“I am impressed with Lycoris. They have made a good start at making Linux accessible to the casual user. There is a long way to go yet but the makers should be proud of the work they have done. It is capable of competing with Windows in the home, something which other distro’s of Linux have not yet achieved. However Lycoris could not compete with Red Hat or similar distro’s in a workstation environment. Then again, you wouldn’t use XP Home edition as a workstation OS. Lycoris is to XP Home what Red Hat is to XP Professional.” Read the review at TechSeekers.
Lycoris Desktop/LX Linux – A Step Away from Windows XP
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
… one to find that Linux on the desktop be it with KDE or GNOME is slow! ? I mean I have a celeron 466MHz with 256Mo of ram and Lycoris actually takes a few seconds to load up windows
. Linux is visually ready for destop, but not actually ready too slow, new users will think there’s a problem 
.
my 2 cents
PS: anyone can suggest alternatives to M$ Windows that actually work without lags?
I find Linux too slow on a Dual PII 300mhz setup with plenty of ram (512mb) and a decent ata 66 harddrive. Besides I’m always looking to improve visual performance on a Athlon XP 2100+, so obviously there is a problem, I think that kernel 2.5 is a step in the right direction, since I’ve compiled it on both platforms.
For those who think that OS X is slow, it’s more than useable on a 400mhz G4 with a Radeon or Geforce 2. (Jaguar ofcourse). Linux doesn’t even run comparatively well on a P3 450. (This is not a discussion of G4 vs. PIII, but Linux + X11 + KDE/Gnome vs. X.2)
I’ve got a Celeron 433 with 192MB RAM – RedHat 8 is bordering on credible, but I use LFS – takes a few days to get everything installed (and you get told *everything* you need to do), but once that hurdle is over, it’s my daily desktop system.
I agree, KDE/GNOME are bloated for such systems – IceWM (www.icewm.org) does everything I need – typical screenshot at http://www.japarker.btinternet.co.uk/bloggish/vmware.gif
Yes, that’s another thing, the Linux kernel is getting better and better, and GCC is maturing very beautifully. But it seems that the Window Managers are getting more and more bloated, Gnome actually increased in speed 1.4 to 2.0 but 1.4 was unbearable and 2.0 is hardly useable except on my Athlon XP.
If you really want a system that runs half decent on an old machine you should look at older releases. I have Suse 5.2 which runs KDE 1.0 and it used work fine on my P166 with 32 MB ram. It was very fast actually, faster than Windows 95.
I had a background in Linux which was snowing. On windows even having something similar as a screensaver would have brought the system to a halt.
Why does this review insist on comparing with WinXP? You may have noticed that I keep referring to Windows XP and how Lycoris is so similar. This is not a bad thing for Lycoris, in my opinion it is a good thing. Windows XP is one of the easiest-to-use OS’s ever released (bar maybe OS X) and copying this ease of use is a good thing.
From what little I have seen of XP, it’s a good-enough UI for joe-user, as are most other UI’s. Some suit a given niche, most are generic enough for a lot of users.
Windows is unique in offering *only* the GUI – not even any decent logging facilities to see what the GUI has done. Click “OK” and suddenly 5 settings have changed. Look around, and you’ll find them, but there’s no central log to tell you what’s happened.
Most UIs are also offering an alternative to a command-line option – again, Win* gives the GUI as the only option. [win]ipcfg is the only exception to this rule, AFAIK, though it’s still a step between Registry – TUI – GUI, as opposed to text-config-file – TUI – GUI where the user is in full control, and has absoulute choice over level of interaction.
Anyone fancy backing this up?
xf86cfg gives you some decent options – as (presumably) does Lycoris, from a glance at the screenshot.
All I can say for sure, is that xf86cfg gives safe defaults – the screenshot may imply the same.
I challenge anyone to set the refresh rate to 1000Hz (or even 1000MHz) and blow up their monitor, without editing any text files, only using standard utilities on one of the 10 most common Linux distros (or even the utils from xfree86.org). I will replace your monitor if you can provide substantial proof.
anyone can suggest alternatives to M$ Windows that actually work without lags?
That depends on your needs really. I am very happy with BeOS, it has most of the apps I need.. and I’m developing the ones I really need. But your needs might differ.
