Gentoo, Lindows and Lycoris arguably were the big surprises of the year in the Linux land, but everyone is waiting the release of Red Hat 8.0 with, possibly, the biggest anticipation ever for a Linux distribution. Since Red Hat posted the Limbo and Null betas, fans of the most popular distribution on earth were making waves and even called this new version a Windows killer. Does this really hold up though? Will Red Hat be successful on their quest to infiltrate the business workstation/destkop market? Read more to find out and view some of the high resolution screenshots we have for you! UPDATE: Red Hat 8 is out! ZDNews has an article about the new release of Red Hat 8.0.
![Some preferences with the unreleased BlueLightHouse theme]()
The installation of Red Hat 8 is similar to the previous versions. While Anaconda, the RH installer, was updated to support AA and GTK+ 2 resulting in a more spiffy look, little has been changed to the installer itself. One of the changes is that now you have to click “Advanced” to tell LILO or GRUB to only install themselves to the / partition and not on the MBR (I usually use the BeOS “bootman” bootloader), the option is not right up there as it used to be. Other than that, the installation went very smoothly; it only took less than 30 minutes with my 52-max CD-ROM I have here on this AthlonXP 1600+, 768 MB Ram (KM266 VIA Apollo PRO chipset, Asus GeForce2MX-400 AGP card and on board S3 SavagePRO, Yamaha YMF-754 and VIA VT8233 sound cards, RealTek 8139 onboard NIC). The OS rebooted and I loaded it into text mode, and from there I loaded X-Free.
As always, the default environment for Red Hat is Gnome. I haven’t seen any Gnome version numbers anywhere, but I think that RH comes with a modified Gnome 2.0.2. It looks pretty slick, and the fonts (default font is “Sans”) are looking sharp, even being fully antialised, but personally I found them a bit too big for my taste (and I am currently running on 1920×1200 resolution). There is this new feature coming with RH8 that you create a directory called ~/.fonts and you throw in all your TTF fonts in there, and they get recognized automatically from the system! This is pretty neat, only problem is that not many people know about this feature. I think it should have been part of the font panel under preferences. Anyway, in no time I was up and running with Verdana as my main font on the Gnome2 desktop. I think Verdana and the rest of the web fonts I installed, render very nicely in this distribution (X Server included is 4.2.0)
The Gnome desktop included on RH8 looks sharp and clean. It has brand new icons, and only important plugins and launcher icons are included in the Gnome taskbar. For example, you will find a workspace switcher, Mozilla 1.0.1 (default browser), Evolution 1.0.8 (default email client) and the OpenOffice.org icons on the left side of the bar, while you will find the Red Hat Network Update Daemon (up2date) on the right, along the Time. On your desktop you will only find your Home icon, the “Start Here” preferences open in Nautilus and the trash, named “Wastebasket.”
Along with the brand new icons, you will find a new GTK+ theme, called BlueCurve, and a new window manager theme. I admit that it looks much better than many other themes from previous versions or from other distributions (the window manager is clean and up to the point – I like it), but there is still quite an lot of stuff to be improved in the UI itself. None of the suggestions we did here and here a month ago made it into this release. I hope the UI at Red Hat developers will consider some of the suggestions for the next version of Red Hat.
A nice surprise is OpenOffice.org’s looks in this desktop. Red Hat made some good work to make sure that OOo looks good, with full AA support on its menus, even when you try to type something on a document. Too bad that OOo does not recognize the TTF fonts I installed on my ~/.fonts dir, though. Other GTK+ application can’t see them either, eg. gedit, while other can (eg. Gnome2 Terminal). This is an incosintency issue and, in my opinion, it should be fixed.
![Mozilla, Evolution, Gimp, XMMS]()
One of the biggest problems I have with the current UI is the inconsistent, confusing and bloated “Start” Red Hat menu. You are free to like it as much as you want, I just don’t. What is the point of having similar menus all over the place? You have a “mouse” entry on your Preferences, and you got a “mouse” entry on your System Settings. Granted, the panels loading from each menu are doing different things, but it is just not clear enough just by looking at the menu items what is what and which one does what. You have to click both to see if it is the one you needed. A UI should be intuitive enough to clear up such misconceptions right away. Same goes for “Keyboard” and Networking panels. And if this is not enough, the Red Hat menu is cluttered with similar –at first glance– menus: “Preferences, Server Settings, System Settings, System Tools”. And if that is not enough, under the Extras menu, you will find submenus (with different apps in them) called… “Preferences, System Settings, System Tools.” Same goes for the Office, Games, Sound and Video. That “Extras” submenu is not needed. It duplicates things in a bad way, even if the apps offered there are different from their counterparts in the root Red Hat menu. The Extras should have been included in the master menus, and to avoid clutter, they should have been included under a submenu. For example, under Preferences, include a submenu called “More Preferences” and put there the not-so-needed prefs. Lycoris does it that way and it works well. The way it works now, after a while, you can’t remember under which “Preferences” menu you saw a specific item. Was it under the root’s Preferences menu, or under the Extras? Messy.
The Red Hat Network (up2date) is a pretty nice service and, via it, you are able to update your Red Hat installation automatically, via a GUI application. Only registered users are able to use the service. For the package management, Red Hat has created a nice to use “Package Management” application that will let you install/remove software from the RH8 CDs. I couldn’t find a way to actually make this manager to see other “sources”, for example rpmfind.net, but it is nice when you right-click on an RPM file it will load the “Install Package” application and take care of the installation. I installed a number of RPMs created for Null (there were no dependancy issues), so I don’t know how this installer behaves in the case there are dependancy issues. I downloaded an RPM (the “Downloader for X” application) created for RH 7.3, and it also installed and worked perfectly.
![System Settings]()
Red Hat still includes the Desktop Switcher application, so I momentarily switched to KDE 3.0.3. I think Red Hat has done a good job modifying a Qt theme to look similar to GTK+’s BlueCurve. Whoever said that Red Hat modified KDE to look like Gnome is wrong. The BlueCurve theme is not Gnome’s either. Red Hat wrote it pretty much from scratch. So, KDE applications now looks similar to Gnome’s, and Gnome’s applications are looking similar to KDE’s. This is a good thing. As you can see from the KDE screenshots the desktop now has an (almost) unified look (the buttons and some other details are not the same as in Gnome). If you do not count the plethora of GTK+ 1.x important and default applications (Evolution, GIMP, Balsa etc), XUL (Mozilla), God-knows-what-toolkit (OpenOffice.org), Java, some Python GUI apps I installed and some KDE 1.x and 2.x apps, well… the rest of the Red Hat 8 looks unified. Well, as you can see, not entirely. It is a step in the right direction, but until all these applications get ported to either Qt 3 or GTK+ 2 or create a BlueCurve theme for their toolkit and force AA to them, the desktop won’t feel entirely unified yet.
But as I said earlier, this is the most unified look and feel achieved today in the Linux world and it should be embraced by the community of users, instead of bitching at Red Hat for doing the Right Thing (TM) for their business. Yes, the “About KDE” is not there anymore, and very correctly it is not. I give props to Red Hat for taking this intrusive propaganda from the KDE Project to throw in this menu item on each and every Qt/KDE application. It is a completely reduntant, duplicated information for 99.9% of the users and it is there only to consume space. And yes, I am mostly a KDE user, but speaking as a UI designer (and not as a KDE user), RH did the right thing to remove that always-ever-present menu. The KDE About box should be included in a central place, somewhere else. Currently, you CAN view the About KDE box by clicking the KDE menu, then on the Panel menu, then on the Help menu and then you will find it there. It is a bit hidden I have to admit. But it is there, as you can see from the screenshots we feature here.
![Gnumeric, AbiWord, Quanta, ImageMagick, games...]()
Red Hat 8 comes with quite a number of applications, it even includes KOffice 1.2. Suspiciously and funny enough, when you install additional packages from the RH CDs via the Package Management application, all the GUI apps I installed were showing under the Extras menu, but KOffice was never joined the Gnome’s Extras menu as other KDE apps did after installation, while it does join KDE’s Extras submenu (which is identical to Gnome’s otherwise). Anyways, you can find a number of apps, FTP clients, KDevelop, Emacs, File-Roller, Gaim, Galeon, Gnumeric, lots of puzzle games, preferences for the http server, NFS, Services, hardware information, X11 resolution/monitor panel, Internet wizard with support for wireless, modems, nics, ADSL, ISDN etc. However, there are other things missing, equally important. I couldn’t find a samba configuration tool coming from Red Hat, no visual way to change your sound card from a list, and no visual way to change your monitor’s refresh rate or printers.
Also, there is no Java installed. No Macromedia Flash or Real Player either. And that brings me in the multimedia offerings of this distro. Or its lack there of. Red Hat 8 has to be the poorest multimedia-ready distro by default that I ever ran (except Gentoo of course, which comes with virtually nothing by default :). So, there are no movie players on Psyche (except the limited Kaboodle which is not even installed by default). None. No XINE, no VLC, no XMovie, no NoATun, no nothing. I don’t know what Red Hat means by saying that this is a “business desktop”, but I can tell you that when I used to work at Montal.com in UK, which is a business ISP and AIX/WinNT provider, the girls at the marketing and PR department needed the ability to play avi and qt or mpeg files daily. Our design company was sending us either Flash presentations, or real avi files to show us the progress for our marketing/advertising material they were creating for us. So, no matter how much I might bitch later in this article for not including 2D/3D drivers from nVidia, this is an even bigger oversight/issue. This is 2002, people, and modern offices and businesses need full multimedia capabilities by default on their desktop. And Red Hat fails to deliver these. Hurrah for Windows XP and MacOSX in this particular issue.
