So after checking it out for a few days and seeing some people getting decent help and some being treated in ways I find disgraceful I finally put up a posting about Xandros not really being all that professional as a system and I stated the reasons one of them being having problems with VMWare.
Before I posted my problems I had found a listing by their supposedly only support person on installing VMWare. I hadn’t realized initially that it was two years old or so. I tried it anyway and it sort of worked but sort of didn’t. The initial problem had to do with c header files not being installed which shocked me. What made it even worse was the response and supposed fix which was very terse and not something a normal user could do.
What surprised me though is that instead of helping me in their forums a user just came up with the "Xandros didn’t make VMWare so why should they help you". I had seen this before in other forums and this attitude simply leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Fine I don’t expect Xandros to create a patch for me but the Linux communities is about the users helping each other out.
After reading several of these related to my posting and others I have realized that if you use Xandros for what it is and that’s it its fine. Anything else and forget about it. Whether this is good or bad I don’t know but to me part of the Linux world is that you want to play around and try things. Unless you are Lindows or are simply and blatantly marketing your system towards users who will never intend on touching the system which apparently is Xandros intended audience hence when they say business user they really mean one that will use maybe MS Office and that’s about it.
Two other issues I've had with it are that for some unknown reason it uses the entire ram, 386 Megs or whatnot, which I have. Why is that? I don’t understand this. Also I decided to use ReiseFS as the file system and now it is read or writing to the hard drive every five seconds. It’s annoying! Another thing is that for some reason the screen size can’t be adjusted. It’s ok by default but a little small.
For now I have no choice but to run Xandros but I have decided that I will be changing distributions to something more flexible. I am not sure what that will be at all. There are many things I like about Xandros but at the same time it has left me feeling like its more like Lindows than it is say I guess Slackware with its speed. And the support have left me feeling sorry I even bothered.
Supposedly they say it’s stable as can be but I have had various programs crash on me at different times including the whole system itself which rebooted.
I do think Xandros is a truly great distribution and probably one of the most useable out there. But if you are going to have more people use it you have to have support. And as far as "business" people being the targeted group from what I have seen it’s far more the home user with its focus on reading every type of file out of the box and having things like Xine and Mpeg run right out of the box.
Overall I give it 5 out of 10. Ok maybe that’s a little harsh. Great system overall but lousy support especially for anything outside of anything that Xandros has installed itself.
So its back to looking for a distribution more suitable for my needs. Who knows what ill try? I have heard Slackware is great so maybe ill try that again. But again it’s too bad because Xandros is the most useable distribution I have seen again unless you want to go outside of its own environment. In that case forget it Xandros isn’t for you.
- "Xandros review, Page 1/2"
- "Xandros review, Page 2/2"
