CrunchBang - Code, Design & GNU/Linux

gOS 1.0.1 - A Quick Review

Ubuntu is great, but every now and again I like to take a look at a different Linux distribution. The other day I finally got around to downloading and having a quick play with gOS, the much talked about operating system installed on the budget Everex PCs sold by Wal-Mart. gOS is an Ubuntu/Debian derivative.

First impressions of gOS

Bootup speed of the LiveCD was as fast as Ubuntu, which was to be expected. The first thing I noticed, once the desktop had loaded, was my screen resolution wasn't correctly recognised as 1280 x 1024; font rendering was all over the place and the system was quite unusable. I immediately attempted to correct this by using gOS's "My Settings" option; it didn't work and I ended up using displayconfig-gtk to fix the problem.

I was looking forward to enjoying the new visuals gOS had to offer; however, the issue with the screen resolution ruined this and left an immediate bad first impression.

About the visuals

gOS is green, very green. I found the default green theme pleasing in appearance. The BIG buttons at the bottom of the screen are attractive and super easy to use; I can see why people think they would be good for novice users.

Regarding the user interface, why put the Window controls, close, minimise & maximise, on the left? This goes against standard practice and it began to frustrate me after only a few minutes; it's almost as if the theme designer put the controls on the left just to be different.

Also, the big Google search bar, located in the top-right corner of the screen, obscured drive icons which appeared after auto-mounting; it was also quite ugly in appearance and it didn't fit very well with the overall look and feel of the theme which was otherwise quite polished.

Speedy but buggy

I was impressed by the overall speed of gOS; running from the LiveCD it was very fast and I didn't have to wait too long for applications to load. Having said that, speed is about the only thing the Enlightenment window manager had going for it.

I only used gOS for a few hours, yet Enlightenment crashed several times. It also lacked some features and functionality that a modern desktop environment should provide. For example, I tried dragging and dropping a file onto a drive icon, nothing happened, except that the file icon now covered and obscured the drive icon!

Talking of drives, my internal ext3 drive was recognised, but it was not accessible; double-clicking on the drive icon did nothing, no file manager, no errors, nothing. On the other hand, my external USB drive was accessible, although accessing it caused Enlightenment to crash on several occasions.

What no text editor?

Next, I thought it would be a good idea to take some notes while I was actually using the system. I prefer to work in plain text, so I went looking for a text editor; I didn't find one. Thinking this had to be a mistake on my part, I tried to open a txt file located on my USB flash drive; the file didn't open, instead I was presented with a, "Choose application to open this file" dialog. I appreciate gOS is geared up towards using Google's online applications, however I would still expect a simple GUI text editor to be installed by default. I ended up using Vim via the installed UXterm, go figure.

Other niggles

• .ogg media files didn't play by default
• Rhythmbox failed to run at all
• Mouse wheel didn't scroll on standard Microsoft USB optical mouse
• Desktop clock was without digits
• <Print Screen> key did nothing, no screengrab utility installed.

Potential is what it's got

Despite the problems, I still think gOS has great potential; I just wouldn't recommend using it in its current state. It's good to see Ubuntu reworked and some effort put into changing the user interface; however, I'm not sure that Enlightenment is the window manager to use, it was the main cause of most of the problems I encountered.

If you're looking for a lightweight Linux distribution, I would recommend Puppy Linux or Xubuntu.