![OpenOffice.org]()
On a less important matter (possibly equally important for some IT engineers working at their dark room with RH8 trying to listen to their music – eg. my beloved husband) is the lack of mp3 capabilities. Because of the licensing issue of mp3 (which exists for YEARS for the SAME price, but for some reason people seem to think that this is a ‘new thing’), Red Hat decided to not include mp3 libraries on their OS. This is their liberty, but let’s be realistic here, most people use mp3s, no matter if both ogg vorbis and even wma are better technologies comparatively. Be paid that $50-60,000 USD needed to include mp3s on its BeOS back in year 2000, at a time that they were with one foot off the cliff, financially-speaking. And Red Hat, a much larger company, with more money and millions more users (Be never had more than 100,000 active users at the same time), decides to not license the technology. Well, maybe that was an ideologic decision rather than a business one, but the bottom line is most of their customers won’t be entirely satisfactied by this decision. No matter how you turn it, this is a limitation of the default system, as mp3 is a very standard audio format these days. And manually downloading and installing the already created mp3 RPMs for Psyche, it will only make you an outlaw and not the solver of the real, larger issue at hand here.
On another XMMS issue, it refuses to play online playlists, like my favorite one (works on Lycoris, doesn’t work either on Xandros).
There are good things in Psyche, don’t get me wrong. GCC 3.2 rocks; all the binaries are really fast, the system feels fast, and by modifying the services to load on boot, will make your booting even faster (dunno why Red Hat decided to load things like wireless and PCMCIA daemons on this PC though – I don’t have any such hardware). The default blue background image is pretty good too. WindowMaker, is the fastest between Gnome2 and KDE 3 and it works great too. The system is very stable too so far, except for the problems I describe later about the graphics driver. The filesystem used is ext3 while the kernel used is 2.4.18 (yes, it would have been nice to get some of 2.4.19’s goodies, but hey, Red Hat’s kernels are always kinda modified and patched with special patches for stability and they get a long time testing – which is a good thing).
On the downside of things, my mouse was not recognized to have a wheel mouse and after changing its type via the mouse system panel (one of the 2-3 mouse preference panels with the same name… see above to understand the sarcasm) to get it recognized as a wheel one, the mouse would jump like crazy on the screen, as if I had selected the wrong type (I didn’t). Killing the X server (couldn’t use the mouse or shortcut to logout – there is no shortcut) and reloading X, fixed the problem and I now have full wheel operations. I am not the only one with the problem. It seems that Red Hat does not enable wheel operations for all mice. Mandrake and Lycoris recognized the mouse with no problems though.
And talking about the X server… Hmm.. should I start about it, or not? I better do, it’s part of the whole experience at the end of the day.
![More system tools]()
So, here is the story: First of all, there was no resolution available to pick above 1600×1200. This baby, a high-end SGI Trinitron 24″ monitor, I got here can do up to 2048×1440, but I wanted to set it up for the much more “conservative” 1920×1200 at 90 Hz. The X preference panel does not let you pick VESA resolutions except the very standard ones, and to make things even worse, you can’t pick the refresh rate you want. I hand-edited the XF86Config file, I double checked the monitor’s sync info, and then added the 1920×1200 res to the confing file. Restarted X, and I was indeed at 1920×1200. But it wouldn’t go more than 73 Hz, even if both the monitor and this graphics card can do more than 90 Hz for that specific res! I tried everything, I created a modeline via XTiming, nothing! It wouldn’t go more than 73 Hz. I downloaded nVidia’s official drivers, and install them successfully (I had 3D and all now). I reloaded X, and again, even nVidia’s drivers X wouldn’t let the refresh to go up to 73 Hz. To make the long story short, I had to email Andy Ritger at nVidia and ask him to give me his opinion of what’s up here. Andy is an incredibly helpful engineer (thanks Andy!) and he sent me his GTF command line application that creates VESA modelines. Even by using this app’s modeline, X wouldn’t go above 73 Hz. By forcing the X server to go at 85 Hz, it would downgrade itself automatically at 1600×1200. By sending the XFree log to Andy, he figured out that for some (stupid most probably) reason, X thinks that when you are on 24bit, the pixel clock of the card can be only 300 Mhz, while it is 350. So, if I downgraded to 16bit color, I would get 90 Hz as requested. It took some more experiementation and my husband’s additional help to modify BY HAND the modeline that GTF created and be able to get to 1920x1200x24bit @ 90Hz. There is no possible way that even Joe Admin in a remote office in Alabama would have figured out how to fix that without asking directly XFree or nVidia employees. For me, that is one more reason why X just doesn’t cut it, and as a result, why RH8 doesn’t cut it when configuring high-end monitors or other not 100% standard resolutions. Especially when Red Hat hopes to get all these ex-SGI animators over to their platform after porting their custom multimedia applications. These are issues that XFree should fix, include the (proprierty) GTF mechanism (there is no other way) and update the modelines for more VESA resolutions for up to 2048×1536. This is 2002 we are living in, not 1995.
Red Hat comes with DRI 3D drivers for Voodoos, i810, Matrox, Radeon and SiS. There is no 3D support by default for nVidia cards though. I was a bit unhappy about this a few days ago, but now I am over it. I mean, at the end of the day, this is a business desktop and as such it does not really need 3D, right? Well, not exactly. Think the… poor ex-SGI animators trying to port and work with Blender and other GL-enabled animation packages on a PC with Red Hat, or game developers. Developers are employees too and this a business desktop, right?
![Red Hat Network, System Monitor, File-Roller, Gconf, Grip etc]()
I downloaded and installed successfully the nVidia 2D and 3D drivers. OpenGL works fine in 3D game, except that the GL screensavers have a problem to start in accelerated mode (yes, the memoryLimit is set to 0). After running a bit happy with them at the resolution and refresh rate I wanted, X would crash. SSH’ing in the machine and either stopping, or huping or killing X (which would now consume 99% cpu), it would completely kill Red Hat 8 (sign that the kernel was crashing because of the nVidia driver) and I would need to reset the machine. Andy told me to set the AGP settings to 0, and I did so. In the beginning, it was looking more stable, but after a while it would still crash in the exact same way. So, I just reverted back to the generic 2D “nv” driver that comes with XFree. The problem is that this nv driver could not drive my monitor at 90Hz. I could see the windows’ edges to render as zig-zag, which is a sign that something is getting overclocked (while the gfx card _can_ do it with other OSes or drivers). So, here I am back on 73 Hz, writing this. I can tell you, I am not happy about the nVidia and nv drivers situation. The nVidia driver, which I compiled from the .tar.gz packages are NOT stable under Red Hat 8 on my machine even if when I disabled AGP support. I wish that Red Hat, who are now a big respected company (I wrote recently about their dominance in this year’s LinuxWorld expo), could partner with nVidia to include these 2D/3D _better_than_nv nVidia drivers by default, but most-most importantly to have these drivers fully tested and ready for download for the time when their OS is about to come out. As for the standard XFree “nv” nVidia driver is so basic and untested on high resolutions that if it was something real that I could touch, I would have already thrown it in the river, which runs outside my house. And please don’t tell me to dive in to the code and fix it, I am not a device driver programmer, neither I want to be one. I am a user when it comes to Linux and I expect things to work as nicely as they do on Windows XP and MacOSX (I do some C/C++ development only for OSX and BeOS these days).
There are three last points I would like to discuss in this review, because these are indeed real issues in the last 5 days that I am using Psyche.
First, the focus of windows does not always work and this is either a window manager or a toolkit issue. For example, I have Nautilus, gedit and the preferences/mouse panel open and I click between them (in the application body, not in the window manager) and while the clicked app gets the focus, it does not come into the front (I am using the default “click to focus” btw). Half of the time it would work and the clicked apps would come to the front, while the other 50% of the time1 it wouldn’t do it. This might be a toolkit bug, because if I click inside a tab view area, the window will always come on focus, while if I click outside of this specific area, but still inside its window, it wouldn’t. Weird.
Most important bug in my opinion is the GTK+ 2 combo box bug. Example: I get to the System Settings/Display panel and I open the graphics card panel which has a combo/drop down box on its right side, with the name of the driver loaded. About 60-70% of the time I hit the little arrow to open the combo box’s menu, the combo box would get a different value, EVEN if I did not click to any value! In my case, it selects automatically the “mga” option! This is a toolkit bug, and while it does not happen all the time, it happens MOST of the time and if a user won’t be very careful of what got selected without his consent, he/she would end up with a non working X server until he/she gets to hand-edit back the XF86Config file. Messy.
![KDE, KOffice, Konqueror, KontrolCenter, Gaim]()
The last gripe I have is the shortcut and navigability this distro does not have. For example, as I described above, by selecting the correct mouse driver for my mouse to give it the wheel ability, until I restart X, the mouse would move like crazy and I was not be able to click anything. I had to ALT+CNTRL+BACKSPACE my X Server (which was something that was not nessesary, X was fine), because none of the Windows Keys worked. By just clicking the windows key and the context menu key on my keyboard, nothing would happen, no menu would open. Yeah, yeah, I know. These are keys that the evil empire introduced. But they are freaking useful for God’s sake. USE them! They are here, present on each modern keyboard! And what about the complete lack of navigation via other keyboard shortcuts? How do I logout via a shortcut, or even better how do I open a Red Hat menu (in order to navigate through it and do stuff or log out) via a shortcut or via the Windows key? The Gnome Help didn’t help at all on this issue!
Conclusion
So, there are two questions remain:
How well this distribution would do as a business desktop? Let me answer this like this:
Psyche is better than most of its Linux competitors, but still way behind in both the desktop experience and feature-set from both WindowsXP and MacOSX.