If you are happy with linux, I might suggest that you try something lighter. Like blackbox+xterm.
But then again, it won’t get you anywhere near a Windows-like desktop.
There’s also QNX and Amithlon which are both pretty fast on a Cel466 and they have a wide selection of software. QNX doesn’t have that many native apps though. I don’t know how supported your hardware is in alternative OS’s though, but hopefully it is
hmm? as long as you have a fairly new monitor it won’t blow up even if you manage to set the refreshrate that high, it will simply go blank.
The final page of the “review” is the most interesting, to me – it raises the question, “Why make a Linux distro which is so like Windows that you can’t tell the difference” – what is the point?. The old quote, though, Linux is only free if your time is worthless, by itself, is nonsensical. To say Linux is only free if you are only accustomed to pre-installed MS Windows Version XX, with pre-installed MS Office Version XX, and your time is worthless. Changing from Win95 to Win2k is not just a different OS, it is a different concept behind the kernel. Windows costs time to configure, too, as well as cash.
MS pay no heed to home users – their market is business users. Large businesses (as has been pointed out recently on OSNews by someone who hadn’t heard of KickStart) tend to roll their own Windows Distros. For a large business environment such as this, it is far more trivial to configure a *nix-based environment. Microsoft’s only gain is that people are accustomed to it. Let’s face it, FUD isn’t just a marketing proposition, it’s reality – people are fearful, uncertain and doubtful of change. Even IT Managers. The time must be soon, surely, that other organisations follow Telstra’s lead, and realise that the FUD is unnecessary; with *nix workstations comes lower (negligible) risk of viruses, and single roll-out. How many corporate Win XX machines have MS Office installed locally? How stupid is that in terms of IT management? How much is your IT staff’s time worth in updating all of these? As compared to updating apps-server:/opt/openoffice/ once?
I guess part of the problem is that people are trying to compare two things at the same time – the corporate purchaser has (if s/he has his/her head screwed on) very different requirements to the home user. Such superficial reviews are good fun for religious wars, but they do not help genuine decision makers to differentiate between OSes. All that counts is reference sites. If RedHat, Mandrake, even Lycoris, can get some decent reference sites out there (such as Telstra) into public visibility, that will make the difference – these reviews are only read by us geeks.
Try top a different Window Manager, one a little less resource hungry, like Windowmaker or Xfce.
The problem with the Linux and Mac desktop, IMO, is they don’t abstract the GUI from its function. When you copy a file for example, on Linux, Nautilus starts (probably several) threads to do a cp. Instead it should draw that the file has been copied, or is in the process of copying, then issue the cp command in the background. If Nautilus could keep a worklog of what it is doing it might even be able to allow the user to work at their own pace and catch up when there’s free time on the CPU. This sort of thing annoys the hell out of me, which is why I don’t do any desktop developement. I can’t stand GNOME or KDE, and I’m not about to tell an open source developer that they suck ass. I’ll let you guys do that.
Furthermore if you were copying many files, wouldn’t it be faster to use RAM to store the files temporarily while you used several threads to read individual files and several threads to write out whatever was cached in RAM, renicing or limitting processes based on the amount of resources you’re supposed to be using at that time.
See, personally either I’d do the task by using commands like `cp -rP source dest &` and build a proper GUI, or I’d do it the right way the first time and implement the proper threading throughout the program. Where does this half-baked GUI and skinnable obsession come from? I don’t know any unix developers who code like that. Who cares if it looks good until it works. I also think Nautilus is the fault of corps like Ximian that learn how to code on windows and think they know what they are doing. Granted evolution is awesome, and nautilus2 is almost useable (thanks for the scripts dir).
My fav script: burn:
#!/bin/sh
sudo mkisofs -l -o “$1” “$1.iso”
sudo /sbin/hdparm -c 1 -d 1 /dev/hdc
sudo cdrecord -v driveropts=burnproof dev=0,0,0 speed=40 “$1.iso”
sudo eject
right click and burn! Show me the equivalent in windows… Go ahead, show me.
