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After I was logged in as "eugenia," I was at last comfortable to use the system. There were very few applications installed by default, no Kedit, not an easier-to-use text-based editor other than VI (for the times we have screwed up with X - it happens to all, admit it), not even the KDE calculator. Also, there is no Office suite to be found. Instead, you will find 4-5 games, Kwrite and Kate editors, KreateCD, Netscape 7.0 as the main web browser, an email client for the system, and Help files available half in HTML form and half in the KDE-help window and a few other things not so noteworthy. The Netscape 7.0 default theme selected and its huge menu fonts (that you can't change) do not help with the consistency of the rest of the UI. Personally, I found KDE's default menu fonts to be very large as well, but these at least are easily fixable through the KDE Font preference panel.

LindowsOS comes with kernel 2.4.19 and ReiserFS as its filesystem of choice.

I noticed an annoying UI bug in their Keramik theme (doesn't happen on my Keramik on SuSE and Gentoo Linux). When you look at the KMenu, there is a particular background color, but if you detach the opening child submenu, or even when simply opening it, the submenu's window has a different color than its parent and this behavior just doesn't look professional or well done.

Lindows.com have changed KDE in many places, for example there is no "About KDE" in any of the "Help" menus of any KDE application (just as Red Hat 8 did so). Also, they have simplified Kicker and it does not include virtual desktops (you can easily put them back though). The big icons involved in Kicker are the KMenu, Help, web and email... Konqueror is also based on KDE 3.0.1-CVS, but it has received a number of patches and it is effectively the same as the one found on Xandros' early betas. It also sees / as a "C:\" and when you do properties to a directory you are getting the same pref panel as in Xandros File Manager to share that dir (Xandros has added more options since last year though - Lindows' Konqueror patches are not as current as Xandros' anymore). Unfortunately, Konqueror for me was unstable. I could easily crash it (I think I crashed it about 7-8 times in less than a week) and in some cases I would have to logout and log back in, in order to be able to reload it!

The KMenu includes a new option found only on LindowsOS, which is a program that lets you kill any open window. It is effectively a "front end" to xkill. But I find it really weird to have that option in the main/root KMenu, it is like saying to users: "our applications are unstable; you will need this kill application a lot." And indeed, I used it a few times, mostly with Konqueror and twice with... Lindows' jewel, ClickNRun.

One thing that surprised me in the beginning was the absense of Lindows-specific preference panels. The only such panels one will find is the "first time wizard" app which simply loads other pref panels, the (buggy) "change your monitor's resolution" one and the Networking pref panels (wireless, PPPoE, sharing panels). All the rest of the pref panels can be found everywhere else as they are part of KDE or GNU/Linux. The resolution panel would only show me resolutions up to 1024x768@60Hz, while my (fully compliant) monitor can do up to 1600x1200@75Hz. I had to check a checkbox to force the app and show me all the possible X resolutions before I was able to setup my monitor the way I wanted to! More over, that panel does not include 16:9 resolutions found on some new laptops or Trinitron monitors for 2 years now (exotic maybe, but still a limitation of the system).

The Networking panel was pretty good and it was easy to setup and restart networking on the fly. There is also a tab on that panel for wireless configuration and PPPoE. So, except these three Lindows-specific panels, there are no other preference panels for hardware to be found. Also, there are no other useful tools like an automounter or an integrated firewall. You don't even have a GUI tool to edit in and out the services (PCMCIA daemon starts automatically btw, and I don't even run Lindows on a laptop, plus the OS does not launch telnet or SSH daemons, which can be useful when something crashes).

1. "First Contact"
2. "Using the System"
3. "Click-N-Run"
4. "Analyzing the... Lindows Phenomena"
5. "Conclusion"