How well this would serve as a server OS?
I am sure it would be good server OS. It is stable and fast. Some GUI utils are missing for configuring more servers, but for the admin who does not need GUI tools, Red Hat 8 would be better and faster than ever.
But as a (business or not) desktop, I am sorry, but I am still skeptical about it. It isn’t ready yet, it has a number of rough edges, and I really do not understand where the whole fuss was about the last two months about Red Hat 8 being a Windows killer on the desktop. It isn’t one. Not yet anyway.
Installation: 8/10
Hardware Support: 8/10
Ease of use: 7.5/10
Features: 8/10
Speed: 8/10 (UI responsiveness, latency, throughput)
Overall: 7.9 / 10
Thanks to Ed Boyce for going through the pain of proof reading this article.
This one looks like a winner!
The new config tools look great!
If the desktop speed is good then Linux will finaly make it big on the desktop!
ciao
yc
PS Can’t open the png files with winblows.
You didn’t even read the article, didn’t you?
I had the same problem with my Duron 1.1ghz machine.
Try disabling XRender Acceleration for the nvidia driver.
The option is documented in the Nvidia Readme..
Can’t open the png files with winblows.
I suspect you mean with IE for Windows, right? If I were to says “Linbows because lynx won’t show me the PNGs,” I think people would jump on it.
My prediction: Red Hat 8 won’t make it big on the desktop because PalmSource will release BeOS R6 and that will take over 30% of the market within 18 months. All OBOS developers will instead add enhancements to this R6, and within two years we will have a system with every major capability and application that anyone could possibly want. You with me, YC?
Why would I want to disable acceleration? I didn’t buy this Asus card (more expensive than the other MXs) to not be accelerated. Sorry, I expect things to work, not to hack around them. This is not what a desktop environment should be working like.
Thanks for your article Eugenia. I know from what you said this release is NOT a windows killer. But does it make it a good alternative for the MS convert?
Also, have you got a review on Mandrake 9.0 and how it compares to Redhat 8.0. Other than Mandrakes own sites, I haven’t seen any. Can you help. Thanks in advance.
> But does it make it a good alternative for the MS convert?
As I wrote in the article, Red Hat 8 is better than most other Linux distributions. So, if you don’t want to use Windows or MacOSX, yes, go for Red Hat 8.
> Also, have you got a review on Mandrake 9.0 and how it compares to Redhat 8.0.
Mandrake was supposed to send me their distro last week, but something happened and their CEO emailed me yesterday to tell me they will send me the box next week. Then, I will write the review for Mandrake and compare with Red Hat 8. I don’t know yet.
That problem with the Abiword fonts really sucks! I’ve been using RH beta ‘null’ for a while now and I submitted a bug on it: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=72633
It is really a shame that they didn’t fix this for the release. The good news is that I’m running CVS Abiword, and it doesn’t have this problem (also has xft support – woohoo). Hopefully RH will upgrade this package through RHN when the new Abiword comes out.
Haven’t you noticed that the RH x.0 releases are ground breaking but not good enough for public acceptance? I’ll try it out of course, but I’m also very much interested on the results of MDK 9. Maybe RH will get it right on 8.3
Coming from Eugenia, this review isn’t one of those all-way angrily “Linux desktop should be buried” rant. Only half-way
Anyway…
One of the biggest problems I have with the current UI is the inconsistent, confusing and bloated “Start” Red Hat menu.
Blame KDE. Better yet, blame no-one has added menu panel to KDE. And with Bero leaving RH, this will be more difficult to happen. Sad.
I couldn’t find a samba configuration tool coming from Red Hat
Isn’t SWAT installed by default?
The nVidia driver, which I compiled from the .tar.gz packages are NOT stable under Red Hat 8 on my machine even if when I disabled AGP support.
NVidia must get RH 8, see what RH did, and *then* make new drivers that work with RH 8.
Living with proprietary drivers has those problems. Yes, RMS mantra sometimes drive people crazy, but he’s right. Hope someday NVIDIA does what ATi does and help the XFree86 team.
(And that’s why I always tell people wanting to run Linux to go buy ATi instead of NVIDIA)
I doubt you’ll say that for long. The new 8500 drivers aren’t open source
And NVIDIA works just great for most people (even for me whose used it on 2.5 with a beta version of Gentoo). You’re doing them a disservice, given that ATI’s drivers suck a whole lot more than NVIDIA’s.
Nice review. I don’t think even Redhat will claim that their new desktop is a windows killer. Windows is still much more useable on the desktop. But the linux desktop is maturing fast and making amazing progress. Judging from NULL, Redhat 8 is definitely a giant step in the right direction.
Kudos to the Redhat Team for an amazing job. I hope future releases will be much better and polished.
>Blame KDE
Why? I am talking about the Redhat’s Gnome menu panel.
>Isn’t SWAT installed by default?
I didn’t see any gui app called “swat”.
> NVidia must get RH 8, see what RH did, and *then* make new drivers that work with RH 8.
Not if RH could partner with nvidia to have the drivers bug free and ready in time of release.
I forgot, Redhat should really fix the menu system. It is stil cluttered, has a lot of redundant items, and is not very organised and logical. Take a leaf from Lycoris or Ximain Gnome.
There is no doubt that the linux world has improved
in its attempts to win the desktop world,many distro’s are
trying to improve there gui’s altough there is a long way
until they will reach microsoft ,i believe thats its only a matter of time until linux will get its greep on the
home user and coprate user markets.
As for Beos it was a great os but unless palm will take the job seriosly (which honestly im not sure that they are able to) beos is dead and it will stay so,
Linux is used by major companies such as ibm and intel…
for devolopment ,a state that Beos was never in,i cant see any reason why any serious developer would bother messing with it since the source code isnt available,and no one suppourts it .
By the way Mandrake 9 rules these guys are improving
greatly on each release,suppourt them!
do a normal and comparative review! how is red hat with older hardware by the way? i wonder if it will still have problems with my on board CS4236 soundcard. i hate dell! and does the kde desktop still “flicker” so much? hows the mouse movement on gnome? still a little jumpy? or am i the only person that experiences these things on linux?
Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, as they say. The XFree86 guys are trying to work with some totally undocumented hardware made by a company that is actively hostile to releasing the specs for it. Now, despite that, it is still slightly faster in 2D than the nvidia driver itself. Sure, constructive criticism is in order, but throwing it in a river is just a bit much…
Xine is there. Go to: Extras | Sound & Video | Video Player. It’s in my Null installation.
An aside: there are already quite a few custom rpms built for 8.0 at: http://psyche.freshrpms.net/
Overall, I think you did a very nice review. I agree with your points about the menu structure etc. I disagree slightly on some other points. I would have given it closer to a 8.5 or 9 out of 10. It’s the best one out there right now, at least, IMHO.
I agree — being able to drag and drop .ttf fonts into your ~/.fonts directory is *WAY* cool. The reason OOo doesn’t pick them up is that OOo has always required you to run OOo’s spadmin program to add fonts. I’m not sure RH could change that except by rewriting some of the OOo code.
>>You didn’t even read the article, didn’t you?
errr, Yes! I didn’t didn’t read it!
Did it post to fast?
I actually paged through it.
Ok, I’ll take the zero.
ciao
yc
>>…PalmSource will release BeOS R6…
>>…You with me, YC?
100%
> Xine is there. Go to: Extras | Sound & Video | Video Player. It’s in my Null installation.
It is _not_ the case on my Psyche.
I like Eugenia’s reviews because she always puts what’s being reviewed in the hot seat as to how the product stacks up *right now*, with today’s hardware, etc. Very nice review and tremendous screenshots!
I haven’t used Redhat for years…I realized it was server software…and have used SuSE extensively and the newbie distros in particular. It sounds like RH 8 has some gaps to fill in. But, this version has really caught my attention and I’m going to get it and take a look-see. My God, I’ve got to make room for this, SuSE 8.1 and who knows what next :-). Anyway, desktop Linux is getting there, step by step, inch by inch. Yet, perhaps the real question is X. What to do about X? I have to admit, I don’t know.
May I ask which release of RH8 you’re using? The final-final? Or the RC3 (Gold – Code Freeze)?
I really enjoyed this preview, and love the way you went about it. Concentrating on the workstation/desktop elements, and not the server/service stuff. After all, we’re trying to find out whether this is a good MS Windows competitor.
As someone had already mentioned, about Mandrake 9, I’m really looking forward to the review as well.
> May I ask which release of RH8 you’re using? The final-final?
I am running Psyche 8.0. This is what it is writen at many places in the distro.
[i]For me, that is one more reason why X just doesn’t cut it, and as a result, why RH8 doesn’t cut it when configuring high-end monitors or other not 100% standard resolutions.[i]
I don’t understand – you use a graphics card from a manufacturer who doesn’t release programming information to Xfree developers, who release buggy X servers and you blame the resulting mess on X?
No, I blame both Red Hat, the XFree driver testing guy, and nVidia. They ALL have their share on the problem.
Please, stop telling tall stories.
1) Nvidia drivers can’t be include with the distro because of licensing issues, hence the reason you have to manually download off their (Nvidia) site,regardless of what OS you run. Windows XP drivers aren’t accelerated either! Hence, you’d still have to download it, even if you were running your precious Windows XP.
2) Nvidia chip-equipped cards are crap. Period. Sure, you want to be Mr(s) “Lets see my frame rates go through the roof”, yet, moan because you eXPerienced instability. Nvidia cards are unstable, whether it is Windows, Linux, *BSD. Want to be a fps freak, use a Nvidia, want something stable for *NIX, then buy a Matrox. Having run Matrox’s under *NIX since God was a teenager, I have never had any problems. FYI (for your information), I an using a Matrox G550 32 DDR.