I have never seen a monitor actually “blow up” (as the review light-heartedly claims) – tonight I’ve been throwing a Sun Ultra 10’s output into an aged 15″ VGA monitor with no readable output, and been sure to keep the monitor switched off as much as possible (since its display is pretty much unreadable anyway) but even that 1992 monitor is only in danger of killing itself, not “blowing up”. It’s been in danger of killing itself anyway, recently, just because of its age.
(Can’t even say “they don’t make ’em like they used to” as they seem to keep on improving!)
Gessus. When a person asks for an alternative for M$ Windows, usually they mean a credable alternative. There is really only three choices:
– Mac OSX (Buy a Mac? But it’s still lagged).
– Linux.
– Or just stick with windows.
BeOS/*BSD/SkyOS/et all… are all dead and are nothing but toys for a small minority of geeks.
“Windows costs time to configure, too, as well as cash.”
Well, that depends on who you are
For example a friend of mine recently hard her hard drive tank, and so I spent Saturday afternoon at her house setting everything back up – it cost her nothing but a couple of home-cooked meals. Think she knows anybody who could do that with Linux? Hell, *I* don’t even know anybody personally who could do that with Linux. When people say “Linux isn’t any harder to learn – think about how the Windows learning curve.” Well, the Windows learning curve goes only about as far as the relative, friend, or next door neighbor who can sit down with you and teach you the basics – the Windows learning curve is generally always less because so many people are more familiar with it.
“MS pay no heed to home users – their market is business users.”
Yeah, I guess that’s why they’ve spent so much time and resources developing DirectX, and why Windows XP comes with the ability to work with scanners and digital cammeras, along with CD burning software and a movie maker – all things I’m sure every small business user is going to need.
Although I love BeOS to death (no pun intended), I feel it is unusable. It for some reason won’t connect to the Internet (I’ve been told it isn’t compatible with Linksys routers, but I can’t believe that), and that’s basically my main reason. I also need some programs (Photoshop, Word to some extent) that BeOS simply can’t replace. I know Gobe is good, but I need it to be better. I would love to use BeOS, and probably would if I could get the d@mn thing to connect to the LAN, but without that basic functionality it’s completely useless. And the selection ain’t gettin’ any bigger, either. Just recently I noticed Opera took a BeOS version of their software off their website
. Anybody who could help me would be greatly appreciated.
Sorry to be horendously off-topic, but I just wanted to comment on the BeOS being dead thing I here. Advice: either upgrade your computer or stick with Windows. There’s no shame in it. And if you use NT or 2000 (I think 2000 should run on whatever you’ve got going there), it’s stable and the selection of software is unparalleled. Be proud of your Windows machine (if you’re not running ME like me, that is)!
I sometimes wonder wether all this complaining about the speed of xfree-gnome-kde, is about real speed or about perceived speed. As in, lack of subtle animations, and such.
For example people complained about scrolling in Wordperfect. They altered the scrolling algorithm, and people were happy because it seemed much faster. Eventough according to the developers it was actually a much slower algorithm.
I remember eugenia complaining that you sometimes could see two menus open at the same time, if you rapidly drag your mouse from left to right on the menubar. It’s pretty obvious that mozilla implemented a multithreaded menu here. One thread destroys the old menu, while another thread opens a menu. The singlethreaded version is slower, as the new menu has to wait till the old one is destroyed. Yet the singlethreaded version is visually nicer, and perceived as “faster”. (even if you would make the multithreaded version extremely fast)
AFAIK people were complaining about the speed of konqueror, eventhough it was fast. They added an animation, and people were happy 🙂
I mean, on my machine RedHat8 with Gnome2 is like way faster than WindowsXP. (and less annoying :-)) Yet, WinXP has more animations, backbuffering and other stuff. Result people perceive it as faster than Gnome2.
You’re telling me that you don’t burn home movies, scan in pictures of your favorite comics, or play Quake III Arena at work!? What kind of job do _you_ have?
I admit the bit about the monitor blowing up is a bit excessive. However i did run into a problem where X ran my 15″ monitor at 1400X1050 because it was plugged into my laptop. In any case i will remove it from the review and concentrate on the ease of use of having it as a graphical utility.
You have to remember people prefer things that look nice, why do you think people hang pictures of Ferrari’s on their walland even OS X has that “wow” factor. A command line utility may work all well and good, but people prefer having the look of a graphical utility. The main reason for this is that they have been pampered by Windows. Why would a ferrari owner downgrade himself to a Lada?
