“I found Lindows 4.5 Laptop Edition to be a mixed bag for experienced users. It installs easily, barring download issues and getting into the BIOS to change the boot sequence. But beyond the basic install, it took a lot of work to get everything else installed and configured the way I wanted it.” Read the article at LinuxJournal.
Can a Red Hat Guru Survive on a Lindows Laptop?
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I think he pretty much says what the difference between lindows and fedora is.
Fedora – Functional, Rock-Solid Linux distro for your average linux user. Some small modifications to make it better (such as icon or theme), but nothing fundamental. This includes all the software that the average linux user would use (4 CDs in FC2!)
Lindows – on the other hand ships out a very tightly integrated set of (somtimes heavly modified to achieve this) programs to achive thier linux desktop.
There is obvioussly nothing wrong with either way, just different target audiences.
Yeah, when I installed Lindows I was impressed with the speed with which it finished, until I saw that there were very few apps installed. I have a slow internet connection, so Click-n-run is out of the question for large programs.
For me it’s a lot easier to install Mandrake and spend the extra 20 minutes installing all the packages I need, rather than an eternity trying to download them for Lindows.
Maybe the Lindows people could try to sell an additional cdrom with the most common GPL stuff, bundled with some of the pay programs. I’d pay a few extra bucks if I could have a workable installation without days and days of downloading…
“Can a Red Hat Guru Survive on a Lindows Laptop?” Sounds like the latest reality TV.
Fedora – Functional, Rock-Solid Linux distro for your average linux user.
From what I’ve heard, Fedora is anything but rock solid.
Hi
“From what I’ve heard, Fedora is anything but rock solid.”
Different people have diff experiences. You can hear extreme things about Mandrake 10 Community version too. Same for Fedora. For me it has been really solid.
regards
Jess
I have to agree with Jess, Fedora has been rock solid for me on my Dell Inspiron 2650.
Different people have diff experiences. You can hear extreme things about Mandrake 10 Community version too. Same for Fedora. For me it has been really solid.
Different people have different expecatations. Many people who have grown up on solid systems like Windows 3.x and 9x series, are not accustomed to things breaking like dyed in the wool Linux users are. My theory is that the longer you have used Linux, the more accustomed you are to dealing with small quibbles and destroyed CD drives.
Lindows offers the Click’N’Run CDRom, its available to download with purchase, and you get it if you purchase the OS from lindows in retail box form.
It contains alot of the larger apps that CnR contains.
From what I’ve heard, Fedora is anything but rock solid.
The core of fedora is VERY rock solid. I do agree that some of the apps they included were too beta and shouldnt of been included, but they were very non-critical apps (The only one I recall was rythmbox, which was in a VERY beta stage at the time)
Another thing that bothered them were 2 hard to reproduce bugs that until fairly recently plagued RH/FC. One was an extreme slowdown on some very specific motherboards due to some kernel module. Another was some random crasher bug in smp. Both are fixed by now. (sorry, I dont remember the details of the bug). Other then that, my stock fedora machine has been great without any problems with smb, ssh, and some other services I use 24/7 on my machine.
Some people dont like thier gnome and kde, but thats a matter of taste.
I use Arch and Vector on my main systems. Arch comes with pretty much nothing, although I believe it did come with ssh. But it’s easy to install all your stuff through pacman, I liked that. I don’t want extra packages.
Vector has vec-get which has almost nothing on it, but I don’t care cause it’s my laptop and I just browse and chat on the web with it mostly. It has almost all the apps I need.
Different people have different expecatations. Many people who have grown up on solid systems like Windows 3.x and 9x series, are not accustomed to things breaking like dyed in the wool Linux users are
Nice trolling!! Are you posting this from a Win3.1 machine?
I’m using FC1 on my laptop, and all I needed to do to have ACPI support was to add “acpi=on” to the boot options.
I don’t consider myself an advanced user by any measure, but not a newbie either.
My favourite distro is Suse and I can tweak it to my heart’s content.
However when you want something which “just gets the job done” I wouldn’t mind the handholding of Lindows: just “Click & Run” and there you have your app, ready to work, with an icon on your desktop (which of course you can keep or delete).
And no, it isn’t true that you can only surf the net and send mails: just to make an example it is the only linux distro so far that gives you Bittorrent Shadow Client, Limewire, Edonkey…
Also playing DVDs is a breeze: download Xine, VLC, Mplayer and (separately)libdvdcss and there you go…
Suse doesn’t give you any working DVD player, you need to download a lot of stuff before you get one working.
The only reason why I am less than enthusiastic is because at the moment their kde feels really old. But with LindowsOS 5 they’ll have all bleeding edge technology.
I’m guessing you are a Linux user, since they are the only ones I have seen throw around the troll term so loosely.
And yes, for your information, I am typing this from a Windows For Workroups box.
nice, that was funny
person claiming windows 3x and 9x are solid: yes, machines that are never turned on don’t crash so i guess you could claim windows 9x and 3x are solid.
Same here. I use a little mATX box headless on Fedora. I wanted it to do a proper shutdown on the press of the power button.