3) Stop moaning about usability. 95.987345% of people could easily use the above interface without an issue. Why pander and worry about the miserable, pathetic 4 point something percent who, regardless of how much research will still balls something up.
>Nvidia drivers can’t be include with the distro because of licensing issues
Read the license. It does NOT dissallow the distribution.
“2.1.1 Rights. Customer may install and use one copy of the SOFTWARE on a single computer, and except for making one back-up copy of the Software, may not otherwise copy the SOFTWARE. This LICENSE of SOFTWARE may not be shared or used concurrently on different computers.
2.1.2 Linux Exception. Notwithstanding the foregoing terms of Section 2.1.1, SOFTWARE designed exclusively for use on the Linux operating system may be copied and redistributed, provided that the binary files thereof are not modified in any way (except for unzipping of compressed files).”
And why are you hanging of this issue? As I write on the article, I have bigger problems with stability of both the nv and nvidia drivers, rather than the actual inclusion or not of the driver in RH8. I wish I had stability even if it wouldn’t be included by default.
>2) Nvidia chip-equipped cards are crap.
Your opinion, not mine. I used to have a TNT2-Ultra and it was rock solid. And this is Asus we are talking about, not cheap no-name shit.
>Stop moaning about usability
NEVER.
You’re a bit off on the nvidia card bit. NVIDIA is the number one selling graphics card among enthusiasts today. If its stability was as bad as you say, *someone* besides you would have seen it. If it was as epidemic as you imply, Anand or Tom or Sharky would have mentioned it by now, at SOME point. But they haven’t, so I’d take it that its not. Personally, I’ve never had a single problem with them. Sure its a matter of personal experience, you vs me, but I’ve got the advantage that most people seem to have had the same experience as I have.
I hate to insinuate a bias on your part. But the fact that you wrote of Red Hat: “the most popular distribution on earth” without putting it in inverted commas, as it belongs (for example, check the statistics on http://www.distrowatch.com – Mandrake has had higher hpd counts than Red Hat for months on end) combined with the fact that you downloaded Red Hat even before the official release to do a review, whereas you are waiting for Mandrakesoft to send you a copy of their distro to do a review, in my opinion shows that you might be slightly biased toward Red Hat. (wow, is that 1 sentence :-))
Of course i don’t know what your arrangement with Mandrakesoft is regarding the review. Perhaps they would only like a review of a boxed set? BTW this is not meant as a totally negative post, i appreciate you taking the time to do reviews for your readers. Thank you.
… but this looks great!
If it’s as good as it looks and sound, it will probably be my secondary OS. It will at least replace Gentoo on my HDD, that’s for sure.
I doubt that it will make me stop developing for BeOS though, but it could be nice from a users perspective.
“2.1.2 Linux Exception. Notwithstanding the foregoing terms of Section 2.1.1, SOFTWARE designed exclusively for use on the Linux operating system may be copied and redistributed, provided that the binary files thereof are not modified in any way (except for unzipping of compressed files).”
— Have you ever thought that they may need to adjust things?
Your opinion, not mine. I used to have a TNT2-Ultra and it was rock solid. And this is Asus we are talking about, not cheap no-name shit.
— I never said that, I said ALL Nvidia chip-equipped boards. The only ones I would suggest are their high end Quadro. Admitingly, I am pissed off at Matrox for stuffing around and not making some drivers for Parphilia before it was released. The ones now they have available are shit. If they can’t provide a driver for X, then they should simply close up shop, and give up producing video cards, because obviously they have no intention of serving customers.
>Stop moaning about usability
NEVER.
— And what is that meant to achieve? I gave up on that issue years ago. No matter what you do, people will be bloody morons. Simple as that. I would go so far so say that there should be a license so that only those who have a bloody clue can use a computer. In an organisation, have a “wacker” that goes around, those who do something stupid, wack then around the head with a rolled up newspaper. I think after several hits, they’ll get the message to stop doing stupid things.
> I hate to insinuate a bias on your part.
There is no bias at all. When I review, I review the things I know and see.
Just read all other articles on news.com and other *big* publications. They *ALL* consider Red Hat to be the most wildly distro used. Even on our OSAlert poll we did some months ago, Red Hat finished first:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=1299
I must aplaud redhet, this looks very nice. It does have a look of it’s own, as in it doesn’t look like a windows clone. It looks very clean and new. And my favorite part. No hidious clock, someone finaly got that right.
Eugenia thanks for saying what your monitor was. My first reaction the the first shot was what kind of monitor was it taken on. It looks wide screen, like it was on some apple cinema display. I’m afraid of how much that thing must cost. Oh well maybe in year when i graduate and have money. Till then 17″ at 1024 works for me.
>Have you ever thought that they may need to adjust things?
If yes, you should either adjust your OS to work with the drivers, simply because nvidia drivers are important, and if that’s not possible, you PARTNER with them. Red Hat is not the 4-people company of Lycoris. They are now big and respected. They should *partner* with big hardware vendors.
>And what is that meant to achieve?
That the Red Hat UI people might read that and they might fix it. And until they fix it, people should know what is good and what is bad. This is what a review is all about!
>It looks wide screen, like it was on some apple cinema display
It is widescreen, yes. It is a CRT, 24″ Trinitron.
It costs above $2000 I think. SGI loaned it to me for an IRIX review that we will feature this week.
Well, according to this review, Mandrake 9.0 sounds much better. With a press of one button it found all my windoze fonts and installed them under Linux. OpenOffice is fully anti-aliased and has all my windoze fonts under it. Everything looks very sharp and clean, they use Metacity instead of Sawfish, so the desktop feels much faster. The 2.4.19 kernel feels much faster then the 2.4.18 in Mandrake 8.2. And the NTFS support in the kernel completely removed my need to reboot into windows. The installation went smooth even though my 2 CD (the extensions) was corrupt and was hanging. All the menus look unified and have both GNOME and KDE applications. All the KDE apps look as if they were GNOME apps when run under GNOME. I haven’t tried KDE 3.0.3 yet (even though it loads by default) because I prefer GNOME with its Mac OS X look. I am sure KDE works fine, but I would like to mention the fact that Mandrake managed to do all this without pissing GNOME and KDE developers. This is the distro I could almost recommend to my friends who don’t know much about computers (with Mandrake Control Center 9.0 you can forget about manually editing 90% of config files or using ackward utilities like linuxconf). I bet anything I will able to recommend a Mandrake Linux distro to any of my computer illiterate friends before they hit 10.0.
MANDRAKE 9 IS THE BEST LINUX DISTRIBUTION IN THE WORLD!!!
mmm sounds interesting. So the monitior came with a nice SGI attached to it
I can see a debate, SGI’s are to expensive, buy an Apple .
I completely agree with the comments about XFree86 and the rough edges one gets as a business desktop. Red Hat has a lot of work to do making the UI more friendly. I’ve made comments in their mailing lists and posted bugs on the relevant parts of the OS that need to become more friendly. The 7.9 overall rating seems fair.
Dang SGI gives no prices. Oh well i will sit here and droll at the f220 lcd. That has to be one of the most beautiful looking monitors ever. Forget about an apple cinema display. they have no pics of the 24″crt, include them in the SGI review please.
Ok, I will get a picture of the monitor with my camera and post it here!
It is a nice monitor! Stay tuned!
Here it is. It is a black widescreen monitor with great quality and more importantly, great performance! It can do up to 2048×1440 at a very respectable framerate:
http://www.osnews.com/img/1842/sgi.jpg
–quoted by Matthew Gardiner–
1) Nvidia drivers can’t be include with the distro because of licensing issues, hence the reason you have to manually download off their (Nvidia) site,regardless of what OS you run. Windows XP drivers aren’t accelerated either! Hence, you’d still have to download it, even if you were running your precious Windows XP.
–/quoted by Matthew Gardiner–
Don’t you know that Windows ALWAYS already have the Nvidia driver in the Windows’s auto-update? Of course, it’s not good as Nvidia’s real driver, when you download from Nvidia’s website.
Anyway, what a great review, Eugenia!! Thanks! I complete agreed with you about the hardares and X issues, because I am having the same problems.
Hey, Eugenia, great review, it’s nice to see somebody that’s not biased. Most other reviews I read are either completely supportive of a distro or completely hate it, shows a lot about amny Linux reviewers who are just reviewing to advertise their distro not to show real problems.
Can you review SuSE 8.1 too? I’ve been hearing nice things about it, but it’s more for the smarter than average computer user.
I’ve been using Null for awhile now and I have been waiting for the full version, since I installed it. The menu is well thought out having only the default applications listed in the main folder. The extras menu allows them to put all the less used items in one place with the same structure. The extras menu allows me to to keep my menus simple. I want to have koffice installed as well as openoffice, but I don’t want the menu to have 20 items.
i would like to point out one more time that the “nvidia” driver is just not stable. I am running Debian Woody with a GeForce3 ti500 running 1280×1024@120?Hz. It seems to me that RedHat made the right decision to not include unstable drivers with its release.
RedHat can’t force nVidia to make a better driver for linux, because there isn’t a big market for 3D on linux. And there won’t be until RedHat can support it stabley.
catch 22
-cc
>Hey, Eugenia, great review
thanks!
>Can you review SuSE 8.1 too
Yes, I also wait for the box from SuSE. I am in the talks with Red Hat, Mandrake, Lycoris, Xandros and SuSE when it comes to reviews.
I appreciate your candid review. We really should expect as much and more from a Linux desktop than from a Windows or Mac. Otherwise, why not just use Windows or Mac?
