Review: Lindows 2.0 has beautiful skin, iffy personality (Register) [LWN.net]

Here's a review of Lindows 2.0, courtesy of NewsForge. "Because Lindows is marketed to the disgruntled Windows user, I figured I'd try to do it justice and install it on a Windows ME system. I put the CD in, it "auto-started" and told me I didn't have one gigabyte available on the "C:" drive. The only option was to exit. Why couldn't I select a different drive letter? There's plenty of space on the D partition. But there was no way to do that."

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Review: Lindows 2.0 has beautiful skin, iffy personality (Register)

Posted Sep 24, 2002 7:47 UTC (Tue) by beejaybee (guest, #1581) [Link]

I keep hearing things like this - it seems that Lindows is caught in a cleft stick; it's trying to be attractive to Windows dummies (who probably don't even know what a disk partition is - their entire HDD will be one huge "drive C" partition) yet at the same time it has to cope with the complexities of dual booting (since those who are likely to want to try the Lindows product are almost certainly not willing to dump Windows as a pre-requisite for installation).

Maybe Lindows would be more successful _from the point of reviewers_ if it adopted the M$ trick of taking over the whole HDD on installation without even bothering to if it was clobbering anything. Joe Punter wouldn't be happy, though. The real problem is that this sort of installation "wrinkle" is just the sort of thing which (wrongly) convinces the public at large that linux is not ready for the desktop. Of course, very few Joe Punters actually install Windows - which is IMO at least as intimidating as any linux installation! This is one reason why I think the M$ anti-trust settlement should have forbidden the sale of PCs with a pre-installed operating system, unless at least three (counting all versions of M$ Windows as one, and all versions of linux as one) were installed and configured in such a way as to
not give due prominence or "ease of startup" to any particular one.

Meanwhile, I suppose you pays your money (or not, in the case of free distributions) & takes your choice...

Review: Lindows 2.0 has beautiful skin, iffy personality (Register)

Posted Sep 26, 2002 9:50 UTC (Thu) by ekj (subscriber, #1524) [Link]

You are absolutely correct. How many reviwers have ever tried to install Windows, without messing up Linux, on a computer that already has Linux installed, and only two partitions, one ext3-linux and one swap for linux.

This process is anything but trivial, yet noone seems to take this as definite proof that "Windows is not ready for the desktop". Infact Windows has no support whatsoever for the above scenario, and will offer no help whatsoever. You must yourself clear up space for atleast one dedicated windows-partition, and you must yourself reinstall lilo or grub after windows overwrites it with it's own bootloader (without warning, or giving you any option to skip this step.)

In contrast, installing say Mandrake-9 on a computer that has one harddisk, and nothing on this disk *is* very close to trivial. Simply clicking "default" a lot of times is pretty much it.