TuxReports has a team review of SuSE, Mandrake, and Lycoris with screenshots. Read it here.
SuSE, Mandrake, and Lycoris Reviews
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I downloaded the latest Lycoris build the other day from linuxisos.org. Went through the simple graphical install, when it was done the machine rebooted…and a nice message “No operating system found”.
They reviewed three distro’s for a month and they come up with this little piece…
I know nothing about Suse, but I tried to install Mandrake last year. It hung up partway through and I couldn’t complete the installation; don’t know why. I zeroed the drive and tried again with the same results. I was going to try Lycoris, but to this day, I cringe when I look at their hardware compatibility list. It still doesn’t include my video card, sound card or network card. And all of them are common cards (NVidia, Avance and Belkin). I like their look and I wish them well, but I’ve heard a couple of horror stories about their installation similar to the above comment.
The instalation work very well. I take only 20 minutes after insert the cd an anything is up and running. My wireless LAN workers at once, i can browse the Internet and i have access to the disks at my windows network. Lycoris hase done a god job at RC 1.
The review was a little thin. It was of course, given from a new users perspective, so te author covered all of the major bases. While I like that Lycoris, LindowsOS and Xandros are REALLY aimed at the desktop, I feel that they take a LOT of the freedom away.
Now, I’m not talking about charging for these services. I think that that is something that has to happen if they are to stay in business, and I am not above paying for good software. I am talking about the sheer lack of available software that they include at install. Sure you’re going to get a 10 minute install. YOU’RE NOT INSTALLING ANYTHING!
That’s brings me to another point, the author says “all three of these distributions suffer from the same issue; individuals without machines connected to the Internet may suffer from a feeling of isolation and not having technical support.”. I actually think that SuSE has amazing documentation.
Further, the Professional version comes with over 2000 programs! That’s great for people who have no internet connection. You don’t need to download programs, you already have them. The documents are clear. What else do you need to get that “warm and fuzzy” feeling?
Menus! Yes, nearly all distros could learn from the menu structure of Lycoris, LindowsOS or Xandros. SuSE menus can really benefit from a makeover. Menus really effect the “feel” of the OS more than one thinks. So, this is a valid point from the author.
That’s my dos pesos on SuSE. I don’t use Mandrake, so I have no opinion on it’s documentation.
I have tried redhat, mandrake(shudder), Suse, and can’t get onwith them. Strangley my freind had lycoris and it seemed v easy to use from a windows user point of view. Lindows seems I don’t know strange somehow, can’t help but feel the name puts me off!!!
It would seem Lycoris may be the way for me to go then…
Yes.. that was a con for Mandrake… Not only is it not true, it says a lot about the quality of the distro that that is what they are complaining about. Hey! its not mandrake’s fault KDE didn’t do the sensible thing and use xscreensaver.
Never trust hardware compatibility lists. I mean, distributions are basically going to have very similar hardware support. Why? Hardware support’s in the kernel and everyone’s using the same damn kernel. Sure, the versions and patchsets differ, but still, 95% of hardware support is probably the same between distros. I’d be beyond surprised into completely shocked if you couldn’t get *any* Linux distro to work with most Nvidia cards. OK, maybe some won’t work out-of-the-box with very new ones (XFree only recently got support for FX series cards), but even for these you could just install the closed-source driver from nvidia.com, which you’ll likely end up doing if you want 3D support anyway.
In general, hardware compatibility lists are a *huge* drag to maintain. Mandrake’s is nowhere near comprehensive either. I’d be very very surprised if the hardware listed on Lycoris’ list is all the hardware it actually supports. Why not just stick in on and try it out? Nothing to lose…
I don’t know….but I kinda like to see old tux riding through space in his rocket machine.
Some of you might have noticed that KDE has added the package kdeartwork to its collection of packages for the desktop. In S.u.S.E. at least this program includes a compatibility layer that will operate the xscreensaver from inside KDE. It is very nice. Mandrake doesn’t have a few of these refinements because 9.1 was an early release of KDE 3.1.x. Any way, if you don’t like what you have, try upgrading.
When I tried Lycoris last, they’d mistakenly swapped around 0s & 1s in the fstab config file, meaning it was fscking fat volumes. Yes, it nuked my Windows partition, and I was not alone.
It’s true that there are very few screensavers by default, but it takes 1 minute (perhaps 5 for an unexperienced user) to set up KDE to use xscreensaver.