I was just reading a Digg story about Vixta (a new Fedora-based distro designed to be eye-candy and user-friendly). In feel and look, it is supposed to be much like Vista. I am going to write down my experience with this new distro
Since I am already running out of space in my laptop, I normally use virtualbox(a virtual machine product) to try new distros. After making my virtual system (computer), I defined a virtual hard disk in my Big external hard disk, mounted the iso file I had downloaded (just as if I had burned a Vixta CD), and it was ready to boot.
There are two releases of the Vixta: 0.93 and 0.94. First I tried 0.93 which booted smoothly from the virtual CD room. Having the LiveCD mode as default, I could choose to run from RAM (+1GB needed). Not changing the default, I allowed the Vixta to boot up my virtual computer (256MB RAM and 16MB Graphic) and the eye candy screen was there impressively soon after. The first problem I had was that a part of screen was missing in my virtual box full-screen mode. I assume it has to do with the fact that I was running Vixta through virtual box and will not happen in real-computer boots. Vixta could detect my Ethernet and Internet was accessible right away.
Well Vixta is eye candy to be honest and has to some extent feel and look of Vista. I don’t really know how many people would want a vista-like Linux distro but I found it quite fun to have, say, bash in something like Vista. The default softwares are Open Office, FireFox, Konqueror, and there is a Control Panel just like … well you know. One nice thing was that I could lunch the bash line by right clicking in the desktop which is missing in some popular distros. There were a couple of other handy right click functioanlities which were Windows-like to some extent. The desktop configuration tool was also beautifull with possibility of getting new wall papers from KDE-look.org. I tried a couple of nice-looking wall papers.
I think the Vixta is less memory hungry than Vista as I could run it from my virtual system with 256MB RAM but guess needs more meory than say Ubuntu Dapper that I run on my old laptop (Interl Pentium M, 256MB RAM). Actually, Dapper runs faster on my old laptop than Vixta does on my virtual system.
Downside 1: It was not imeediately clear how Vixta can be installed on the hard disk
Downside 2: Though I had selected English as my language, there was seeminglt a track of Protougese (or something) language here and there
Then I tried the newer release: Vixta 0.94 which could not boot becuase of some sort of Kernel panic. Again it might have to do with running from Virtual Box.
I think the Windows is more friendly with users and because of that linuxes are going to be like the windows(i mean user friendly aspect).
I agree! Windows LOOKS more friendly to the users. Is it really more friendly? hardly! This is just that we as users are got addicted to this crappy OS and can’t get rid of. Linux is more powerful, more secure, cleaner, and faster. Give Linux a while and we will see which one is gonna be the real winner!
Actually, Vixta might be less resource hungry, but the fact is that it will never get the feel of Vista.
I run Vista Ultimate SP1 on 256MB RAM and 32MB GPU (With 800MHz CPU), and the fact that it is running really well amazes me.
Of course you have to edit a DLL file in order to install it, but still…
It is nice looking, but I still prefer Vista.
Although i prefer Linux over Windows, so dont think that I am some sort of Windows Fanboy