eWEEK Labs tested two such well-crafted Linux distributions: SuSE Inc.’s SuSE Linux 8.2 and MandrakeSoft S.A.’s Mandrake Linux 9.1. These distributions would be as good as Mac OS X as alternatives to Windows.
Mandrake, SuSE Lift Linux
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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yeah right, i remember me reading an article comparing win9x and Corel Linux on ease of use, eye candy, software 2-3yrs ago
Sure, now they catched it after all
I haven’t had any experience with Suse 8.2 but I have installed Mandrake 9.1 and was very impressed. But I honestly don’t believe that either package is ‘as good as Mac OS X’. Maybe it can be considered an alternative to Windows but I wouldn’t put it in the same league as a commercial desktop Operating System, not yet anyway.
These distributions would be as good as Mac OS X as alternatives to Windows.
Um… this is surely in jest.
Things missing from Linux, including these two mentioned in the article, which prevent it from being “as good as Mac OS X”.
-Drag and Drop software installation/removal
-Organized and user navigable filesystem
-Single advanced audio subsystem (CoreAudio)
-Any semblance of commercial or ACTUALLY comparable free alterative applications. (Audacity is not as good as DP4, GIMP is not as good as Photoshop, Abiword is not as good as Word v.X which isn’t saying much, etc.)
-GUI management of ALL system and application settings/preferences
-Application interoperability, being able to copy/paste/drag-n-drop between any two or more applications running on the system.
-A complete and total ability to NEVER have to so much as see a Terminal command or interface without the specific desire to do so.
If either of these Linux distros are in fact “as good as Mac OS X” I’d be using them in a heartbeat. I’d love to have a desktop machine running an OS as nice, simple, powerful, and complete as the one running on my TiBook, and I’d like to not have to pay thousands for the computer itself. The sad truth of it is that if I want something as nice as OS X today, I have to buy expensive hardware, despite how much I’d like to believe that Linux was actually there already. Why should I have to use a menu editor or create a “launcher” and point it to “/Path/to/SomeProgram&” just to be able to run it. Sure if the distro includes every piece of software I want to run and maintains the latest versions then this is a moderate issue at best, but barring that tremendous amount of effort on behalf of the distro, or wanting to try more than what SuSE or Mandrake may have thought up for me, well then I’m left with all the problems of Linux today on the desktop.
I think Mandrake 9.x is a nice OS, enough for me to use as my main OS, but it can not be compared to Apple. Although maybe in the next few years and once there is better intergration in the OS, it will. But sadly, I won’t be able to upgrade to 9.1, I bought 9.1 from the MandrakeStore and haven’t heard any wind of it since. I e-mailed them two weeks ago and recieved no responce. Ugh, this has turned more into a rant, sorry about that.
We all know you can get SuSE for free, I wonder why the people who do these articles don’t know that.
I installed it for free the other day.
You can’t download ISOs, it’s true, but you can get all the packages, no probs. Well, bar a few for licensing reasons. So that does make Mandrake “more free.”
I really gotta try Mandrake some day, maybe next version.
I do not know OSX, but I know Suse and MDK.
Copared to Xp they are toys for the desktop and I doubt it very much that they are as powerful and easy to use as Apple’s OSX.
I see tonnes of “SUSE is great” – reviews floating around the net. They must be struggling ….
{ I do not know OSX, but I know Suse and MDK.
Copared to Xp they are toys for the desktop and I doubt it very much that they are as powerful and easy to use as Apple’s OSX.
I see tonnes of “SUSE is great” – reviews floating around the net. They must be struggling …. }
Actually XP is the toy. I only use XP for games if I cannot get WineX to work, everything else is done under SuSE Linux 8.2. SuSE has almost caught up with OS X, its close. SuSE just has to tweak a few more things and then it will be completely on par with OS X, IMHO
With toys for the desktop i meant to say that they are all right for geeks who like getting their hands dirty…..
But you have to admit that they are not raedy for a day to day user. Perhaps they might get there a few releases down the track; who knows.
…Linux developers will hire actual HUMAN INTERFACE DESIGNERS that will be able to turn the OS into something genuinely easy to use. The geeks for geeks mentality still exists heavily in Mandrake 9.1.
LInux developers often work for the love of it and THEY will not hire anybody. Maybe the main distributions or IBM will. Plenty of people working on making the interface more consistent. Look at the HIG project.
Stop whining. Start contributing.
I am so tired of hearing all these constant whining. If you don’t like it, don’t use it.
It works for the rest of us.
“With toys for the desktop i meant to say that they are all right for geeks who like getting their hands dirty…..
But you have to admit that they are not raedy for a day to day user. Perhaps they might get there a few releases down the track; who knows.”
Hmm, I am using SuSE 8.2 for all the tasks I have, both at work and at home, and I do not consider myself a geek. My main task is to write contracts and keep in touch with the customers. There are very little annoyances in SuSE for a day to day user like me.
I have an IMAC that runs os 10.2 and a desktop Athlon XP running Mandrake 9.1
two points “get serious” made:
-GUI management of ALL system and application settings/preferences
-A complete and total ability to NEVER have to so much as see a Terminal command or interface without the specific desire to do so.
