SilliconValley has an article about LindowsOS 4 while PCPRO says that “LindowsOS 4.0 ‘takes the pain out of Linux'”.
Lindows.com Upgrades OS with 4.0
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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It’s simply just principle I will never buy a Linux distro that so desperately attempts to dethrone Windows by becoming itself a clone of Windows, or Windows like. Besides the name Lindows just freaks me out, I’d never be proud to run something named Lindows.
First topic on this thread is a flame of Lindows. It’s okay to flame Lindows and Microsoft but not Mac or BeOS, right?
I’m just curious as to how one goes about creating and releaseing a Linux distro. Say, if one wanted to base a distro on an existing distro, do you need to pay the company of the existing distro to use it? It’s a little confusing to me as to what is GNU software and what isn’t in some of these distros… (in the case of Lindows, I understand that they have some proprietary software that they distribute with their distro, but I don’t quite understand how they do it)
You might be interested in looking at Linux from scratch.
They are trying to give a choice to people who want something besides windows, but don’t want much hassle. We all want that so why complain when somebody does it.
It’s prefectly legal to take the non-propreitary parts of a distro and create a new one based on it. You could, for example, make a “pretindows”, by taking the portions of Lindows that are under a free software license, such as GPL, BSD, MIT/x11 licenseetc.., and packaging it up.
Some distros, such as RedHat, have parts that they hold trademarks on. You would need to remove all RedHat-trademarked logos, etc.. in order to make a distro based off it.
In 6 months we will have the 10th. Their version numbers don’t mean anything.
If they wanna unseat MS on the desktop OS solution they should forget the unusable ugly and buggy KDE, that’s what I think
Linux From Scratch is an interesting solution for the geek but it is soooooo long to build its own distrib
If they wanna unseat MS on the desktop OS solution they should forget the unusable ugly and buggy KDE, that’s what I think
And what should they use instead? I find KDE much more useable than Gnome and much less buggy. To each their own though.
I find KDE too heavy to use, I don’t like the ugly task bar, and because of its heavy weight it is buggy
I don’t have any other solution excepted Gnome but that’s true it is also buggy
“They are trying to give a choice to people who want something besides windows, but don’t want much hassle. We all want that so why complain when somebody does it.”
That wasn’t exactly my point. Let me clarify, the principle of the matter is that if they want to make an alternative OS then they should be original and be creative. I use my Mac OS and Windows XP, and in the odd times I use Red Hat 9. I don’t think that I really bitch when it comes to operating systems for no apparent reason. The three I listed are viable professional products, Red Hat 9 is more or less like Lindows, but without the crappy name and the crappy UI.
I find KDE really too heavy to use, I don’t like the taskbar and because of it’s heavy weight it is buggy.
I don’t have any other solution in mind excepted Gnome, it is also buggy but faster and I like their Nautilus explorer.
My favorite desktop solution is to use IceWM with Nautilus, it is fast I have no prob with it.
Otherwise it would be so nice to have the Deskbar/Tracker of BeOS.
If they wanna unseat MS on the desktop OS solution they should forget the unusable ugly and buggy KDE, that’s what I think
And what should they use instead? I find KDE much more useable than Gnome and much less buggy. To each their own though.
My solution woudl be to forget about KDE and Gnome, along with X11, and come up with something that doesn’t suck.
From everything I’ve heard, Lindows 4.0 is a good distro for newbies. It does the basics very well and doesn’t require a lot of background Linux knowledge.
The great thing about Lindows is that it might actually bring in a bunch of new Linux users. Even if they are running Lindows, they are still running Linux which will increase demand for software and good drivers for ALL of us. Also, I could easily see Lindows as a stepping stone to a more advanced Linux distro (a Lindows box is pretty much guaranteed to be compatible with any recent Linux distro).
P.S. Chris, I use Gnome on Libranet 2.8 (plus a bunch of sid stuff). I used to think Gnome was buggy, but it turned out to be a crappy soundcard driver. Got a Soundblaster Live and things are rock solid lately. Just my personal experience.
With the blocking, this actually seems like a good solution for libraries and coffee houses. Boxes are cheap enough.