I agree that haviing the GUI separate is good. It does make the system a hell of a lot more stable. Then again X does crash a lot and it is slower than having the GUI built in. (I may be wrong on that last point).
Oh and about “linux only free … worthless” bit. I can set up a Windows system in less than 1 hour. The first time i ever installed Windows it too me about 1 hour. With Linux (Suse 5.2) … the first time i installed it it didn’t work. The second time it had more problems. Maybe it was because i was pampered by windows.
Oh and if you have any criticism about the review please post it on the review itself. I check that more often than here.
c, you don’t know what you’re talking about. It is indeed faster to use RAM to cache files that are being read or written and write them out later to disk, but Linux already does this. It is a function of the kernel, not Nautilus. And if Nautilus does start threads to do a cp (which I doubt) then those threads *do* run in the background while Nautilus draws on its windows. Threads run concurrently, that’s part of the definition of threads. What is more likely is that Nautilus calls out to GNOME’s VFS layer which then does the copying itself.
Scheduling file copies and the like to be done later is something that shouldn’t be necessary for Nautilus. First of all, if the system crashes or power goes out, you can have lots of data loss if things weren’t written to disk yet. Also, suppose you tell Nautilus to copy a file, then modify it in emacs. If Nautilus copies the file later, it will copy the modified version. Nautilus should tell the kernel that the file needs copying as soon as possible and leave it up to the kernel to decide when to do it, becuase the kernel knows when every file is modified and it can decide better than Nautilus. Lots of work is going into I/O scheduling in the kernel to make it efficient. 2.5 is better than 2.4 in this regard.
Gnome does look pretty in its Apple-clone form, but that’s hardly enough reason to use it. KDE is even worse — I haven’t seen a stable KDE since the 1.x series and it’s just been getting slower and buggier.
Xfce is a decent choice if you like the CDE design and Enlightenment 0.17 might turn out okay. But there’s little reason not to use something nice and fast like IceWM + Rox-filer. Rox looks and works better than Nautilus or Konqueror and is so much faster and smaller it’s not even funny. IceWM lacks good config tools (IcePref is only halfway there), but once you set it up it’s fast, friendly, and powerful. I’ve found that Windows *and* Mac users adapt much more quickly to Rox+IceWM than to KDE or Gnome — the latter have nicer visual effects, but aren’t nearly worth the cost.
Windows is unique in offering *only* the GUI – not even any decent logging facilities to see what the GUI has done. Click “OK” and suddenly 5 settings have changed. Look around, and you’ll find them, but there’s no central log to tell you what’s happened.
Check out the Event Log, it logs a whole bunch of stuff. And if you want to get really into it you can set up performance counters and other things if you really want to see what’s going on at all times.
The alternativve choice was requested because of a speed issue, if it’s linux use Mandrake with a xfs filesystem and performance will be much improved. However as one earlier stated if BeOS has the apps one needs, there is clearly nothing better for speed and briliance in design and function for a machine that has smaller processing power.
Be works with LinkSys routers…at least ethernet router – I don’t know about wireless.
I agree with Eugenia’s analysis of how Linux distros may shake down (in another thread). I hope Lycoris finds a niche – it’s a good distro.
I think the comments on GUI program developers/development are inspired by the fact that a dedicated GUI program that creates threads to do things (in assembly language?) has more polish and craftsmanship, maybe, than what is basically a front-end to a command line program(a GUI file manager spawning cp commands). Think XMMS compared to GQMpeg, or ERoaster compared to Easy CD toaster Creator. I have thought this was part of the reason Linux lacks polish ever since I have started using it. But, I don’t care, as long as it works well.
On the article, the author missed out a few things.
1) Office isn’t bundled with Windows. In fact, it is hardly bundled with much machines, especially consumer machines running XP Home. Besides, currently, major OEMs are pushing WordPerfect Productivity Pack in this arena. So I don’t understand why is it in the comparison. Especially since you have to pay more for it. And even more especially since Microsoft pushes a different product for the market (Works).
You can download OpenOffice.org for Windows BTW, in the exact same manner as you do for Lycoris (maybe different if you are downloading Lycoris’ version). It is cross platform you know.