And, I agree 100% about the menu. Jeeze?! That’s not good. The start menu on the WM featured here at OSAlert (Xpde) makes much better sense. I can’t wait to try that WM out.
But, OTOH, when you look at how far Linux has come, it’s very hard for me to be too critical. RH looks good. I’m pleased with the bold and positive effort to unify the desktop. Linux is definitely coming of age.
Here’s my biggest complaint. On Null and in your screenshots, the AA fonts are too blurry for my tastes. However, judging by the screenshots, it looks like that’s tweakable, though. I’m looking forward to trying that out.
One day I’ll use Linux because it will be the best desktop OS available. But, until then, I think I’ll be realistic and just use Linux as a server and keep “using” Windows (can’t afford to go Mac).
Darren
Thanks for the review Eugenia. Jealousy doesn’t permit me much empathy for your grief with the big monitor, but you make fair points.
Just wondering about defaults regarding basic security things (open ports, services defaulted “on”, etc). Did RH add any “hardening” tools or do we still have to do everything by hand?
>>Have you ever thought that they may need to adjust things?
If yes, you should either adjust your OS to work with the drivers, simply because nvidia drivers are important, and if that’s not possible, you PARTNER with them. Red Hat is not the 4-people company of Lycoris. They are now big and respected. They should *partner* with big hardware vendors.
Eugenia – I have much respect for your work but..
…no dice! An operating system absolutely should NOT be “adjusted to work with xxxx,” whether the device is from NVidia, Maxtrox, ATI, Western Digital, or IBM. When you and I bought NVidia, we knew that we’d be at risk (or at least, beholden to NVidia for updates).
The main problem I have with closed source drivers is that they are unknown quantities. For example, let’s say we come up with a new way to leverage unused 3D accelerator chips to do matrix math. I just can’t get it working with my WhizBang ABC video card. Only by disassembling the binary do we find the video driver unnecessarily disabling 3D calculations each time the screen is redrawn. Even though we found the problem, we can’t fix it and distribute the fix! In other words YOU would have to fix it yourself, or hope that WhizBang gives an answer.
Clearly the right solution is for WhizBang to publish the specifications. Is WhizBang’s hardware truly better than the competitions? Or is it only that optimized drivers lets them win benchmarks?
Something else to consider: RedHat and many other distros try to obey the GPL; one of the main strengths of Linux is that you can modify it yourself. NVidia’s license does not allow this.
P.S. I’m not attacking NVidia; I own a TNT2, GEForce4, ATI AllInWonder (tv-in/out), and ATI Radeon 7500. I won’t tell you “you should’ve bought the Radeon” or “You don’t need to use that high-refresh rate anyhow”.
ATI’s site they tell you that “[We are considering allowing you to use the tv-out that you purchased] under Linux. in the meantime go to the Gatos project, where people are trying to figure out what we won’t tell them.”
–quoted by Sam–
RedHat can’t force nVidia to make a better driver for linux, because there isn’t a big market for 3D on linux. And there won’t be until RedHat can support it stabley.
–/quoted by Sam–
Really? Don’t you know that a lot of recently movies were made in the Linux by use Maya, Maya plugin written in Python and etc on the SGI machines? StarWar II was made by Linux, which I have Linux Journal. It was great article about it. Also, they have the huge Linux farm workstations there.
I agree with Eugenia that the OS (Red Hat Linux 8, in this case) should be alter and not the nVidia driver if alteration is needed to address the problem that she was having.
According to the license with the nVidia (Linux) driver, there is no problem with distributing the driver with the distribution as long as there is no change to the driver itself. Hence, Red Hat could have used this driver and test it (and distribute) for Red Hat Linux 8, but Red Hat didn’t go down this path. Now, because of this, the graphics card and the monitor and the high refresh rate setup-combination isn’t supported. Therefore, this is a matter of “Out of the Box hardward support/compatibility” issue. Agree? Simply put, this combination of configuration (or the user’s need for high refresh rate and high resolution with these particular hardware) wasn’t taken into consideration by Red Hat.
Due to this, there is not enough evidence (based on this review) to state that nVidia-chip graphics card are unstable.
Agree? Any comments?
>I appreciate your candid review.
Thanks!
>On Null and in your screenshots, the AA fonts are too blurry for my tastes
No. You can select which level of AA you want. Check this screenshot with the two font panels where you can configure the font engine to your liking!
http://goober.osnews.com/img/1842/redhat1.jpg
Also, please do not forget that most of my screenshots are rendering with the Verdana font, which I changed because I did not like the default Sans. Check this screenshot(http://members.csolutions.net/zayda/osnews/img/1842/redhat3.jpg) and check on the RIGHT hand side of the shot. The right hand side has the default Sans font loaded, and you can see how the letters and numbers are colliding! Unfortunately, Red Hat does not come with well designed fonts, this is why I reverted to my Verdana from the Windows partition.
>Did RH add any “hardening” tools or do we still have to do everything by hand?
It comes with a firewall by default and SSH installed and loaded, but I didn’t bother too much with it because I am already behind a BSD firewall… I should have gotten more into depth about this, you are right…
>2) Nvidia chip-equipped cards are crap.
From what I understand, Nvidia did well with frame rates on Windows platforms until the the ATI Radeon 9700 was recently released. Currently the 9700 leads in all the important video benchmarks according to Maximum PC magazine. You can read a review of the 9700 in their current issue.Before the 9700 came out Nvidia had the lead.
I really do have to agree with Eugenia: there is a lot of usability work still to be done and the best thing Red Hat can do is face the music and get on with doing it. Red Hat 8 is not yet a viable business desktop, especially compared to Windows XP. It is getting closer, and has made great strides in the last year or two, but is still not quite there yet.
I don’t see how Gnome on Mandrake looks anything like Mac OS X. I have come to the conclusion you have never used OSX or even seen a screenshot or have not used Gnome on Mandrake.
I may be wrong but please explain the similarities you refer to.
I do like Mandrake though. The final release seems to have much nicer font rendering that the Release Candidates.
> …no dice! An operating system absolutely should NOT be “adjusted to work with xxxx,” whether the device is from NVidia
When you are in need, you DO the adjustments, even if they are not the best solution. This is not a perfect world we are living in, engineers have to make such adjustments all the time in their code. This is not a cmedia sound chip we are talking about, it is the driver for the mostly used cards in the world. The companies should also counter-balancing their options and their actions if they want to keep customers happy, even if their engineers might not like it.
Eugenia, maybe after you’ve done the Mandrake 9 review, you can also do a Red Hat 8 Security/Network services review as well? You know, kind of like a review for the servers guys out there. What do you think?
> I agree — being able to drag and drop .ttf fonts into your >~/.fonts directory is *WAY* cool. The reason OOo doesn’t pick >them up is that OOo has always required you to run OOo’s >spadmin program to add fonts. I’m not sure RH could change >that except by rewriting some of the OOo code.
just not true
i added verdana to X just by adding an XFontDir (or whatever it is) line to XF86Config-4 and they showed up in OOo as soon as I launched it.
-cc
> Red Hat 8 is not yet a viable business desktop, especially compared to Windows XP. It is getting closer, and has made great strides in the last year or two, but is still not quite there yet.
— Am I missing someting here, or did Redhat not explicitly say they are not after the whole desktop market. For most office workers, thats the people I work with every day, Redhat would be more than they ever need.
Many office workers are not allowed to install software. I am aware of one bank where you can’t even install a screensaver.
Anyway all Redhat would like is a few percentage points of the desktop market for now. That is plenty!
Check web stats. Most screens out there are on 800×600.
I noticed the two font panels in your screenshot while reading the article. This is where I realized that “hinting” and “smoothing” might benefit me.
I would love to, but I am mostly a UI/desktop/games and web developer kind of person and not a sys admin. I know how to setup mysql, php, apache, manage users, quotas and stuff, but I am not as knowledgable as I would like to be in more advanced server matters, so I don’t feel confident enough to write such reviews. This is why I asked others to do the UnitedLinux review, which is a server-oriented distro.
> just not true
>i added verdana to X just by adding an XFontDir (or whatever >it is) line to XF86Config-4 and they showed up in OOo as soon >as I launched it.
Well, you didn’t DnD it (it being font file(s)), did you…
You created a directory containing fonts, then added a line…
These steps are consider more messy than simple DnD (from the perspective of a window/GUI enviroment).
Did you get a copy before it was released to the public? I am in bad need of an upgrade, RH 7.3 is still stable, but it is doing weird shit, at least under my user.
Eugenia, I know you didn’t like the new YaST2 in SuSE 8.1, but I look forward to a review on it as well. To save yourself some work, maybe you should wait until SuSE 8.1 is released and then contrast all three of the major new distributions.
With all these requests for reviews it seems like you have a lot of work ahead. I you choose to do them.
If you do I am looking forward to your review of SuSE and Mandrake. I can’t decide which one I should purchase.
Personally I think I need to buy two more computers. A Powerbook and a $800 Desktop to try all the new OS’s.
Now all I have to do is come up with $4000.
Eugenia, thanks, thats a nice monitor, Does SGI want it back after the review? I think i would cry seeing it going away. Or do you get to hang on the thing for long term reviewing?
Eugenia I have RH8 (Null) installed and I have XINE installed too.
Do you mean to tell us that the final doesn’t have this program?
Sorry if someone has already posted about this. I haven’t read many comments yet. I was just reading the article and I posted.
Eugenia, just want to let you know that I think you did a great job in this preview. Forget about those who said that you were bias-ed. I think the preview was fair, since it was written based on your personal experience with this particular version of Red Hat, regardless of what you have experienced perior to this article. Hence I think it had been very logicallly layed out and stated some issues that you had encountered.