I knew that was an ACPI feature, a five minute Google search gave me the awnser. This was with the sum total of one week’s Linux experience. Perhaps “Gurus” don’t need Google…
“Many people who have grown up on solid systems like Windows 3.x and 9x series…”
…have grown accustomed to apps being shut down by Windows incessantly, the OS crashing, the infamous BSOD, but I’m thankful for that latter one because it was the inspiration for the greatest screensaver of all time.
From what I’ve heard, Fedora is anything but rock solid.
Darius, I use it on my server (IBM NetFinity series) at home, and it has been solid.
I think their product is put together very well. So well in fact, that I purchased a ChoicePC subscription. Lindows was and is the only distribution that installed everything correctly, the first time, on my IBM Thinkpad T20. I look forward to version 5 which should have all the latest goodies. In the past I used RH 9 and I enjoyed it but man it sure was a pain to install applications. I’m not one who enjoys either compiling or trying to fix dependencies so Lindows Click N Run was a blessing for me was another HUGE reason I switched. I’m now considering becoming a Lindows Insider so I can help guide their future direction by being a part of the beta testing team. Overall I’ve been very pleased with their product and have no plans on switching to another distro.
Lastly, I do wish some apps in CNR were up-to-date like Open Office and such. Hopefully all of this will be fixed in v5.
You would have thought that a person involved in the IT industry for 20 years would realise that you hold down the power button to turn off the computer, instead of unplugging it and removing the battery.
That said, now to the linux part. Fedora Core 1, can be rock solid i guess, but only with a customised kernel, the default one isnt that good imo. I dont use it, i let my parents use it, and they also complain about the speed of it. I havent tried Lindows, and was wondering if it is also slow?
I just wanted to make sure you knew what I meant when I said everything worked on my Thinkpad. ‘Everything’ included video, audio, power management, optical mouse, Track Point mouse, Xircom 10/100 ethernet card, IBM High Rate Wireless LAN card, Mitsumi cd burner, GE 5 in 1 media reader, and my Olympus digital camera.
The only thing I had to do was put in my WLAN info (SSID, security key, etc.) so I could connect to my network.
The boot up is a bit slow but doesn’t seem to be any slower than W2K on my laptop. As for the responsiveness of the system once it running… holy smokes, in my experiece it blows the doors off of W2K running on the same machine. No troubles here but speed and responsiveness is all relative.
I don’t have Windows XP because it’s expensive and I spent half of that money on a ChoicePC membership for Lindows.
Lindows is not for me as I don’t want to pay to access files through CNR that are commonly available on the Net for free. I’d much rather use SuSE with it’s YAST tool or Apt-Get. The only thing I hope to see in future YAST is the feel CNR has for displaying programs. YAST at present gives a basic description of a program but no picture giving you a clue what it looks like. You instead have to search for the program developer site to see a detailed description.
Lindows seems more suited to a person that doesn’t mind an OS developer controlling your access to programs, limiting your tools and charging you fees for things that are free. Ironic that it sounds very much like a M$ strategy.
I could cut my own hair too, but I’d rather pay to have someone do it for me. That’s the beauty of CNR. It gives you an easy and convenient way to install applications. I’m willing to pay for that. I can choose not to use CNR if I wanted. I could use APT-GET instead so saying that you don’t have control over how you install your apps is misleading. Plus, Lindows makes sure that the credit for all of the apps is given to the developer(s) of those apps. It’s win-win.
What I believe to be the true gem of LindowsOS is its CNR technology. CNR is a paid service that will allow LindowsOS users to update and install all the software in the CNR warehouse with a click of a mouse. Broadband internet connection is almost always a must-have if one is to consider using the CNR service.
However, if an user is not happy to pay Lindows.com for using CNR, he/she is perfectly welcome to start using apt-get or dpkg or alien to install virtually any piece of freely available software available to the debian distribution. (I am only referring Debian because LindowsOS is debian based). This may, however, render CNR unfunctional if one decides to use CNR some time down the road. If one is to take this route, I strongly recommend the LindowsOS installed to be the Developer version since it contains a lot more tools with the initial installation.
These days, installation of most distributions are made pretty easy. The problem often lies in maintaining the OS and customizing the OS to one’s specific needs. LindowsOS + CNR make maintainance a piece of cake as long as broadband connection is available.
In my opinion, one does not have to convince or even force Fedora users to try out LindowsOS. If you are happy with your OS, the best approach is generally to stick with it unless you are just feeling the craving to try out different new flavors.
Scott you really covered the best of Lindows, I couldn’t said it better myself!
But because many here is giving more creds to Feodora than Lindows I must say whats differs between them…
Feodora = Dependency Hell!
Lindows = Click N Run Warehouse!
Topview Executive was the original Windows 1.0
I’m a Fedora user, running FC1 with updates, it’s very solid and I like it.
OSNews had a story a while back with a link/coupon for a free download of Lindows4.5 devel. I dl’d the iso, burned it, but it would not install on my pc so I gave up on it. Perhaps I’ll try the next version of Lindows.
I must say that I think Lindows is doing a good job on several fronts; fighting MS, attracting new Linux/Free Software users, and contributing to a few open source projects.