2) Not to many people fancy buying PCs at $228. The retail price may be way way different, but the differences is closed on for OEM versions. I doubt Lycoris is free for OEMs, but for the average OEM selling more than a 100 machines a month in the US, it should be around $40-50. That’s 30-40 dollars difference.
The reason why you don’t see very low cost machines running XP from major OEMs is because they don’t sell. Majority of the PC buying community buy machines around $800. There is $250-300 Windows machines, but not from major OEMs.
3) Evolution is by Ximian, not Symbian.
4) I won’t comment on whether Lycoris imitating Windows XP is bad or not, it got boring. Well, it is bad, for a number of reasons.
Besides, commenting on the control panel, most of the applets are actually just KControl applets. They aren’t integrated into the Control Panel the same manner as Windows XP does it.
I don’t understand why you guys think KDE and GNOME is slow. Sure, if you load 6 month old software, it is slow. However now, with KDE 3.1 RC1 (no time to upgrade to the latest RC), XFree86 4.2.1, installed with GCC 3.2 on Mandrake 8.2 running kernel 2.4.18 – wow, is it fast. And to think they are all running on a evaluation version of Virtual PC that would expire in 2 days….
The only thing I see Linux is slow in is booting up. Which is a traditional UNIX problem.
Besides, jbett, comparing Linux on a PIII and OS X on a G4 is very bad. You know, you could run Linux on that G4 and do a proper comparison. By all means, I find KDE through Virtual PC here more responsive than OS X 10.2, and I’m not talking about scroll bars yet. What’s even more faster is the underlying system, which that XServe benchmark proved that Linux was indeed faster than OS X.
Steve: MS pay no heed to home users – their market is business users. Large businesses (as has been pointed out recently on OSNews by someone who hadn’t heard of KickStart) tend to roll their own Windows Distros.
They actually do have home users on their target list. In fact for a long time they had their own line of OS for them. Most Windows users are consumers. However, they spend more money on the business side because it makes more money. Office, for example, is Microsoft biggest cashcow.
Darius: Yeah, I guess that’s why they’ve spent so much time and resources developing DirectX, and why Windows XP comes with the ability to work with scanners and digital cammeras, along with CD burning software and a movie maker – all things I’m sure every small business user is going to need.
DirectX was made not for the average home user, but for the extremely profitable extreme gamer. These guys would pay anything to get a better gaming experience. These guys know more about their hardware and software then they know about they personal lifes :-).
Camera and scanner support was not done mainly because of the home users, rather the corporate market. The corporate market was the early adopters of scanners and digicams, before they were within the price range for consumers.
Von: AFAIK people were complaining about the speed of konqueror, eventhough it was fast. They added an animation, and people were happy 🙂
I wouldn’t actually call it animation, but rather activity to show that it was in the process of doing a task. In KDE 2.0, Konqi just sets out a blank page until the whole command was complete (or aborted). This makes people think it is slow.
Von: Yet, WinXP has more animations, backbuffering and other stuff. Result people perceive it as faster than Gnome2.
The only commercial system I know which has backbuffering is Mac OS X. Windows Xp doesn’t have anything close to that.
Stephen Smith: You’re telling me that you don’t burn home movies, scan in pictures of your favorite comics, or play Quake III Arena at work!? What kind of job do _you_ have?
Wonder if your boss knows this… 🙂
Mark: With Linux (Suse 5.2) … the first time i installed it it didn’t work. The second time it had more problems.
Of course it didn’t cross your mind that Linux had improved remarkbly since SuSE 5.2, especially when it comes to installations.
not me: Nautilus should tell the kernel that the file needs copying as soon as possible and leave it up to the kernel to decide when to do it, becuase the kernel knows when every file is modified and it can decide better than Nautilus.
I remember a debate like this on #gnome at irc.gnome.org. Basically, Nautilus (and GNOME) as a whole can’t use Linux-specific features because they have a lot of users that aren’t using it (especially when Sun finally throws its weigh behind GNOME in Solaris later on..)
emagius: Gnome does look pretty in its Apple-clone form, but that’s hardly enough reason to use it.