Roy,
What difference does it make if they ever leave Lindows for a geekier distro? The only thing that matters is that more people move to Linux so that Linux will get more native support from hardware manufacturers and software developers (like Quicken).
I’ve run everything from Gentoo to Debian and everything in between. Since Lindows is built on Debian, I think it has promise. And, if Lindows can satisfy my needs better than other distros, I wouldn’t feel less geeky for running it. I’d feel smarter.
My problem with Linux is that I change distros so frequently, I don’t have a cornerstone. Here today, gone tomorrow. I rely on Windows as my cornerstone. You know, what I mean is that I keep all of my important documents on my Windows partition. Everything on my Linux partitions is expendable. That’s why I don’t want to pay for a Linux distro. I know as soon as I buy one, I’ll want to try another one and wipe the one I just bought. The point is if Lindows can replace Windows as my cornerstone, I’d buy it. Somehow I doubt that it’s there yet.
Daren… I understand your view… for me, Lindows has been my cornerstone, it works… and I have leand much of Linux over all… and it is mostly because I feel comftable messing with it… using apt-get… and looking for info on Linux… Now, there have been times when I haved feelt that sometimes the info I find has been made asuming that the user nows Linux, for explanations are not clear to me to many times, since I am new to Linux… but thing are inproving…
All distros that want to get in to the desktop market, because there is a market, will have to make things easier for the everyday Joe… if not only geeks will use it (no insult intended)… so those distros that are mimiking Weakdoze are not doing it bad… I see it an there is no reason to bash X distro for it (because Lindows or Xandros… or Suse, or KDE/Gnome are not the only ones)… If it makes the user use it, better use it… :p
At the end of the day… eider inprove ease of use or die… Every one distro will make use of usefulness… so use wichever you feel comftable with… and make shuare your distro doesn’t stay behind…
Yup, you are right. It really doesn’t matter if people switch from Lindows to another distro. Lindows has received a lot of flak from the Linux community over that last year for being a dumbed down copy of Windows. My main point was that what really matter is that Lindows will bring in more Linux users.
I personally enjoy tweaking my Linux box, so Lindows isn’t for me. However, I understand that I’m in the extreme minority. I’m a geek. Linux has a lot to offer non-geeks and Lindows is making Linux more accessible to them.
I think now is a very exciting time for Linux. I can currently do just about everything but play games on Linux (game availability sucks).
As for important files, I really don’t have many on my home machine, but I do keep a 30GB FAT32 partition for Linux files that I want to keep around when I change Linux distros.
LindowsOS would be best suited copying OpenTracker, and improving upon it.
It is already very similar to the way windows feels, and it is very nicely and modularly coded. Albeit OpenTracker uses a great deal of special BeOS-only features, I’m sure the million$ at disposal for Lindows.com would manage to add those features to LindowsOS.
I would really like to get a few million$ behind the Zeta project, with some more (and better) developers. We do have a few REALLY awesome developers. Some with degrees, some just naturally good, then others that just poke around and know just enough to create simple apps (yes, we have a need for those). We even have a need for someone who essentially knows little more than how to draw. Even people that can just write down ideas.
Lindows.com could make LindowsOS much nicer by, in the very list, mimicking the behaviours of OpenTracker. Though it would be nice if they were to add the API bindings to LindowsOS (open API, peoples) so that OpenTracker could compile natively and run natively on LindowsOS. Then they could aide the OpenTracker project and get us some nice new features, such as transparency (yes, it can be done at Tracker-level, for Tracker windows with little to no apprecciable slow down).
Oh well, maybe I should talk to the moroons over at Lindows.com…
–The loon
What’s wrong with a windows clone if it retails for a fifth, or tenth the price? Get some perspective you trolls.
Why “distrowar”? I mean… It’s all GNU/Linux at the bottom
I don’t feel very different from using Gentoo, Lindows, Xandros, RedHat, SuSE or whatever distro there is. “That distro is better than that one because #(some kinda error or whatever)# exists in it.”. OK! But some patches and maybe and a kernel compile and that error is gone.
Can’t we just distrowar and get on with making standards and promote the use of GNU/Linux (any distro) on computers?