Xandros - King of the Desktop?

I was looking at the home page of this site earlier today and I saw an ad for Xandros advertising it as the ‘King of the Linux Desktop.’ I figured I’d check out what it was claiming and I went to Xandros’ home page to see their claims.

Xandros is very similar to Linspire but, as Gary will tell you in his review of Linspire, Linspire is really not a useful version of Linux. It fails to truly add much to Linux other than branding many open source applications as their own.

Xandros seems to suck less than Linspire. It has an intuitive interface and it attempts to provide an experience as similar to Windows as possible. Mad Penguin has this to say:

Xandros 2.0 Deluxe falls in a special category of distros reserved for the would-be Windows convert. It keeps close company with its cousin LindowsOS [Linspire], and with features such as seamless Windows networking, CD burning/file manager integration, directory/printer sharing, and easy software updates makes it stand head and shoulders above the rest. After reviewing other Windows-like distros such as LindowsOS [Linspire], I believe Xandros has done a much better job.

Of course, both Xandros and Linspire cost actual money to buy. This is acceptable for pieces of software like CodeWeavers Crossover Office which develops a useful application and uses it’s revenue to add to the development of Wine, which helps everyone. With Xandros and Linspire however there’s no indirect aid to the Linux community - just people spending money for Linux.

It’s because of the rather mediocre performance of Linspire and Xandros (compared to many other distributions) that I would suggest to everyone who’s trying to convert from Windows to try either Ubuntu or Kubuntu. They are the same operating system with only the graphical interface changed. Specifically, I’d recommend Kubuntu for new users (it’s prettier).