TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

DreamLinux impressed me in their last release with a surprisingly pleasant graphical interface which, sadly, attempted to conceal a very poor Linux distribution underneath. When I saw they had made a new release, I was surprised they had survived. My morbid curiosity dictated that I must try it out.

Install:

The disc gives you the option to boot into Gnome or XFce. From what I could tell the visual setup is essentially identical. This is good and bad news. For folks with older hardware you won't be sacrificing any eye candy choosing the lighter desktop. The downside is they might have been able to do some more creative things with just Gnome, but I'm just speculating.

They've somehow managed to reproduce the Mac OS X dock (complete with zoom effect). I have to admit that's kind of cool. One thing they certainly didn't reproduce was the simple elegance of the OS X installer. Instead you get this monster, possibly the least intuitive aesthetic nightmare ever to grace the computing world since the infamous aLinux Carnival of Suck.

After flailing my way around their menu for a bit, I somehow got it to work. I should mention that I didn't realize I'd made it work because it offered absolutely no user feedback while partitioning the drive. If my harddrive light weren't blinking I'd have thought the thing had frozen up.

Eventually a status bar miraculously appeared and proceeded to do a whole lot of nothing. It did display a percentage, and the little blue shuttle bounced happily back and forth like a Spider Monkey aiming his next fecal projectile, but the percentage stayed at 56% for nearly the duration of the install.

Reboot brought me....nothing. A blank screen with a cursor at the top left. It didn't even have the common decency to blink at me. It just stared. I decided to do the rest of the rant from the LiveCD.

Software Selection:

Firefox, Pidgin and OpenOffice are included. They've imitated the Mac Office icons, though not so well as to cause a lawsuit. A variety of media players were also available, including one I'd never seen before: AVI Demux.

GCC was included, but not Java. GimpShop replaces GIMP (it's essentially the same thing with jumbled up menus). One unique program was DreamLinux Easy Install. I wasn't able to test how well it worked without an internet connection, but the idea is a good one: list a bunch of useful apps and let the user install them with a click.

Conclusion:

Obviously a lot of work has gone in to some parts of this distribution and it shows. The overall visual scheme was nice, and their scary reproduction of the OS X dock is commendable.

However they seem to have utterly forgotten something so simple as using separate screens for your installer rather than tossing the whole sordid mess into one window and letting the user figure it out. The contrast of elegant and clunky is quite stark.

I'd never use it, but as the angry emails tend to remind me I'm not the only person with an opinion. Of course, I have it on good authority that those folks smell like elderberries and are very poor dressers.