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Linux Software

Another Review of Xandros Desktop OS Version 3.0 20

Posted by michael from the collective-judgement dept.
Steve Emms writes "We've published today a review of Xandros Desktop OS Version 3.0 Deluxe which might interest your readers. Xandros Desktop OS Version 3.0 is billed as 'an intuitive graphical environment that works right out of the box and offers unrivaled compatibility with Microsoft Windows'. So it's pretty clear what the market of the product is - all the millions of Windows users that are fed up with an unstable operating system, want something for email and web browsing, and be able to create, edit and send the boss their Word, Excel and Visio files."
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Another Review of Xandros Desktop OS Version 3.0 More

Another Review of Xandros Desktop OS Version 3.0

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  • Xandros version 3 (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Scott7477 ( 785439 )
    If I were a corporate purchaser, why would I pay now when I could wait a while and download it for free?
    • Because the "free" download doesn't include crossover or auto updates.
    • If you were a corporate purchaser, you'd probably lose your job for not knowing the answer.

      The cost of softare is a fraction of IT costs for any organization beyond a certain size. Maintenance, support and upgrades account for much larger costs. If an organization waits for the free Xandros CD, then it can't buy maintenance, support and upgrades from Xandros. That means it will need to staff to do that internally. In all likelihood, that's going to be more expensive.

      Remember, most organziations think th

  • Has to be Easier than SuSE 9.1 (Score:4, Insightful)

    by engywook ( 802813 ) on Thursday December 16, 2004 @11:59AM (#11105706) Homepage
    A couple weeks ago, I (computer geek) helped a friend (Microsoft victim) install SuSE 9.1 onto an older PC that he wasn't doing anything with. I was amazed at the amount of stuff that had to be done, figured out, or explained that I will typically just do without thinking. Having my friend there trying to figure this stuff out really brought home the fact that that particular distro was not particularly "novice-friendly". One thing that particularly surprised me was the amount of trouble we had getting X up and running. The config that it came up with on its own didn't work. No matter what we tried with the config file didn't work. We eventually deleted the Modeline entries and let the defaults be used, and that worked just fine.

    Now, I'm not saying that everything we did was hard or time consuming, but we did stay up until 4am getting things up to basic functioning.

    I'll be installing SuSE 9.2 on a home machine or two over the next couple of weeks. I'll try to make note of everything that needs to be done that does not seem "novice-friendly".

    It's good to hear about a distro that can be recommended to Linux neophytes.

    • Interesting... I found SuSE 9.1 to be the easiest install for Linux yet. I have installed many popular distros... including Slackware, Redhat, Mandrake and Debian. SuSE 9.1 was the most simple, straight-forward install with the least amount of tweaking. I am not saying you are wrong. One of the problems with Linux, unfortunately, is its inability to be dynamic on different hardware. Some distros work great on some boxes, others for others. I love Linux... I hope they can figure this part of it out. T
      • I agree that SUSE is one of the easier distributions to install but i think the mandrake is a bit more novice-friendly while partitioning. If you partition the wrong way you can loose all you data so I would like to see some improvements in the SUSE installer.
    • I can't say SuSE is novice-friendly... If you want really novice-friendly distro, why not choose Mandrake with it's M$-like installation interface? Or there is Yoper that didn't asks you nothing but a partitioning question and you get a working OS in minutes...

  • I still fail to see... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Phleg ( 523632 ) <stephen.touset@org> on Thursday December 16, 2004 @12:03PM (#11105748)

    Why desktop operating systems intending to migrate folks from Windows use KDE as the default desktop environment. I'm not trying to troll here, but KDE seems to be of the mentality for providing a configuration option for everything, and have tons and tons of menu options.

    For the average user, this just isn't a very good idea. Having some experience with converting Windows users to desktop Linux, myself, I've found that the vast majority prefer the simple and clean feel to the GNOME interface. They try hard to use reasonable defaults and provide an option for the most important changes. Also, they try wherever possible to eliminate configuration options that require the user to type something (meaning the user has know about what to type in).

    Yeah, it's not as customizable as KDE, but that's not what's important to Joe Average. Joe Average wants to turn on his computer, change the theme and fonts, then start actually doing stuff, not spend time fiddling with hundreds of options to get it "perfect". It's an appliance rather than living space.

    • I don't maintain a Linux distribution, but apparently creating GNOME packages is a huge pain in the ass, and that KDE is much easier. Here's what Pat Volkerding of Slackware had to say about it:

      Anyway, suffice to say the jury is still out. Since GNOME 1.4 I've felt
      that GNOME is going in a direction that doesn't fit well with Slackware's
      goals, and for at least as long I've considered removing it completely and
      taking whatever flames I get for that decision. Right now, I think
      removing it would be the best th

    • And a candy-coated Fisher-Price looking desktop isn't exaclty very slick and professional looking either. I can't stand all the bouncing cursors and bloat that is on by default. Clean and simple- that's what most other non-tech savy computer users in the world.
    • Yep, that's true. Sad true, but it is. I know some folks having problem to find fonts configuration submenu in KDE's main menu interface...
  • I had installed Xandros on my little sister's celeron 300 and it actually ran along side windows 98 quite well. This was about 2 months ago. I had never used Xandros before but had read it was very newbie friendly. I must admit I took quite a liking to the file manager, that they call xfm (xandros file manager). Imagine my disappointment after doing an "emerge xfm" on my machine. I wish it were available for other distros.
  • "all the millions of Windows users that are fed up with an unstable operating system"

    Windows NT/2000/XP are not unstable, so you must be referring to the long obsolete Windows 9x series.

    Those that are still using Windows 9x today are either not particularly concerned about system stability or don't have a system capable of supporting contemporary versions of Windows or Linux.

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