“Xandros Desktop is a Linux distribution aimed squarely at the desktop user. It is based on Corel Linux which itself was based on Debian. Corel sold its Linux distribution to Xandros when it decided to stop marketing it. Xandros has delivered a pleasing experience for the newcomer, both in terms of performance and visual appeal.” Sam Varghese reviews Xandros Desktop.
Xandros: a Pleasant Experience
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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The only thing I can troll on is the fact that the author states:
Quote:
“The only downside I could find was the fact that one needs fairly robust hardware to run Xandros – things weren’t exactly fast on my Celeron 466. Life was much more pleasant on a PIII-800.”
End Quote.
Umm, I believe that most of us (I’m considering the osnews audience, and I understand it wasn’t written exclusively for osnews.) have moved past the Celeron 466 era.
Not that is matters, just made me chuckle and I thought I would share.
Anyhoo, I love my Xandros, IMHO it’s number 1!
I suppose the author was comparing his Xandros experience with Windows.
Now once version 2.5.65 of the Linux kernel gets out (the one with the responsiveness tweak), that should help considerably.
I have a PIII 550 w/ 256MB of ram. Of course I use win98, lycoris, and BeOS. I’m not going to update my system until all the new hardware starts to roll out.
I’m waiting for the serial hard drives, 64 bit processors, etc. Oh and some money too 😉
Built mine in Febuary 2000, but the motherboard gave out in about 2 years.
So it was replaced by this freaky mobo with a slot 1 slot for my PIII AND a socket interface, I’m guessing so I can use the newer PIIIs
Ah, but you are past that. A PIII 550 IMO upstages a Celeron 466 a great deal.
Yes, money would be great too!!
😉
Xandros has standardised on the KDE desktop and added its own refinements. This is a sensible move given that KDE has a better set of desktop applications than any other desktop environment.
Note he repeats this KDE comment in lots of places. He fails to mention who is on the Xandros team. This guy ain’t qualified to write a review.
Great review, jbolden1517, who is on the Lindows development team? Red Hats? SuSE? We dont need to know who is on the development teams, we just want to know how the system works and how it compares 2 others. The author did that exactly.
PII 450 here… not my main computer granted, but my only linux box.
Xandros 1.0 ran faster than any other OS I’ve had on here. From what I’ve read, the speed seems to vary a lot even on similar hardware. I guess that could all come down to perceptions.
I am a big fan of Xandros. It’s the best newbie OS by far, and is exceptionally easy to work with. However, it’s Woody Debian, and that means it will be the last distro to update things like the kernel. They’ve already said they’re not going to incorporate KDE 3.1 with Xandros 1.0, and they won’t even commit to it for future releases, although I’m sure it will be available at some point down the road.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=21660&cid=2303301
“PII 450 here… not my main computer granted, but my only linux box.
Xandros 1.0 ran faster than any other OS I’ve had on here. From what I’ve read, the speed seems to vary a lot even on similar hardware. I guess that could all come down to perceptions.”
I agree, I’m also stuck in the past with my P3-450, and Xandros ran quite well on it.
KDE 3.1 is by far the best KDE out there -It’s arguably better than any other desktop GUI (Ok Beos and Amiga fanatics… Settle down).
While I understand Xandros has tweaked KDE for their release (perfectly understandable), I won’t even consider a Xandros purchase as long as they’re standardized on V2.2.2 (as per Distrowatch).
Yopers public relations and business plan are both disasters, as far as I’m concerned, but they did have the right idea by basing a distribution solely around KDE 3.1 (not to mention having the insight to optimize to i686).
Why others aren’t saying “Hey… KDE 3.1 does a lot of the stuff that we used to have to customize in order to achieve”, and repackaging/optimizing their distributions for the newer KDE is beyond me.
Yeah, I know that rumors are Xandros is financially on the brink (along w/Mandrake and a couple of others), but they could make a bigger impact if they weren’t standardized on 1-2 year old software.
My opinion mind you, but not only is KDE 3.1 making people re-assess Linux as a desktop threat, but to not standardize now means that they’ll be seriously behind as 3.2’s already being worked on (or is it 3.1.1? I never can remember such details).
I would consider purchasing Xandros’s personal edition (as I already own Codeweavers) except for this fact -And potentially others would as well. KDE 3.1’s just that good(!)