making IE the default web browser.” It’s pointless because it’s so easy to just switch browsers, hardly worth mentioning.
Moreover, KDE’s file manager relates with Konqueror similar to how Windows Explorer and IE relate.
He doesn’t really go into much detail about what makes Ark Linux unique, yet constantly reminds the reader “hey Ark Linux is KDE centric, watch out!” And the “problems” with Ark Linux he describes could very easily affect other distros as well.
I dislike that review and ExtremeTech usually has decent articles.
Edited 2006-08-21 22:49
Nvidia drivers: not every distro wants to ship closed-source drivers with their product so this is no big surprise. Personally I would not pin the fault on the distro for not installing a proprietary driver for me.
He didn’t say anything about the closed drivers, could just as easily have been refering to the fact that the installer didn’t recognize his card and assign the xorg nv driver. At any rate, his issue was that the resolution maxed out at 1024×768, which from a quick look at the ark website is a known issue and requires manually editing xorg.conf to increase resolution capability. I think it’s a valid point in reviewing a distro targeted at casual/home users.
Besides, since Ark ships with xorg 7.1 the nvidia binary would probably cause more problems than it solves right now.
Kynaptic is part of the KDE suite of apps. If it’s buggy or doesn’t work properly then its maintainers have some work to do. Why is the author blaming the Ark distro? If he’s saying this particular version of KDE is not stable, well gee golly what do you think the people running Debian Unstable are doing? Testing and improving.
Kynaptic is a KDE-based app, it is not an “official” KDE app. I beleive it’s maintained by Conectiva and Debian, so if there’s an issue with Ark’s implementation of it then yes, it is an issue with Ark.
>Although I understand that Ark Linux is a KDE distro, I think it’s a mistake at this point to use Konqueror as the default browser.
And if it were a Gnome distro, the default browser would be Epiphany.
And how many Gnome distros have ephiphany as the default browser? Everyone defaults to Firefox.
Not that I care, Opera is my choice, but I don’t think that pointing out the choice of Konq as the default browser in a Firefox world is out of line given the target audience for this distro.
He doesn’t really go into much detail about what makes Ark Linux unique, yet constantly reminds the reader “hey Ark Linux is KDE centric, watch out!” And the “problems” with Ark Linux he describes could very easily affect other distros as well.
I didn’t get that, he simply stressed that it was a KDE-centric distro so if people prefer to use Gnome-based apps, they will have to install them.
He mentioned the Mission Center and seemed to give it a thumbs up, and as far as I can tell from the article, from the ark website, and from the package list on distrowatch (package list, not ranking, I don’t care about dw rankings), that is about the only thing in Ark that makes it unique from other KDE-based distros. Other than that it seems like a fairly stock distro, not necessarily anything wrong with that but it’s hardly cutting edge.
I dislike that review and ExtremeTech usually has decent articles.
I agree the review was pretty vapid, but you seem to be taking it personally.
From the Ark Linux website it doesn’t look like they have much in the way of corporate backing. I’d actually be pretty flattered if my distro were compared with Ubuntu and Xandros, two debian-based distros with heavy backing.
How about comparing it with another RPM based distro in similar shoes and see how it does for polish?
Frankly, having read the review, I’m disappointed. A site with a name like Extreme Tech writing an article which seems aimed at people who’ve never used a computer before:
“Clicking the K button lets you access your application menus, home directory, system settings and tools, help, search, KDE Control Center and various other useful functions.”
I think a screen-shot tour would have been just as useful. The only thing that looked interesting to me was this Mission Control app which is a control panel. Even there the reviewer glosses over it not letting me know why other distros (e.g. Ubuntu or Xandros) do it better or worse.
“Be sure to spend time browsing around Mission Control. It’s a nice control panel that other distributions would be wise to emulate.”
Yikes.
Would that mean it needs a few more tabs?
Disapoiting, uninteresting. Must be all this Summer’s heat waves or… oh well, where can I find real interesting reviews on Linux?
extreme tech TRIES to do reviews on various linux distros every now an then. but really, they shouldnt. they arent a bad site for hardware reviews, and pc builds, custom cases. and anything windows, while its a good site their windwsness shows through in reviews like this.