Mandrake is making strides towards GUI configuration and administration, but it’s by no means on par with the MAC. KDe can be configured to look somewhat like OSX with the kicker and themes and such, but harddrake is no OS control panel.
One thing not mentioned was installation of programs. There’s no dependency hell in OSX, you install a program and ta-da, it works. No all day treasure hunting google and RPM find for depenencies several layers deep simply to isntall one piece of software.
Linux is getting there, it remind me of widnows 3.1 a bit in that a lot is done through the command line, and the gui is slowly improving. i give linux 2-5 years to become user friendly and surpass windows, or fade into the background as a geek hoobyist’s OS.
Anyone that says that Linux can be as good an alternative to Windows as the Macintosh is hasn’t used a Macintosh. Mac OS X is years ahead of Linux and a good bit ahead of Windows. I don’t use it because it is too expensive and it is still a tad slower than Windows (I just got my HP Pavilion ze4300 today), but none the less it is a far greater OS than Linux is now.
That is not to say that Linux is bad. It is a very good OS that shows years of development, but it lacks when compared to OS X or Windows (currently). Hey, I can’t wait until I can get everything I expect in an OS in a free form, but that day isn’t quite here yet.
Plus, quite frankly, RedHat is a much better alternative than Mandrake. I haven’t tried SuSE because I can’t live without my computer for the length it would take to do a network install. Every reviewer always excudes RedHat from these types of things because they don’t market their distro as the “user-friendly” distro. Really, RedHat is much easier than Mandrake or Lycoris to me.
Hey, I’ll gladly herald the day when Linux is as viable an alternative to Windows as the Macintosh is, but that day isn’t here.
you wrote -> LInux developers often work for the love of it and THEY will not hire anybody. Maybe the main distributions or IBM will. Plenty of people working on making the interface more consistent. Look at the HIG project.
Stop whining. Start contributing.
I am so tired of hearing all these constant whining. If you don’t like it, don’t use it.
It works for the rest of us.
—————————-
spare me. i’ve used it. and now quit. i contributed, and now i’ll bitch all i want. we (osx and windows users) are tired of you people always putting up the front that linux is as nice as our os’s. they arent. they have strong points. but not many. i want to use my computer to do work. i dont want to have to spend 5 days setting it up how i like and settling dependencies. take a look at it. unless you like not working, linux sucks. deal.
What he MEANT TO SAY WAS:
if you don’t like it, contribute: draw up how you think the menus etc should work. Write up what your expectations are of the perfect OS, then send them to mandrake or whomever.
I bitched out mozilla @ bugzilla for the worst bookmarks and bookmark handling i’ve ever seen. They fixed 3/4 of my problems in the next version (1.4b)
Some of these people actually DO LISTEN. I wonder how much Open Office.org ppl listen.
If you can’t program, you can certainly use paint brush or whatever, draw your menu system or draw examples of your themes. You can always give advice as to how something would be easier to use–if enough people complain about it, the developers will probably do something about it–maybe not tomarrow, but soon. Instant gratification doesn’t exist for linux (that is unless you’re moving from win9x to linux–god that feels good)
Pencil down what you like about the various OS’s you use and what you don’t like–be specific. Then e-mail EVERY OS DEVELOPER. Some of them may begin to add/modify things to your liking. Some of them may ignore you.
Ok?
ps. I write games & gui apps (mostly for windows)–if I didn’t listen to other people as to how they want things to look, or as to how menus, mechanics, etc are laid out, I wouldn’t have any users of my software.
The problems with Linux are more fundamental than just menu structure, or editing menus, or how pretty the GUI looks in a screenshot.
There are serious flaws in the traditional UNIX system metaphors, which Linux makes special effort to mimic, which cause the design of the system to breakdown when used and operated in the ways that typical Windows or Mac desktops are.
Most of the development today with respect to Linux usability is centered around trying to just give an abstracted afront to the user which is “pretty”, but is still just hiding the chaotic underpinnings of the system and it’s adopted metaphors, or lack there of.
Building solutions to a broken system while still working in the same broken metaphor is, and has been, keep Linux systems from developing into more robust desktop solitions.
Package management is a good example. People have spent years trying to figure out how to deal best with package management. Well I honestly believe that the problem is that people are so fixated on limping along with the very idea of packages at all. There are certianly some things for which packages make sense, however they are few. In most cases a desktop environment which supports something like OS X’s application bundles is a MUCH simpler and more user interactive way to install applications, as well as remove them.
Windows might not be the best way to look at how to do things for Linux because Windows isn’t striving to maintain any sort of UNIX compatibility. However Apple’s MacOS X certainly has paved the way to show what hurdles are in the way of adapting UNIX for the desktop, and further they have shown solutions on how to surmount those hurdles.
A user-friendly UNIX-based desktop OS is already available, and were it not for the requirement of expensive hardware it needs to run, it would be even more widely considered the easiest to use OS on the market today.
Linux developers on the front of adapting the system to the desktop user seem more content with making pretty widgets to take fancy screenshots than they are with really tackling the underlying system metaphor flaws which will always prevent Linux from making a good alternative desktop OS until they are actually addressed.
So the question isn’t, “When will Linux become a good desktop OS?”
The question is, “When will Linux developers actually get serious about making a good desktop OS?”
Who do you think are the almighty “Linux developers”?