Next you would be telling us bash is a Apple-clone… The default theme of GNOME doesn’t look anything like Mac OS. The panel on top of the screen may look like a menubar at first glance, but if you look longer you would notice it doesn’t resemble the menu bar much..
emagius: KDE is even worse — I haven’t seen a stable KDE since the 1.x series and it’s just been getting slower and buggier.
For me it is quite the opposite. Since KDE 2.0, it has been getting faster and less buggier. The least buggiest version I have used is 2.2.2 which is, for me, far more stable than 1.x. I’m using 3.1 RC1 on Virtual PC right this minute, and I haven’t notice a bug all that major (I notice two minor bugs, but they are fixed already).
And when it comes to speed, each new release, it gets faster. Unless yoour poor soul is stuck with 32mb or 16mb or RAM, it gets faster. The major problem being is that it is taking more and more RAM (especially the default KDE 3.1).
What home user wants to use a command line? Everything should be configurable and executable or acessed by some form of menu or dialog box. User interaction? Do you know how many people were confused with simple dos commands back in the 95-98 days, let alone the people who are stil confused using windows? There’s a reason M$ has all those wizards for just about every single task possible, from setting display option,s to setting up a home network.
rajan r: The least buggiest version [of KDE] I have used is 2.2.2 […]
That’s interesting – maybe this is part of the reason why both Lycoris and Xandros have decided to stick with 2.2.2 for the time being.
To rajan about Speed:
The problem that most users have with speed on linux are directly related to the fact that some distros (Redhat people Redhat!) do NOT take the time to activate the proper hdparms in the /etc/sysconfig/harddisks file for IDE drives.
BTW, before everyone flames me off the board, this is not something a user should have to worry about. I am liking SuSE less and less because I use Gnome and it is very KDE centered however the thing is tweaked pretty hard and runs very fast out of the box.
With Redhat not only do you have to edit a file to get the best performance but if you have any other performance issues then every Redhat person will tell you to edit this file even if you said that you have already got DMA and other settings turned on. They are completely focused on it to the point of ignoring everything else. However, they are correct that it is the most likely culprit.
I had real issues with RH8 and speed until I tweaked out the settings in this file and my laptop pretty much sings now. I would love to see some comparison numbers from the folks who think it is slow. My impression goes like this.
KDE 3.0 — slow, decent response, but slow launches and even slower desktop initialization times. It is option rich to the point of being very bloated if the Control Center gets anymore crowded they are going to need tour guides to show users where the heck things are.
KDE 3.1 — hope it is better have not tried it.
Gnome 2.0 — fast but sparse on options and native apps — on a redhat 8.0 with Nyqust’s gtk2.0 rpms for many apps it is very nice but still lacking in some basic features like menu editing and file type handling — Nautilus is just as fast in my timing on my box as Konqueror in KDE 3.0 by the way just not as nice in features.
Icewm — nice but just not a decent replacement for a desktop environment.
XFCE — if you can put up with the CDE look and feel then it is a damn decent lightweight desktop.
GNUstep — if you can actually get this damn thing to compile and work right and then set your gtk, gtk 2.0 and qt themes to all have a NextStep theme look then you can have a very unusual but very usable lightweight semi-desktop.
Enlightenment — Still waiting for the latest.. but very curious.
If it’s configured properly, it is NOT slow. I run it on a PII-400 and it kicks the crap out of every other OS ever on the same system.
Jonathan, yeah, I think the main big problem here is the fact that distributions don’t know how to optimize their distributions for speed. My personal hand-tweaked stuff is way faster than Mandrake 9.0’s stuff. Even though it almost the same versions.
Maybe tommorrow, my last day of legitimacy with Virtual PC, I would install 2.5.x which would speed up things even more.
I am liking SuSE less and less because I use Gnome and it is very KDE centered however the thing is tweaked pretty hard and runs very fast out of the box.
If you like GNOME, SuSEland isn’t for you :-). However, their KDE installation is one of the best tweak ones out there. Just one problem with it which is fonts. Which would/should be fixed by 8.2. Another small tiny problem is the fact YaST2 and KControl isn’t integrated….
KDE 3.0 — slow, decent response, but slow launches and even slower desktop initialization times. It is option rich to the point of being very bloated if the Control Center gets anymore crowded they are going to need tour guides to show users where the heck things are.
