I was reading Richard’s diary again, and he was commenting on the new United Linux coalition of Caldera, Conectiva, SuSE and Turbolinux. The idea is to create a new superLinux, standards based, and basically a competitor to Red Hat (Richard, one day you’ll put that space in the middle!)

So anyway, in doing so, he commented on Lycoris, née Redmond Linux, an RPM-based distro. I must interject at this point, for no good reason, that apt and .deb rules. Anyway, I hadn’t looked at Redmond Linux for a while, not since its rebrand at any rate, and they operate on a similar idea that we do at SmoothWall – which is to separate the commercial and community sites in two. So on lycoris.org, I spied some screen grabs of their new Control Center, basically a suite of control panel and config applets.

My initial thought was “dear god, they’ve cloned XP” … and it looks like they have – even down to the little “click here for the legacy/classic control panel” bit. I wonder sometimes how any Linux distro intends to be taken seriously, when all they do is clone what little UI advances Microsoft make in their desktop products. Every icon and graphic on that screenshot pages looks like a poor or very close imitation of the excellent icons designed for Microsoft by Iconfactory.

But the cloning doesn’t stop there – Lycoris has a network browser, which mimics Network Neighborhood from Windows 95/98/NT and My Network Places from Win2K/XP. Yes, it’s a nice achievement to build SMB share browsing into the file manager / explorer, but I wish that someone would consider spending the time trying to separate Linux from the Windows paradigm, not continue to ape it. Look at Lindows for example – it’s a great idea in concept, but all it’s doing is continuing the lock-in to the Windows platform and way of thinking. Yes, you can migrate from Windows Whatever to Lindows, but you’ve probably done it to continue using your Windows-only applications. For vertical applications, I can see the point in this if you want your underlying system to be more open than Windows, but for running say Office or Adobe suites, you must be kidding. If you’re only going to run those apps, well I suppose at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter what OS you’re running, but you’ll likely get greater performance out of Windows – Wine and variants is a while away from being invisibly as good as Windows IMHO. If you’re trying to migrate away from say Office 2000 to Star/OpenOffice, you’re still locking yourself in – last time I looked, both Star and Open Offices ape Microsoft Office to a greater extent, even down to style. Ape, ape, ape. This is why I love Mac OS X – it forces application developers to think a bit outside of the box. By giving them different widgets to use, and a very strong environment to build in, they can start developing in new ways. Even the homegrown stuff they’ve done like Sherlock and the new Finder (itself an extension from NeXTstep) is that bit apart from what seems to be the current mindset of “let’s do what Microsoft do, only better” – why not do something different?

Just a thought …