Review: Xubuntu 7.04 revisited

Quoting:but my girlfriend's 12-year-old nephew is taking to it like a duck to water

I have two nephews, 11 & 8 year old. They have been having problems with XP for a while. Three weeks ago, I decided to help them out. Instead of fixing their XP, I decide to give them one of the old, but decent, PCs I have.

I installed PCLOS and included many of the games but didn't let them know. I told them this computer is to learn about computers, so go ahead and explore to your hearts content. I even gave them the root password but explained how important it is and to be careful about it.

I checked with them every few days and every time they are more excited about it than before. Guess what, they don't even want to use XP any more, Linux is much faster and a lot more cool computer and keep asking "when are you going to get our stuff from the OLD computer".. They haven't touched the XP machine at all since and they don't want to.

After installing it, I just showed them how to log on and that was it. They found everything else on their own. For those who keep talking about retraining, I say you are full of it. They didn't only find all the games, they also found everything else, OOo, Gimp, Inkscape, how to configure their KDE (schemes and everything else related). They even created an account for the 4 year old little brother who played Potato Head and Bubbles.

They have downloaded pictures from their camera and it was a snap. So simple and automatic to show them how to download them and have taken pictures and video clips of anything and everything around them. They keep fighting about which one to use as background and keep changing each other's when they get the chance.

They don't have Internet connection, now their mother is going to get it for them after she heard how safe it is and what they can do. She was hooked on some games too. Most importantly them making some promises (yeah right!).

They keep saying "it is the best present they got".

You know what, my wife keeps telling that, I am being more excited and happier than they are.

I think she is right

All the praise heaped upon Vector Standard made me want to revisit Xubuntu. And the whole point of doing the review, and writing it the way I did, was that the Ubuntu family's feverish popularity makes its distros subject to a higher standard.

Since Ubuntu is the No. 1 distro by many measurements (with Xubuntu being a derivative that uses most of the same tools), I wanted to analyze its popularity and whether or not it lives up to the hype.

Other distros should take heed of some of what, in my opinion, is responsible for Ubuntu's popularity: single-disc, live CD used as an installer, an install script without too many questions for users, the ability to do partitioning automatically, excellent desktop aesthetics (in Xubuntu anyway -- Ubuntu is still that orangey brown, I think) and good choice of applications. Many distros have some or most of these attributes, some have all of them.

And then there's that huge Ubuntu community. Between the well-trafficked forums and many ancillary blogs, there's just a lot of Ubuntu out there. I often find answers to my Debian questions from Ubuntu people.

But I hadn't read anywhere that Xubuntu 7.04 basically ships BROKEN -- you can't even launch a program until you do a bit of Xfce configuration. My conclusion is that Canonical keeps a close eye on Ubuntu, much less so on Xubuntu, or they wouldn't have let an ISO out of the gate with fundamental (though easily repairable) problems.

I did go back to 6.06 LTS, and while everything worked, it had that flat blue look that every other Xfce distro has.

I guess I'm saying that Ubuntu is way, way too big to ignore at this point -- that's why I'm writing about it.