> Does SGI want it back after the review? I think i would cry seeing it going away. Or do you get to hang on the thing for long term reviewing?
Yes, SGI will take it back after the review. It would be nice to keep it along with the Dual Octane they sent me for more reviews in the future.
> Eugenia I have RH8 (Null) installed and I have XINE installed too. Do you mean to tell us that the final doesn’t have this program?
Yes, there is no Xine on my Psyche. I wrote this as well in the 16-30 range of comments.
What’s this Null?
I have Psyche ISOs, but they are titled Psyche_RC3_Boxset (everything during operation is titled “Psyche” and Red Hat 8). This RC3 was released 2 weeks ago, and was code-freezed. I’m not sure how close this RC3 is compare to the release tomorrow.
>Many office workers are not allowed to install software. I am >aware of one bank where you can’t even install a screensaver.
Meaningless in the context of choosing and then deploying an OS.
>Anyway all Redhat would like is a few percentage points of >the desktop market for now. That is plenty!
Corporate lies get told all the time.<Shrug>
The reasons for Red Hat not including the nVidia drivers is simple: the drivers interface directly with the kernel and thus have the ability (as Eugenia pointed out) to bring the whole system to a grinding halt. Who is going to support the drivers? Red Hat? nVidia? Red Hat can’t support what it knows nothing about (they have no more access to the driver code than your or I) and nVidia pretty much throws the drivers out “As Is”. If you want supported drivers for your nVidia card, you have to use the drivers provided by whoever created the card, whether you use Linux, MacOS, or Windows. In Eugenia’s case this would be Asus. I’ve never checked, but I doubt Asus officially supports their cards under Red Hat (but I could be totally wrong!). nVidia did NOT produce the card that Eugenia uses and has NO obligation whatsoever to provide drivers for it at all: that’s why they’re called REFERENCE drivers. The drivers you get from nVidia are the drivers on which the REAL drivers (those distributed by the OEMs) are based. Sure, some OEMs just slap their names on the reference drivers and shove them out the door with a cheap, basic reference board. Asus is certainly NOT one of those companies, as Eugenia pointed out.
In other words, Eugenia, with all due respect I think you’re missing the point: just as it is not Microsoft’s responsibility to write drivers for every piece of hardware known to humanity (which they certainly don’t), it’s not Red Hat’s either. nVidia does not sell cards to end-users. Your issue is with Asus for not (as far as I know) providing Linux support for THEIR product. Blaming Red Hat or nVidia is simply wrong. nVidia has released Linux REFERENCE drivers, for which we should be thankful. It is up to the individual OEMs to make use of and support them. I would humbly suggest your take Red Hat and nVidia out of the line of fire and redirect your very valid comments where they belong: Asus and all the other manufacturers of nVidia cards. They should NOT be depending on the reference drivers to satisfy the needs of their Linux customers.
There is another reason, of course. Red Hat doesn’t condone or support the creation of close-source drivers, especially closed-sourced drivers written specifically for Red Hat Linux. If they did, the idiots who constantly scream, “Red Hat wants to be the Microsoft of Linux” would shout their vocal cords apart. By encouraging hardware manufacturers to create open drivers (or at least drivers that work on things other than ONLY Red Hat Linux) and NOT courting those manufacturers to write Red Hat specific drivers, Red Hat does a service for the community.
Anyone who’d followed the Limbo/Null development lists would know all this anyway, from reading the replies of the Red Hat team to questions regarding exactly these issues. I did follow the lists. The impression I get is that Red Hat employs a lot of really nice, polite, hard-working people. Red Hat genuinely wants to be a good corporate citizen AND a good open source citizen. Those two goals often seem mutually exclusive. It’s certainly not an easy path to take, that’s for sure. So far, the balancing act seems to be working and I wish nothing but good luck for Red Hat as a company.
Even if the open source / free software world didn’t literally preclude the rise of a “new Microsoft”, I don’t think we’d have anything to fear from Red Hat.
Am I a Red Hat fanboy? Nope. I’m typing this from Dolphin (Mandrake 9.0) which I prefer for several reasons to Psyche (even though I’ve admittedly only used the latest Up2Dated version of Null!).
>> just not true
>> i added verdana to X just by adding an XFontDir (or
>> whatever it is) line to XF86Config-4 and they showed up
>> in OOo as soon as I launched it.
>Well, you didn’t DnD it (it being font file(s)), did you…
>You created a directory containing fonts, then added a >line…
>These steps are consider more messy than simple DnD (from
>the perspective of a window/GUI enviroment).
My point was obviously to show that RedHat would not have to alter OOo like you said they would.
Their OS already has ~/.fonts in the XF86Config-4 (or it should), so it should just work!
-cc
> Blaming Red Hat or nVidia is simply wrong
Sorry, but I think you are the one who is missing the point. In the Windows world, people even if they have Asus or other manufacturer’s cards, they still pile up in queues to download the latest Detonator drivers from nvidia’s own site. In the case of Linux, nvidia is the one who provides the driver, not Asus. Even the Windows version of the Asus drivers are BASED on the nvidia Detonator drivers and Asus (and the other big manufacturers) use them via licensing and partnership. You have to see things from the user’s point of view: In the Linux world you get things from the source. And in this case, both Red Hat and nvidia do not provide good support for the most sold gfx card in the world, the GeForce2MX. And at the end of the day, the user does not care who’s fault it is. The point is that it does not work well and that strikes negatively on both nvidia and RH. No matter IF it MIGHT be Asus fault (it isn’t).
Any one knows how to see if agpgart is compiled already in the kernel (trying to insmod it as a module it spits errors here), and if not, how to exactly load agpgart for the VIA KM266 Apollo PRO chipset? Thanks.
Firstly I must say I am suffering from Monitor Envy.
Secondly Nice review… This is the first one to date that I liked…
Few points Redhat -> Has always tried to adhere to Free Software principles in Letter and Spirit. This alone is reason why they do not include MP3 and the NVidia Drivers as standard
(nvidias drivers are part source part binary) and Binary kernal drivers ARE a threat to the future of an open source linux.
Being part binary and part source I am guessing that you are going to see problems because the binary part was compiled with gcc-2.9.6 and you are compiling the source part with 3.2… along with the high optimisations needed for a graphics driver are bound to cause problems. The alternative is to compile with gcc 2.9.6 which may not work well either given that the rest of the system is compiled with 3.2…
Your best option is to wait untill nvidia releases updates for redhat or brings out generic packages compiled with gcc-3.2….
Thanks for sending the bug report to the XFree86 guys this is the only way these sorts of problems get fixed…. This kind of stuff is important.
I haven’t tried Redhat 8 but I am considering… Its either that or stay with Mandrake or go to Gentoo. The next thing I would like to see is a distro with a graphical configuration tool for wacom etc tablets….
Oh yeah and I should have a working version Wings3d (Nendo Clone) for linux working and online in the next few days. If any ex SGI animators out there are looking for a fast and spiffy modeller with good import/export facilities.
I am running nVidia on Mandrake 8.2 and have very few problems. The main issue with the nvidia cards is they do not work well with athlon processors. The reason for this is that the athlon uses memory in an unusual way (to do with the way that the processor predicts what the user might do next ). This is improperly handled by the Linux kernel and when a program that has been compiled for the pentium architecture is running (eg the Nvidia Drivers) can cause crashes. There are work arounds to prevent this from happening but hopefully the problem will be fixed in the Linux Kernel sometime soon.
Personally I would like to see nvidia release Opensource drivers (at least for their older hardware) but I am glad that they do in fact release drivers at all.
Just to let everyone know, I will be reverting to Matrox G400 in this machine soon. The nvidia card was there because I lost my Matrox G400 in one of our house moves last year, but a good friend send me another one, so I would be going back to MGA-400. I like the G400s mostly because they work well on BeOS, QNX and Linux, which are the OSes I have installed on this Athlon machine. I would have kept the nvidia card there if it didn’t require me to compile it each time I use a new kernel (I beta test the 2.5.x kernels very often, so I change kernels all the time). While I am not an open source advocate exactly, in this case, if nvidia does not want to partner with big linux distros, they should indeed open source their drivers. But of course, fat chance.
” Yes, I also wait for the box from SuSE. I am in the talks with Red Hat, Mandrake, Lycoris, Xandros and SuSE when it comes to reviews.
”
your so damn lucky
Can’t wait to see your opinion on them
I though the review was well-written and did a good job of describing the experience. Of course it’s your opinion; as humans what else do we have besides our opinions?
I’ve never tried Red Hat myself, but I have used Mandrake and Lycoris. The menu problems you describe sound worse in RH than these other distros – Lycoris especially isn’t that bad. Is RH taking a step backwards? If only you could drag-and-drop the menu items into your own system – like in Windows (god forbid Linux should mimic things that Windows does right!).
Too bad for the driver problems. I use an Nvidia GeForce and have never felt that any Linux distro was working together with my hardware. Aren’t Nvidia cards the most common?
“Stop moaning about usability.”
What a classic Linux-user response. What else is there besides usability? Looks aren’t everything… The satisfaction of being a non-conformist can’t make up for being uncomfortable with your work environment.
> Meaningless in the context of choosing and then deploying an OS.
— Well then what is meaningful?
Are you saying that there are not a whole lot of Business Desktops out there where RedHat would not be perfectly useable?
> Corporate lies get told all the time.<Shrug>
— Do you think Redhat would be stupid enough to think that they could take on Microsoft in every area. There are a whole lot of custom apps(inhouse as well) that have been written for Windows and cannot easily be replicated on Linux, and also many users who need VBA support. By default that limits them.
