Lycoris Desktop/LX review at Extreme Tech

[gabbman]

Two more cents on this one. Everyone is right. Linux gives us the freedom, financially and technically, that Microsoft can NOT.

Linux offers many different ways to do the same job, just like many different people will do the same job differently.

 

I have used Mandrake since v7.0, allways as a dual boot, as it could never quite do one thing or another that I required from windows. I april of this year I tried Lycoris, v44. Along with the software comes a community of dedicated people that really believe in 'their distro'. I took a bit of a 'plunge' in June and thought I would try the 'windowz-free' gig. Lycoris to my surprise actually allowed me to function on a day to day basis from my HOME desktop with very little fan-fare. Even my wife was able to do her thing with little or no help from me. (She only wanted to know why I changed the way things looked). Simplistically the Lycoris o/s lets you do the job, email, internet, OpenOffice (ran all my MSOffice apps), digital camera and photo manipulation and keeping my web site uptodate, writing music and files to cd, pretty much everything I needed to do, I was able to accomplish.

 

My only 'objection' is that they still use the kde2.2 . To make a long story short, Mandrake 9 is my primary Linux distro of choice (it's the eye-candy) as well as the large number of mandrake users, and of course, texstar - goes without saying just makes life tooooo easy.

 

So yes, well all have different needs and wants, and Linux excels in offering all us the choice, our percieved "best tool for the job required".

[Guest duir66]

gabbman took the words out of my mouth. We're all correct. Which I'm glad to see.

 

I admit that I might not be as captivated by Lycoris as I am by Mandrake. But, relatively speaking, I might be new to using Linux as a primary desktop but I am not new to computing. Linux is my 5th primary desktop in the past 10 years. (Amiga, Windows, Classic Mac, BeOS, and now Linux) and I think that Lycoris (and possibly Lindows and Xandros) is going to be the first linux experience of many, many people that have yet to know anything about Linux other than the Tech-savvy IBM commercials.

 

I have already started touting the "wonders" of Lycoris to Windows users who would never know about anything about Linux if it weren't for their exposure to me. "Yeah, they managed to pull off a Win 98 feel to it.", usually finishes off my statement about Lycoris. I always get a short considerative "Hmm!"

 

I have no plans to migrate away from using Mandrake, SuSE or possibly RedHat on my main Linux box. But that doesn't mean my positive experiences with other distros won't be related to those who only know Windows.

[ral]

I think Mandrake should do a RedHat. I have a problem. I want to integrate Linux in a Intercafe. RedHat look more polished with its fonts, had a simpler more Windows like application/start menu, so I decided that it would probably be easier to integrate RedHat 8. At the same time, Mandrake would be used for back end functions (server duties). After awhile though I realized that using two different distro's at the same time would be more difficult, so now all the Linux machinesat the shop run on RedHat 8 (oh oh...I am dead).

 

The sad part, is that IMHO Mandrake is actually the better distro. It is much easier to configure because of its control center (a lot of RH8 configuration is still done via manual editing config files rahter than through a dedicated GUI), but its traditional KDE and Gnome desktops are not going to be easy for a Windows user to get used to.

 

It should be this simple:

 

Accessories

Internet

Office

Multimedia

Tools

Games

Preference (KDE or Gnome settings)

System Settings (Linux settings)

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