This weekend, after I'd settled on my tools, uploaded today's comic and convinced myself that creating Help Desk in a pure Linux environment was doable... I decided to muck about with other distributions.

But I really only had time for one, so I downloaded the free version of Xandros, burned a CD, and gave it a whirl.

Why Xandros? Well, I had fond memories of Corel Linux. No, seriously, I did... for all it's missteps with the community (heh) it did a *lot* to make Linux easier to use for me -- and it showed me what everyone was talking about when they went on and on about apt-get (I had to see it working in a graphical environment -- yes, I am that shallow). It also let me play Tetris during the install, which was probably one of the most brilliant ideas I've ever seen in an installation program.

Besides that, I noticed that the pro version came with the CodeWeavers thing that (apparently) lets you run iTunes. Which would be nice, since Apple sucked me in with that and the iPod, and now my entire CD collection is sitting in my iPod and converted to their "mp4" format on one of my windows partitions. That, and there's a nice little program called Power Writer that I use when writing fiction -- it's essentially a word processor designed sepcifically for novel writing, and I love it's stripped-down and easy to access featureset).

(attempts to play Apple-encoded files from Mepis have been met with little success. The only application that gives it a shot is xine, which is a very frustrating program because every time I click on a new file it tries to open ANOTHER VERSION OF THE PROGRAM and then plays both simultaneously. I can't figure out how to tell it to stop doing that. And some files it can play, others it can't -- that damned file encryption again... and I don't even want to comment on xmms -- xmms in Mepis is borked somehow, I don't know how exactly, but any attempt to play *anything* on that brings up a file dialog... over and over and over and over again...)

So I thought, hey, if Xandros works as advertised I'll go ahead and buy the Deluxe version.

My first impression is that downloading an iso via bittorrent is sort of a pain in the ass. But that's not the point of this post.

It had a pretty simple install (though sadly, no game) and when I logged in for the first time, lo and behold, it was the Corel Linux desktop -- with improvements, but definately the same design elements. This isn't a bad thing. The enhancements were mostly for the better.

However...

They crippled Konqueror.

Not Konqueror the browser-turned-file manager-on-steroids... no, I mean Konqueror the web browser, as it was originally designed to be. Xandros clearly wants you to use Firefox for everything, and there's really nothing wrong with Firefox per see... but I like how Konqueror manages its bookmarks much better, I like how Konqueror supports drag and drop more than Firefox does (as far as I've seen, playing with both of them)... basically in Mepis I wound up using both, not really being able to choose between them. Here, Xandros decided to stack the deck in Firefox's favor.

Essentially, they removed some pages from the Konqueror configuration panel. Some of the removals I understand -- they took out all the places where you tweaked Konqueror's settings as a file manager, since they want you to use XFM -- and XFM seems like a better thought-out file manager, all things considered. But there were two items that were specific to Konqueror as a web browser: the place where you set your home page, and the page where you controlled how Konqueror displays fonts.

I always liked Konqueror's font controls more than Firefox's and Mozilla's, because they worked the way I expected them to. Trying to figure out what font size 16pt Sans Serif was in Firefox was hit or miss. In Konqueror it matched the font size of the rest of your desktop. Not to mention that's the page where you set what kind of encoding Konqueror used (western, unicode, etc.)

So they took that out. Konqueror worked just fine, but browsing from page to page I noticed that all the text being rendered was RIDICULOUSLY SMALL.

I wasn't particularly clear on why they did that.

Anyway, after playing with it for a few hours, I came to the conclusion that Xandros did work exactly as they advertised... but what they were advertising was too simple for what I need. For example, they didn't have pngcrush in their download servers... or nano (which is the successor to pico, which is my favorite text editor because I'm lazy and like to have menus that make sense). I had to search for and add the regular debian servers in order to get those (fortunately, the Xandros GUI front end to apt-get is pretty intuitive to use, as far as those things go, so I didn't have to actually look for the files that managed that stuff).

When I added them and refreshed the servers, I was able to install pngcrush... but trying to run it failed horribly, because it reported that two png libraries that pngcrush relied on were not at the same version. What the hell? I thought apt-get is supposed to take care of that stuff? Well it is, but apparently there's this thing called "pinning" which is a way for apt to prioritize what kind of packages get downloaded and applied, so that you don't accidentally overwrite something you've considered mission-critical... and while it is apparently easier than most would like to bork Xandros custom files by downloading packages willy-nilly, in THIS instance Xandros decided these library files were far too important to be updated.

Hmph.

Anyway, eventually I figured out how to overcome that (by browsing the Xandros forums). (As it turns out, pngcrush isn't as useful as I'd hoped because it doesn't have an option that converts a 24-bit png into an indexed 8-bit png. Such is life.) In fact, I as able to find ways to work around most of the roadblocks Xandros set up for me when I wanted to download software it didn't have... but I found that I was spending far too much time doing that. I never thought I'd say this, but apparently this is a distribution that aims for people who have *less* knowledge of Linux than I do.

Still, the applications that came with it worked without any problems, which is less than I can say for Mepis and it's incrutably odd xmms setup which will not, in fact, play shoutcast streams. And unlike mepis, it detected my monitor and gave the option of displaying at 1280x1024 (though, strangely, not at the same time -- I had to switch to a generic monitor setting to get that high, my specific monitor setting only handled 1280x960 or something like that).

I wound up playing with Xandros just about all day Saturday and for half of Sunday. There are things about it I really liked, but in the end I switched back to Mepis. I like the Xandros desktop -- very clean, everything was well placed -- but adding software to it was much too difficult a process, and there was always the danger that something, somewhere, would break. Meanwhile, Mepis has some frustrating elements... the broken KMenu (which is apparently a KDE specific thing for which there is a fix, but the fix isn't available in the distro yet), slow internet access (which, according to one poster on the Mepis forums, has to do with the kernel trying to access a protocol that doesn't exist before defaulting to the one that does -- that post had information on how to stop that, and it seems to have worked) and an installation of xmms that doesn't do anything it did without any problems on Xandros... along with five or six other multimedia applications, none of which can play the music I downloaded with iTunes because they can't break through the damn security wrapper thing, or whatever it is.

But the advantage Mepis has is that while it's a custom job in terms of some of the tools available and how the distro is set up, it's not a custom job in a way that prevents you from easily using other Linux applications. It's Debian Linux with a few extra things that make Debian easier to use... it's not Debian Linux turned into something else. I wanted pngcrush, it gave me pngcrush... and the libraries it needed to run it. If I want KDE 3.4, all I have to do is add the server its on and tell apt to get it. In that respect, I think Mepis has the upper hand.

Xandros is great for people who have never used Linux... but at some point I think as people who use Xandros get more and more experienced they're going to hit a ceiling and get frustrated with the fact that Xandros doesn't want you to do certain things. I could be wrong. Perhaps two days (a day and a half, really) isn't enough time to test it. But that was my initial impression... with the little knowledge I have of Linux, I was still pretty frustrated trying to get Xandros to do things I know that Linux should be able to do, but it wasn't doing.

Next time I test something I think I *will* try Ubuntu, lack of KDE or not. Last time I tried Gnome I wasn't particularly impressed, but that was three or four years ago...

but not all of them. It's odd.

There are a few songs that are aac encoded that play on xine just fine... and some that don't. I *think* the difference is that the CDs I ripped are not protected in the same way that the music I purchased from the iTunes store are, and I can play the ripped CDs but not the purchased music.

But yeah, I guess that's what I have to do, heh.