The only way Linux will be successful on the Desktop market will be over time and with a kind of snow balling effect.
No corporate lies just common sense.
Yes, I couldn’t agree with you more Eugenia. While I am an open source advocate, if an application is closed source, or a game, I don’t really care. Sure, it would be nice if they were open; improvements would take place as a result.
When drivers aren’t open sourced, you create more problems. Nvidia’s drivers work great, that is, if they work. Open Source drivers stand a much better chance of working under different configurations, and they will actually work on more architectures than just Intel. This is certainly what saddens me, and don’t throw out that crap about SGI not letting Nvidia open source drivers; SGI has open sourced a good many of their projects, even parts of IRIX, to aid Linux. I’ve heard that they have even encouraged Nvidia to open source the drivers. This would certainly make SGI’s job of supporting Linux on their specialized x86 machines much easier (not that I care for x86, but this is the case).
I would like to find out if Nvidia really is being kept from open sourcing their drivers because they just want to keep their “secrets” (lets be honest, the drivers are not going to tell someone else how to build a better GPU), or due to the IP rights of other commercial entities, and if so which ones? If not SGI, then who?
I noticed in those screenshots that a number of the RedHat utilities don’t follow the button order guidelines in the Gnome2 HIG (ie: some are OK Cancel, instead of Cancel OK)
I understand the rationale for doing it the way the Gnome2 HIG (and the MacOS HIG) says, but I think that decision is going to haunt them in the future in regards to fitting in with KDE, Qt, Tk, GTK+, Java, Web, and Windows(via wine) apps and their users’ expectations.
artem: Everything looks very sharp and clean, they use Metacity instead of Sawfish, so the desktop feels much faster.
IIRC, Red Hat uses Metacity. Heck, I think they made it too.
artem: The 2.4.19 kernel feels much faster then the 2.4.18 in Mandrake 8.2.
The speed difference is mostly caused by GCC 3.2, not 2.4.19.
artem: because I prefer GNOME with its Mac OS X look.
Next thing you would be saying that CDE looks like Windows XP.
artem: I am sure KDE works fine, but I would like to mention the fact that Mandrake managed to do all this without pissing GNOME and KDE developers.
The only developers that are trully pissed is KDE developers. There isn’t as much bashing of Red Hat on GNOME side as it is on KDE side. Pretty much because Red Hat had always been hostile towards KDE, and KDE takes every single bad move harshly.
artem: (with Mandrake Control Center 9.0 you can forget about manually editing 90% of config files or using ackward utilities like linuxconf)
But unfortunately, if it could confuse my mom and dad, it can confuse any newbie. Why? There is two control panels, one for the DE/WM and the other for the system.
artem: MANDRAKE 9 IS THE BEST LINUX DISTRIBUTION IN THE WORLD!!!
Granted I haven’t used the stable release of 9.0 (which is the bug fixes over the one I have used), I wouldn’t actually consider Mandrake the best distribution around (I have tried various distributions geared for the desktop, BTW).
Something else to consider: RedHat and many other distros try to obey the GPL; one of the main strengths of Linux is that you can modify it yourself.
Funny. In their box set, Red Hat include a LOT of closed source applications. Besides, using NVidia drivers, or partnering with them to improve it wouldn’t violate the GPL, you just be called by gnu.org as the evil force taking over Caldera’s post in the GNU/Linux camp.
Anonymous: Really? Don’t you know that a lot of recently movies were made in the Linux by use Maya, Maya plugin written in Python and etc on the SGI machines? StarWar II was made by Linux, which I have Linux Journal.
Most of these movies that are starting to use Linux use it in their renderfarms, or rarely use them as their workstations. However, these workstations DO NOT use NVidia’s consumer graphics cards, trust me.
Rob: just as it is not Microsoft’s responsibility to write drivers for every piece of hardware known to humanity (which they certainly don’t)
Microsoft is a totally different case. They have like almost 97% of the market, it would be stupid for Asus to create drivers to 1.x% of the market when the cost is much more higher than making for Windows.
A friend of mine has a Compaq printer. It’s one of those USB-only all-in-one jobs with built-in copier and scanner. It came bundled with a Compaq machine running Windows 98SE.
The printer is not supported in WindowsXP Professional. It’s not really a “Compaq” printer at all. It’s actually a slightly modified Lexmark printer with Compaq’s name stamped on it (much the same way Compaq stamps their name on Logitech mice, much the same way your Asus video card is just a slightly modified nVidia reference card). The same Lexmark cartridges I use in my Lexmark Z22 will work (after removing a little plastic tab that serves no purpose anyway) in the “Compaq” printer.
Now, Microsoft doesn’t provide a driver for this printer. I have a Lexmark Z22 that XP Pro and Red Hat (as well as Mandrake and ELX, though SuSE hates it) both recognize and configure perfectly. I can choose to use Lexmark official drivers in either OS, but there’s no need. My friend’s “Compaq” printer, however, is another story.
You have a video card made by Asus BASED ON an nVidia reference design. My friend has a Compaq printer BASED ON a Lexmark design. I was actually able to get the printer to work, in a very broken and limited way, under Mandrake using a Lexmark driver and CUPS. With XP Pro it’s a paperweight, period.
Following your previous logic, the failure of my friend’s Compaq printer to work under XP Pro is in fact Microsoft’s and Lexmark’s fault, and not the fault of Compaq?
Asus licenses the right to build a card based on nVidia reference designs. Poor Linux results are the fault of Red Hat (OS) and nVidia (hardware designer, not marketer/manufacturer), not Asus (who actually created and supports the card).
Compaq licenses the right to build a printer based on Lexmark designs. Poor XP Pro results are fault of Microsoft (OS) and Lexmark (hardware designer, not marketer/manufacturer), not Compaq (who actually created and supports the printer).
That’s certainly an interesting way to look at it … great for Compaq and Asus, I suppose, as it neatly absolves them of any obligation to satisfy the needs of their customers.
Anyway, I’ll tell my friend to fire off an angry e-mail to Lexmark and Microsoft to see about getting his Compaq printer supported in XP Pro …
I am honestly not trying to troll or be argumentative just for argument’s sake! Too often people mistake well-intended, polite disagreement for irrational hostility, and that’s really not my intent. I just don’t honestly see how Red Hat and nVidia can be blamed for a lack of stability of your Asus video card any more than Microsoft and Lexmark can be blamed for my friend’s total inability to use his COMPAQ printer under XP PRO.
> Red Hat and nVidia can be blamed for a lack of stability of your Asus video card
Excuse me, but you have misanderstood and you write stories here that are not relevant at all.
The instability I experience is NOT that of Asus video card’s, it is the bloody’s driver. The driver has the bugs, NOT the card. How do I know this? Because the generic XFree “nv” driver works PERFECTLY (as long as you don’t push it at high refresh rate, which is just a sign that the driver was never tested with high end monitors), while the nvidia driver crashes all the time. And don’t forget that I have QNX and BeOS on this very machine. Both work PERFECTLY on 1920×1200 at 90 Hz! It is just that both drivers on Linux have (different) problems, it is not the card. The card is just fine, thank you.
In a recent article at LinuxPlanet (http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/4460/1/), mentioned:
“Still, Red Hat’s share remains “miniscule” compared to Microsoft’s, Troan admitted. The 8.0 edition “won’t be for your typical Microsoft Office/AOL user.” Red Hat does hope to gain more ground, though, among technical users and other “single users” from both the Unix and Windows sides of the fence. “Single users” of 8.0 might range all the way from call center managers and Lotus Notes administrators to Wall Street analysts and photo editors, he illustrated. “Linux has some really cool photo editing apps.””
So from Troan’s mouth himself, he isn’t after the SGI market (that would be stupid for a company that size) or Microsoft. The last I checked, call centers DON’T use monitors that big and with that high resolutions.
Red Hat is smart. They have already identified their target markets, which is profitable enough, yet realistic. They aren’t going head on with SGI (stupid) or Microsoft (double stupid).
So in the end, you are better off reviewing this distribution on machines made for its target market. And I don’t think the hardware you used is fair for Red Hat, especially the monitor.
On the other hand, not supporting whell mouses is a bad thing :-(. But then again, like any other RH release, x.0 isn’t always ready….
Your review is nice, but the part about X and the monitors highlighted a problem with XFree, Nvidia and Red Hat in general, but wouldn’t cause Red Hat much in terms of user acceptence (people with that kind of monitors wouldn’t be thinking if they used Linux :-). I agree with you on the menus argument though.
About the UI suggestions, I read them, and there was one suggestion that I liked: adding spacing between the redhat icon and mozilla. I filed a bugreport, and they changed it apparently. For a couple of reasons I didn’t like lowering size of the fonts, the z-snake, the right-aligning of a couple of labels, or the url like button.
UI design is something different than Graphics design, please keep this in mind When you have to choose between graphics design and UI design, you should always go for the latter. I did also a bugzilla on the fact that all those settings menu are confusing. Sadly, they didn’t change it.. Maybe it was a bit too late.
First off, you have a rare monitor. You’re the only one I know that has that kind of monitor, run it at such high resolutions with such a high refresh rate. You also have a pretty good eyesight, if you can see an extra pixel from a mile away These are two things that are different from Average Joe typing a text, checking their mail and surfing the web for professional reasons. You really should take this into account while reviewing this.
Thus, you can see that lowering the size of the fonts will hurt usability alot. It will only work on a very expensive monitor, with a person who has a perfect eyesight. That is asking for way too much targeted at a *part* of the corporate desktop market.
