Lycoris is a great distribution if you’ve never used Linux before. However, it focuses on the familiar, preferring commercial applications to lesser-known free alternatives. Lycoris offers an easy introduction to Linux, but the limited range of software included means the distribution is probably best suited to first-time users, says PCWorld.au.
Beginner-friendly Linux OS: Desktop/LX
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Looks like this review is new but is covering the older version on LX, not the new version.
I believe this was a review of the Evaluatuion Edition of Update 3 that shipped with Austrailian Magazines.
A review of an outdated ‘evaluation’ release is not fair to either the company or those who visit OSNews.
Eugenia – Perhaps pulling this particular review may be in order?
It looks more like a product overview to me. I especially love the irony of the “in brief” section at the end.
Does anyone know if Lycoris plans to offer a free download of 1.4 like they eventually did with 1.3? I seem to remember being somewhat impressed when I tried 1.3 (considering it’s goals) and was interested to see what they’d do with 1.4. But I’m not about to spend $40+ for a distribution I’m not even going to use.
I have to say, I’m not enthused by them charging another $50 whenever you want more functionality either.
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Michael Salivar
Is there something informative *here* on *in the article*? All information I got is : it’s easy to install, KDE-based and there are commercial apps for Windows compatibility. I could cut-and-paste the article substituting Lycoris with SuSE, Mandrake, Lindows or Xandros and no one would notice.
What are the features of this OS? What has been choosed and what not for everyday tasks? Where is strong and where is weak? Simply: where is a *review*?
PS. I still have to figure out what do they mean that including commercial apps is more familiar to the end user than including free apps. What commercial apps for Linux do you know you find “familiar”? Oh,I missed the point. Dealing with draconian EULAs is surely familiar to many users. Freedom of OSS software is -unfortunately- not so.
There are some very good reviews on DesktopOS.com.
Lycoris Desktop/LX has stability support & I’ve been exposed to. The base OS installation comes with everything a user can ask for to get going right out of the box.
Desktop/LX is really worth a try. And they will offer an updated evaluation copy for download at a later date.
Yes, but most people don’t realize that you can throw a Winamp like interface on the most obscure networked music player, and your average Windows user will be able to use it. Why do you think XMMS is so popular, despite sounding so bad?
But then, I don’t recall using any commercial apps for Linux besides distributions themselves. And no, I don’t really understand what he’s getting at either, unless he’s talking about things like Crossover Office. Or maybe he’s talking about the Bitstream font engine, or… oh hell, I have no clue.
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Michael Salivar
@Michael Salivar
Why do you think XMMS is so popular, despite sounding so bad?
What do you mean by “sounding so bad”? XMMS sounds no worse than any other digial media player on Linux. In fact, XMMS development has been sponsored by a company that has years and years of experience in professional audio driver development.
You’re right, the vast majority of music players in any operating system don’t sound very good.
My biggest issue is the gaps between tracks. This drives me absolutely insane when listening to any Pink Floyd album, and no matter what I’m listening to it gets on my nerves. Not much less annoying is that most players muddy the output considerably. Given, I listen to high quality ogg’s on an above average sound card on quite good headphones, so I’m hearing a lot more detail. However, I’m sure there’s a difference, and it’s a significant one to my ears.
I suggest getting your hands on a Dark Side of the Moon album and encode it to ogg quality 10. Install a couple more popular players like XMMS, Juk, and Rhythmbox, and then a couple more obscure ones like MP3blaster, Squelch, and MPD. All of the popular players I’ve tried have very large gaps between songs while MP3blaster’s is quite small, Squelch’s is miniscule, and MPD’s is non existent. Now listen to Any Colour You Like. With the popular players you’ll lose a good deal of the detail of the wonderful instrumental. In MP3blaster it will still be very noticable, Squelch will be much improved, and MPD will, again, be nearly perfect. Now try Us and Them, the high points will actually start to break up in the popular players, while it gets progressively better in the same order as before.
Maybe I’m just being picky, but I love good sound.
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Michael Salivar
If you want real high quality sound and have the space to burn (if you’re encoding at quality 10 with ogg), you’ve got to go flac, why even bother with lossy encoding? BTW, how could mp3blaster have better sound quality when it seems to be just a frontend to the same libraries/utilities as the more popular players?
I get no gaps between songs with Rhythmbox 0.8.5 listening to my ogg encoded dark side of the moon.
Call me shallow, but I could never be bothered trying something that just looked so messy of a desktop.
maybe you should look into a plugin for XMMS (and just about every other player) called crossfade.. which is exactly what you are complaining about and has been around forever.
