Just Uber

Given the explosive arrival of Linux into the consumer desktop market, I thought it’d be interesting to check out the operating system at the heart of the best selling Walmart Linux PC. Let me introduce you to gOS. It’s built on top of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, but in choosing the lesser known Enlightenment DR 17 window manager the developers have taken a different route towards delivering this new distribution.

Although E-17 is pre-alpha software, it seems to run pretty reliably and responsively on my old PIII Dell Latitude laptop. The good performance is likely testament to the designer’s desire to develop a window manager that could deliver eye candy, without sacrificing performance. Given the snappy response of E-17 on my PC, I imagine it runs exceptionally well on the Walmart PC (especially compared to Win XP or Vista Basic).

The desktop presents the user with a Mac OS X style dock containing links to various applications – and interestingly – several web services. Google Apps, Email and Products appear alongside of Wikipedia, Facebook and others, offering one click access to the major players on the web.

If you’re anything like me, you’re likely to remove most of these web app links to make room for your own stuff. I think that placing website launchers in the dock may hint at the target audience of this operating system. Without a doubt gOS is aimed at the new PC user market and I can see how it’d be a pretty good answer to the ‘what do I do now?’ question that a new IT user may have.

A large Google search box is located in the top right corner of the desktop but looks pretty ugly and personally, I immediately wanted rid of it. (To get rid of it click Configuration > My Settings > Applications > Startup Applications and delete it from the list. To remove it from your current session without logging out Alt + right mouse click and select Kill.)

gOS ships with a pretty solid set of apps including Open Office, Gimp, Rhythmbox and Xine, just about everything the average new user is going to need. Unfortunately it seems to lack some of the settings and configuration tools (although I could perhaps install some gnome counterparts) that I’d expect to see in an Ubuntu distribution, and that a more advanced user might like to see.

To draw a line under this, gOS is a pretty good distribution. E-17 is neat (and to be fair, is the main difference between this and Ubuntu) and bundling it with a cheap PC opens up computing to people who may not previously been able to afford it. I’d like to see gOS in a cheap laptop like the asus eee, but I can’t help but feel it’s still a little rough around the edges.

If I wanted an operating system for a child, or for someone who’d never used a PC before, I’d be inclined to give gOS a try. For anything else, I’d probably stay with Ubuntu. Overall a great idea, and the beginnings of a better future for Linux on the desktop.

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 1:14 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.