It also lowers the importance of using nvidia drivers in high end solutions. Face it, your monitor, desired resolution and refresh rate is high end. Red Hat here is targeting for the low end part of the corporate desktop. It’s not for you, it’s not for power desktop users.
Note that Red Hat always said it isn’t a drop in replacement for Windows, but that it will work for the basic needs most people need in a corporate desktop. They never said that it was targeted to 3D artists. In this market you also don’t need video, flash or real video. (although it’s always possible they include it in the commercial version).
Fans may be saying that “Red Hat null” is the windows killer. Guess what, any fan says that about their OS (except windows fans) (ie look at the Beos-Palm comment).
Listen to Red Hat. They clearly said it *isn’t* a windows killer, and isn’t meant to be. Accepting that, you quickly see that they certainly do have a chance in the market they are targeting. I hope at the very least that you would admit that Red Hat has improved alot on it’s last distro on the end-user aspect.
Anyway some other points in your review that deserve ellaboration. (based on a Null desktop with up2dated)
When you click on an RPM, it will handle dependencies automatically. That is, as far as the required rpms are on the cd. Dependencies on third party not-included rpms are not handled automatically.
Set up your printers in Applications – System Settings – Printing. I don’t know why you want a list of sound cards, it’s automatically detected.. If it isn’t, it’s a bug. To give a list is just a crappy hack to a failing hardware detection. Your online radio playlist works with mp3, maybe that’s why it doesn’t work with xmms.
Anyway, judging from the betas, I must say that Red Hat 8 is pretty much the best distribution for my needs I ever saw. It’s the only distribution where I had to change the default settings so little. It just looks beautifull, and it has it’s own personality.
Ow, wait. It sucks! Don’t waste your bandwidth on it by downloading it! It’s shitty! (I want to download it today at 700K/sec, not 7K/sec :-))
>I filed a bugreport, and they changed it apparently
They didn’t. I did the spacing by myself immediately after I installed it.
>You’re the only one I know that has that kind of monitor, run it at such high resolutions with such a high refresh rate
It is a Trinitron monitor. SONY and EIZO alone sell 3-4 different models each with monitors that supports such resolutions.
Eugenia: “Excuse me, but you have misanderstood and you write stories here that are not relevant at all.
The instability I experience is NOT that of Asus video card’s, it is the bloody’s driver. The driver has the bugs, NOT the card.”
That is my entire point, summed up perfectly. nVidia does not — does NOT — market graphics cards to end-users. You did not buy an nVidia graphics card, you bought an ASUS graphics card, yet you are not using official Asus drivers. You are using unsupported, generic drivers NOT made by the company that made your card.
ASUS made the card, Asus should provide drivers for the card. I have a VisionTek card. If I use the reference drivers and they have problems or are somehow incomplete, I blame myself for not using the officially supported drivers for my card. If VisionTek does not PROVIDE officially supported drivers (such as Linux drivers) for my card and I am FORCED to use the reference drivers, that is VisionTek’s fault, NOT nVidia’s. In that case, I am grateful that the nVidia drivers exist at all, even if they aren’t perfect since they’re better than nothing, which is exactly what the company that is SUPPOSED to be supporting me gives me: nothing.
nVidia is under no obligation to release their reference drivers to the general public at all. Like I said, they simply don’t market to end-users, they market to OEMS. The reference drivers are just there. If they work they work, if they don’t they don’t. It’s not nVidia’s responsibility one way or another. It’s that simple: you didn’t buy your card FROM nVidia, you bought it from Asus. How can you expect nVidia to support it? It’s simply not their job.
I drew a direct correlation between your Asus card and my friend’s Compaq printer and not only did you ignore it, you said it was irrelevant. It was a literal direct correlation and equally literal extension of your own logic.
1) Asus makes card based on nVidia design. It doesn’t work right so this is nVidia’s fault, not Asus’.
2) Compaq makes printer based on Lexmark design. It doesn’t work right, so this is Lexmark’s fault, not Compaq’s.
That simply does not make sense to me. It shifts the blame from the company who is SUPPOSED to support the product to a company who is NOT supposed to support it just because the company who is supposed to support it does not do so.
Just because I disagree with you, it doesn’t make me irrelevant. To save you the bother of moderating down any future “irrelevant” comments on this thread, I simply won’t make anymore. Like I said in a previous post, it really wasn’t my intent to troll. My apologies to anyone who feels that’s what I was doing.
I have already replied here for your argument that Asus should provide the drivers (which is valid of course, it just doesn’t solve the problem in the situation of linux):
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=1842&offset=60&rows=75#41…
BTW, I don’t understand why you are afraid of moderating you down or that I might think you are trolling. You are not. We are having a perfectly nice and productive discussion.
… even though maybe you should have.
Would it help if I mentioned I have an eye infection? I apparently missed your post with my one good eye …
On a side note …
For everyone who likes the Bluecurve theme but isn’t necessarily crazy about Red Hat, it’s available for Gentoo (it might still be masked, I’m not sure) and Mandrake 9.0 (check http://www.pclinuxonline.com and click on TexStar’s RPMS).
That’s right … BlueCurve for Gentoo and Mandrake … fool your family, impress your friends … Proof that beauty (and “radical” UI changes) is only skin deep …
I have a question of utmost urgency. Does Redhat 8 have the “noseguy” screensaver?
Thank you.
ps. Excellent review. The nvidia problems are not the users’.
It is a Trinitron monitor. SONY and EIZO alone sell 3-4 different models each with monitors that supports such resolutions.
You misunderstand. It isn’t about wether or not multiple companies sell the product. There are, I know. It’s about how many people in the low end corporate desktop have such a high-end monitor.
From the sony website.
PREMIERPROTM Series 24” FD Trinitron(R) CRT
GDM-FW900
This wide-screen display meets the exacting demands of graphic artists, CAD/CAM engineers, animators and professional users who require extraordinarily accurate colors and crystal-clear images.
Red Hat 8 isn’t targeting graphic artists, CAD/CAM engineers, animators or professional users who require extraordinarily accurate colors and chrystal clear images.
> Does Redhat 8 have the “noseguy” screensaver?
Nope, it does not show up in the screensaver list. Is it a good one?
< Nope, it does not show up in the screensaver list.
< Is it a good one?
Well, lets just say it’ll be something to look forward to in Mandrake 9
I have been an avid windows user for years and I am looking to change, this looks quite interesting as an OS and I have used previous version and loved them, ive always needed a dual boot machine though as I also play games. To make this a viable desktop option you require full games support and have to encourage game vendors to sell games that work on both versions. Also I hope there is full DVD support on this release.
Anyhows, here is somthing for the linux community, placing it as a gaming option,
any thoughts ?
> To make this a viable desktop option you require full games support
There are about 20 2D puzzle games included, plus 2 3D ones. You could install more I guess…
> Also I hope there is full DVD support on this release.
No, there is none, by default.
It has always been a difficult thing for me personally to criticize Linux distributions. People, I suppose, use Linux for all sorts of purposes, and enjoy the freedom for different reasons. Developers, no doubt, like the fact that they have access to, and can modify, the source code.
I like the power of the command line, and the free-as-in-beer aspect of it. As I pay nothing for it, I really restrain myself from being overly critical because I am really not contributing anything at all other than reporting bugs. I imagine many other people are in this boat as well.
Deep down, I want Linux to succeed and become a serious competitor to Windows because while most people use computers, most don’t use them in a truly empowering, efficient manner. I think there’s a lot in Linux that can make people far more efficient (One thing off of the top of my head is the control of focus, which really enables me to move around faster by turning off the “click to focus” convention).
Because I really love Linux and want it to succeed, it’s painful to point out its weaknesses, but they really are legion. In fact, I’d say that overall the Linux desktop has far more problems than Windows, but that for me, the problems are less egregious, so I put up with them. (This is just my opinion).
I think it is a great thing that there are reviews like this that are critical of usability issues. There’s amazing psychology at work – and you can sense the bitterness – from the people on Usenet and other forums who, in response to these criticisms, make comments along the lines of, “Something must be wrong with you because it works fine with me,” or the incredibly destructive and self-indulgent, “You’re obviously too stupid to use Linux, go back to your Windows.” This does amazing damage – I know, I’ve heard it first hand from people who are not familiar with Linux, want to try it, but are put off by the community of Linux users because they read this kind of thing (This is not the norm; most Linux users are alright people, but some of these angry retorts really stick out and are memorable. It’s like in real life, the vast majority of people you pass on the street do not spontaneously burst into flame, and you won’t remember any of their faces – but you will remember the face of the one guy who does).
The kinds of complaints raised in reviews surrounding usability, especially such basic issues as video drivers not working properly, are very important, if we agree that we want more people using Linux (If we don’t, I guess it doesn’t). For months I had complete system lockups with my NVidia drivers on a Visiontek GEForce 2 MX (solved later by the NoRenderAccel line in XF86Config). This kind of thing shouldn’t happen. It simply shouldn’t. Yes, I fixed it, and so have other people who have had this problem, but what a drag. Who is at fault (I blame NVidia, personally) is way less important than fixing the problem so it doesn’t make some new user, trying to run a common and popular video card say, “Stable OS, eh? Yeah right.”
Usability is key. Bad usability issues are what has given the Linux desktop a perpetual “unfinished beta” feel (compared, at least, to Windows). The thing is, these problems *are* surmountable, but the first thing to do is admit the weaknesses and prioritize addressing them over defending the “honor of Linux and its developers”. Or whatever the motivation is. Criticism should be constructive and civil, but it needs to exist.
I find reviews like this far more helpful than, “This release is one more indication of JUST HOW COOL WE ALL ARE.”
Usability is key everywhere. Websites, desktops. Pick your interface.