Walmart-Xandors

Tom Wittbrodt tomwitt2 at gmail.com
Tue Apr 19 11:27:00 EDT 2005


While I haven't purchased a Microtel PC, I do have experience with
Xandros and I can tell you it's an excellent all-around distribution.

In complete frustration supporting Windows, I converted my wife and
father about 2 years ago to Lindows.  It seemed a great distro for
newbies (at the time).  In hindsight, it wasn't such a great choice. 
With Lin(dows|spire), there are WAY too many "user friendly" ways of
doing things, each being slightly different.  And when I wanted to
drop to a shell to do stuff, there were none of the standard tools I
expected to be there.  The Click-N-Run method of adding software
worked reasonably well but it wasn't easy to add a different software
repository (to get the tools I needed).  The Linspire support web site
is NOT intuitive; navigating to the user forums always seems to be a
happy accident when you arrive.

About 4 months ago, I converted my wife and father from
Lindows/Linspire to Xandros 3.0.  Xandros really is an excellent
distribution for both newbies and experienced Linux users.  Just about
everything can be accessed via the Xandros file manager (a souped up
KDE Konqueror).  When dropping to a shell to do work on their
machines, most of the tools I want are already there.   It was
extremely easy to add the Debian unstable software repository so I
could get access to tools other than those in the Xandros maintained
repository.

Most of all, I liked the fact that the Xandros desktop icons and
application menus are sparse with a single option for most common
tasks.  Surprisingly (or maybe not so in hindsight), this seeming
limitation on application choice made things easier for my wife and
father by removing the "so which one do I use?" question.  And even
better is that all roads lead to the Xandros file manager so the
constant use of this application becomes second nature.

Mix Xandros with a reasonably priced PC and it sounds like a pretty good deal.

-- Tom

On 4/19/05, Karl Hergenrother <33karl at verizon.net> wrote:
> Is the summary that no one has any experience with Xandros, but the
> Microtel PC is probably suitable for an inexpensive desktop?  Sounds
> like it.
> 
> Karl
> 
> _______________________________________________
> gnhlug-discuss mailing list
> gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
> http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
>



More information about the gnhlug-discuss mailing list