Xandros Desktop Professional

I’ve been using Xandros Desktop Professional for a few days lately, courtesy of a friend who works at Xandros, for review purposes. My first impression of Xandros is how plain-looking it appears compared to the freely available distributions out there like Kubuntu or even OpenSuSE. But as my friend puts it, Xandros caters to a different audience (home user looking for an easy transition from Windows, but still want all the perks of multimedia, and business users, looking for a streamlined desktop and server offering without having to go through rigorous learning phases). Despite the great strides already happening in the GNU/Linux market, Xandros still seems to have a certain niche happening and it seems to work for them.

I’ve been using the said desktop offering in a fairly recent Toshiba Tecra M2, which had near-perfect support in Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, and the only complaint I have about it is not able to switch displays due to an issue in xorg and the nvidia chipset. In Xandros, I was not able to set this up using the nv driver, and I had to fallback to vesa to be able to have a usable desktop during and after installation. It didn’t provide an easy way to switch between drivers, and I had to resort to using the terminal to be able to do so.

Another gripe I have with Xandros Desktop Professional is not having sound configured at all. I’m pretty sure this is a well supported laptop on the sound department but Xandros is the only one that was not able to configure it during setup. I haven’t gotten back much to fixing this, but it is quite annoying not to be able to hear anything at all.

Laptop support is also a hit-and-miss affair; it wasn’t able to provide much of the features of the function keys like LCD brightness or even mute sound or lock the desktop. This feature works most of the time with Ubuntu and OpenSuSE. Wireless with the ipw2200 driver works, but must be setup after installation and was not able to configure it during setup.

My last major gripe about Xandros Desktop Professional is the choice of theme for the default install. Instead of going for a more modern approach with Plastik, it opted to use Keramik, which made it look more cartoonish rather than professional.

But despite these setbacks, Xandros is rock solid stable, and managed my hardware pretty much as I wanted too. The Xandros Security Suite is a nice touch, although it just rebranded most of the free software applications that provided the functionality, like that of Xandros Anti-Virus which uses the database of ClamAV. System File Protector checks for potentially harmful changes to core system software that can be used for possible system attacks. Xandros File Manager looks pretty much like Windows Explorer which makes it good for new users to get accustomed with, but this is not new, since Konqueror in any modern KDE-based distribution supports such.

I haven’t really touched deep into the features and functionality of the Xandros Desktop Professional, but will be able to churn out a good review in the coming weeks, along with Xandros Server Standard Edition.