Gos 3
A while ago I mentioned that I installed Suse on a separate partition on my laptop. My intentions were to give it a test drive and then use hat partition to do the same for some other distributions. Well, last night I finally got off my rhump and tried Gos 3.
I have to say that the installation was quite painless, even for it being a dual boot. The only thing I had to do was tell the installer which partition to use and it did the rest all by itself. Truly, the most difficult part of the install was that I had to burn 2 cds to get it to work, the first one was a coaster.
The OS defaults to a quite good looking desktop that is very reminiscent of OS X, if OS X were green 🙂 The installed utilities and programs in the dock are quite google centric, which to me is not a problem because I use several of them already. The application responsiveness is quick and clean as well. I can see where this would indeed make a great distribution for netbook oriented installs.
The google gadgets are also pretty neat. The are again really reminiscent of OS X. There isn’t quite the selection yet of programs and utilities that Apple has, but I suspect there ill be eventually, and the ones that are there are usable and entertaining. They even have several versions of the giant analog clock, just for dann.
Now for what I didn’t like: The color, for some reason, seems a little washed out. Maybe I am hallucinating or maybe my laptop is just getting old, but I don’t notice that while using Ubuntu proper. The menu’s are this ugly grey/brushed metal just which reminds me of the “cool menus” of the early 90s from enlightenment or maybe an old fluxbox theme. In other words, with the nice glossy look that the desktop has, I believe the menus look clunky and dated. They don’t match, but they work fine and most people will probably only use the taskbar/dock thingy at the bottom anyhow, which brings me to that. That dock is really slick looking and working too, with one exception. How the heck do you alter it? For something as sweet looking and working as that, you’d think you could add and subtract programs/icons with a right click menu or something. Last but not least, this Gos is a very netcentric distribution that even comes with an icon to start youtube right in the dock, but it doesn’t have any form of flash installed? Wtf guys? I am sure there are people out there who will say, but that’s not free software, or what have you, but here’s a newsflash for them, I don’t care and most other people won’t either. That’s just an irritation waiting to happen by design.
All in all, I have to say that I really dig using Gos 3. I actually expect it to be hit, especially among netbook users and people who want an easy and lighter Linux. I say try it. You just may like it!