I haven’t notice much performance issues running it now over Virtual PC. The desktop launch *seems* slow, but there is a patch, I think I got it from kde-look.org or apps.kde.com which replaces the start up stuffs, so it only start-ups the essentials, and then when the desktop is loaded, the rest is open up. It really makes you feel that the desktop initialization time is way faster, but actually, it is more than a second slower :-).
As for the bloat, I don’t think it is bloated. I think cluttered is the proper word. Remember Mac OS 9.0? That is cluttered. It is pretty easy for someone to redo the whole thing, the problem is nobody is trying. Everybody is saying “This is bad” but offers no input on making it better. Sure, we all know it is bad, but we all don’t know what we should do about it.
I’m writing a long UI recommendation which should be finish 2-3 months after the release of KDE 3.1 that focuses on clutter removal. KDE isn’t bloated. It is precieve that way because it is slower than light-weigh low-feature WMs and because it is cluttered.
XFCE — if you can put up with the CDE look and feel then it is a damn decent lightweight desktop.
With theming, you don’t have to put up with the looks. It is a pretty decent project, but frankly, it is not suited for me.
GNUstep — if you can actually get this damn thing to compile and work right and then set your gtk, gtk 2.0 and qt themes to all have a NextStep theme look then you can have a very unusual but very usable lightweight semi-desktop.
Which ironically, GNUstep isn’t a desktop :-). It is like saying “One day, I would try Qt, but it is so hard to instal, blah blah blah” :-). Window Maker is currently the most used among that group even though besides the looks, it has no real technical connection.
The reason why Lycoris is sticking to KDE 2.2.2 is because they spend too much darn time patching up this version and integrating it with their product, it is a waste throwing it all away. I have no idea why Xandros stuck with KDE 2.2.2, but for Lycoris, it is pretty much a business decission. They can’t move to KDE 3.x until they badly need to.
“Gnome 2.0 — fast but sparse on options and native apps — on a redhat 8.0 with Nyqust’s gtk2.0 rpms for many apps it is very nice but still lacking in some basic features like menu editing and file type handling — Nautilus is just as fast in my timing on my box as Konqueror in KDE 3.0 by the way just not as nice in features.”
Part of the reason I use GNOME2 is because it seems to try and do something else besides clone the Windows/Internet Explorer user paradigm. Part is because it really seems like all the good Apps are GNOME native apps, like Evolution, Rhythmbox, Abiword, OpenOffice, etc. And another part is because the system has a nice mechanism for type handling and menu editing, which you’ve claimed it can’t do at all. I like being able to go to “applications:///” in Nautilus and edit my GNOME menu in a spatial manner, it’s like having the Apple menu back from OS 9.
-Nathan
This distribution must address the sluggishness of X Windows or they will fail completely.
Here are some problems:
1) After installation, the computer seems to format the manual pages for hours (Red Hat does this, too). I don’t understand why this needs to ever happen but every Linux distribution does it.
2) Starting up the web browser we think the computer died and try to start it again and again, and it does eventually start but every other click pops up errors.
3) The later beta builds (like build62) seem to randomly crash X Windows using VIA PLE-133, Savage 4, ATI Rage chipsets.
4) The control center just dumps you into other applications that take tens of seconds to start after clicking the link. Worse, the password is not remembered when clicking “remember password”.
I hope they’re not really selling Lycoris for new users who buy the Wal-Mart, Tigerdirect.com, and Microtel PC’s beacuse I have exactly those configurations and they run Lycoris at the slowest speed I’ve ever seen. Even Red Hat is faster.
Kris
I like Gnome 2 as well and use on SuSE here at work — god SuSE has no clue on how to set up a proper gnome environment and on my Redhat 8.0 laptop for home.
Menu editing I think through the file browser is counter-intuitive and better handled through right click actions in the gnome menu itself. That is a personal choice and in Redhat 8.0 the biggest Gnome focused distro menu-editing it is turned off by default. Finally the additions of categories and sub-category additions have only recently been fully handled through the Nautilus interface. Try adding a new category or folder under Applications:// and see what you get. Nothing.