What kind of compression ratios are you getting with flac? I’ve looked into it a bit, but I’m concerned that I won’t be able to find a decent portable with flac support. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
I don’t have the background to make a solid claim as to why that’s the case, the same utilities and libraries sounding different with different players. I assume there must be another layer the data is passing through, but I have no way to back that up. As for gaps, it’s the higher level application handling the queue and not the libraries, correct? I’m sure of one thing, though, the difference certainly exists, the difference is like night and day with my Sennheisers.
Considering I do get gaps in the vast majority of players, but not in others, I’m pretty sure that rules out a bad rip/encode. Why don’t you get them? Hell if I know, which distro are you using? Maybe it’s a patched version of Rhythmbox. I’ve used XMMS in too many to count including Arch, Rythmbox in Ubuntu and Libranet, Juk and a few other KDE players I can’t recall in Conectiva, Lycoris, and Suse. Among others, those come to the top of my head. Then there’s MP3Blaster, Squelch, and MPD which I’ve used exclusively in Arch, though I have used MPD in Ubuntu with OSS. MPD and Squelch are always compiled by hand. Through all that my above observations have been constant with ogg’s ripped and encoded using the abcde script under Arch.
Please, if I have a problem help me find it
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Michael Salivar
It appears that it only works for MP3? If it does work with ogg, it still doesn’t change the muddy output.
Besides, MPD runs as a daemon, I can control the same instance from ncurses, close that and control it from a cli, and then startx and control it from a Gnome or QT interface. All without interrupting playback. Oh, and network capability is built in.
I thought this was a article on Lycoris, not XMMS and othe rmusic players…
no it works with ogg.. Are you PR for MPD or something?
Ok, I think I came across that once before, but I passed it off as only it’s volume crossfading functionality. Still though, it’s not going to fix the muddy output. Nor is it going to get along well with my desire for things to have basic functionality without bloated code or plugins. Call me an idealist… I am.
I can assure you I’m not PR for anyone, and if I was I would include a disclaimer from the get go. I have, however, spent a great deal of time in search of a music player that fits my simple needs. Now that I’ve found one, and the opportunity arises, I’m glad to spread the word.
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Michael Salivar
well i think the source of the crappy sounds coming out of your machine may actually be pink floyd. All my trashy punk bands sound just fine through xmms.
Yeah, well my trashy punk sounds fine in XMMS too. Long live Crass and all, but musical skill has it’s merits too.
I have not tired Lycros — but i must say i have been using
Ubuntu on my new IBM X31 for a week and love the simplicity and power of it.
Good—
– Installation only asked a few questions location/netowrking/uesr name
– Every thing was configured properly except acpi ipw2100 wlan sleep/suspend issues (known driver issue). Very knoppix
like.
– The apps that they have picked are usefull and stable
– The desktop is clean and simple (i really like gnome from being an fluxbox user)
– Most config options can be done from the gconf control panel
– package mgmt done with debians – apt/sid
– secure no open ports / servers running
– auto mounting of usb/cdroms
Bad —
— choice of APM/APIC would be nice ;-]
— small issues w/ gnome networking configuration
— dual boot (have not tried it yet)
— smb stuff is a bit buggy
i am going to recomend this distro to users who would like to start using experimenting w/ linux i think it shows the power and elegance of linux.
-greg
I used to work for Joseph Cheek at Lycoris as a Product Support Specialist. Lycoris definitely carves out a specific niche that nobody at all, until recently, really challenged or equalled. Arguably, in this one area, Lycoris is ahead of virtually everything else. That area is usability and human factors design. Joseph has really solid experience in both Windows and Linux development and support. He’s just a very good software engineer, a smart man (and a kind man, too).
Lycoris is not for those wanting to fight for ten thousand features, instead, Lycoris chooses reasonable features that consumers use. The one area we really had trouble with back when I worked there was support for proprietary DVD encryption schemes. I’m not sure, but with Lycoris taking on a somewhat more commercial looking approach they may make a deal with someone to get that kind of functionality, I haven’t really been following Lycoris closely to know, one way or the other.
If you just want a cheap computer and you want to read Email, browse the Web, play a few games, or create documents, Lycoris is easier than Windows to install and probably a bit quicker to install than Windows, too. To a Windows user, it even looks similar to windows, and has reasonable menu names so that you can easily locate what you are looking for.
Basic, simple, very consistent, easy. I recommend it for those looking for that kind of an experience that are willing to pay a modest fee to get it. Counter warning: this is not a geek distro, you will not like it at all unless you appreciate exceptional user interface design. Either way, I wish my friends at Lycoris well.