I am sorry but with the file types and programs utility I am able to hide app open actions I do not want to see and add custom actions but that is not the same as being able to add, delete and edit file associations at will. This is coming.
I like Gnome because it is not as crowded to borrow rajan’s term and it is faster and as you say most of the apps I know and love are gtk/gnome based. On top of that, if you use Redhat 8.0 you can hunt and find gnome 2.0 rpms of apps like rhythmbox with gst stuff of course, gnumeric and abiword.
However, I understand its limitations as well. BTW, I do not MS clones either but I still use Evolution and Gnumeric. :->
Am i the only one who spent some time to tweak his OS?
I was running Gnome1.4 + GMC (old gnome shell) + Galeon on my old K6/333+256MB and feel it fast enough for everything.
I remember to have installed Mandrake7/8 and Redhat7 and feeled them very slow, so i thought something was wrong with that distros and i installed Debian2.2(later upgraded to Woody), and then tweaked everything to make it faster enough.
Now that’s my mother’s computer, and last week i ran Gentoo on it with KDE 2.xxx, and it was as fast as the Windows she was running (off course apps loaded slower from the cd).
I don’t know, but I would imagine the Lycoris on the Wal-Mart computers is the last stable release.
Part is because it really seems like all the good Apps are GNOME native apps, like Evolution, Rhythmbox, Abiword, OpenOffice, etc.
It is interesting to point out that all these apps, except Rhythmbox don’t use any GNOME 2.0 and/or GTK+. Plus, OpenOffice.org works in the exact same way on KDE as on GNOME, and it doesn’t at all use GNOME-related libraries. It may at one point be in GNOME Office – blame Sun for that.
Besides, after using Rhythmbox, I don’t see how this app is good. It is still a iTunes clone, a unstable and underfeatured iTunes clone.
And another part is because the system has a nice mechanism for type handling and menu editing, which you’ve claimed it can’t do at all. I like being able to go to “applications:///” in Nautilus and edit my GNOME menu in a spatial manner, it’s like having the Apple menu back from OS 9.
Which unfortunately isn’t completely intuitive. Hardly anybody knows this. I only knew this from complaining at Footnotes a few weeks ago. If I could know this from a menu option, then great! But this is still on the other hand still power users-only. Maybe I would have find out about this from the documentation, but it is a pain to read them. KDE’s have a much better user documentation, even though right now it is in bad need of reorganization.
Before my machine blew up, I was using GNOME 2.0 on Mandrake 8.2, as a reminder. I’m not bashing GNOME. 🙂 But when I use GNOME, I find most of my apps aren’t GNOME ones, like Opera, KOffice, KDevelop…
Besides, after using Rhythmbox, I don’t see how this app is good. It is still a iTunes clone, a unstable and underfeatured iTunes clone.
I don’t know when you last used it, but I have rhythmbox playing mp3s here for several days, no crashes, eventhough it’s a pre-alpha something. It is alot more userfriendly than something like xmms, and has more features, such as easier searching for something, multiple playlists
Btw, you can have abiword,galeon,gaim for gnome2/gtk2, evolution just started. Btw, evolution1 and abiword1 are still native gnome applications, like the original poster stated. He didn’t say gnome2 native..
Which unfortunately isn’t completely intuitive. Hardly anybody knows this. I only knew this from complaining at Footnotes a few weeks ago. If I could know this from a menu option, then great!
Uh, that’s great, but you can edit the gnome menu by right clicking in it since gnome2.0.2. On the other hand I think it’s pretty intuitive to do it through applications:// But heck, it would be better to be able to rightclick on the applications menu, and select “Open in filemanager” or something like that. (like you have in windows)
What I would like to see from the guys at Lycoris is better access to a wide range of supported graphics hardware – compiling against the kernel is not an option for a home/desktop user;)
“What I would like to see from the guys at Lycoris is better access to a wide range of supported graphics hardware – compiling against the kernel is not an option for a home/desktop user;)”
What i would like to see is something which does the ‘compiling against the kernel’ for you. Like an RPM that when you install actually compiles the driver into the kernel for you.
Also it would be nice if there was a check to see if the graphics card that was compiled in the kernel is still present when booting up. If not then it should boot to a VGA screen instead of just crashing X.
Oh and how do you remove a graphics driver from the kernel?