I’m writing this review on Google Docs in Firefox while running gOS 1.0.1, the Ubuntu-based distribution that steers users toward Web-based applications whenever possible — mostly those under the auspices of Google — and which powers the Everex Linux PC being sold for $199 by the truckful at Wal-Mart.
I’m getting more comfortable with Google Docs all the time, but there are times when you need a traditional text editor. Yet there is no GUI text editor to be found in the gOS distro. There is the entire OpenOffice suite and the GIMP image editor, a smattering of games, Rhythmbox for music and Xine for video, but no stand-alone mail client (you’re encouraged by the iconography on the gOS desktop to use Gmail …). Luckily there is a terminal program, which is named UXterm but looks suspiciously like plain ol’ xterm, and with that you can bring up Vim or Nano, but that’s pretty much it. Come to think of it, without a terminal in the GUI, and a console text editor, gOS would be in a heap of trouble, so it’s good that they included one. But every gOS user’s life would be a whole lot easier with a GUI text editor. Since you can add anything in the Ubuntu repositories, holes in gOS are easily filled.
But the more I used the new, green OS, the more I wondered whether the Everex (and everybody else) would be be better off with Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Debian … or just about anything. While the Everex, with its 1.5 GHz VIA processor and 512 MB of RAM is underpowered when compared to most modern desktops, I regularly run Debian and Ubuntu — both with GNOME — and even Slackware with GNOME and Xfce on a machine with similar power but half the memory. And as I found out, the speed and lightness on resources that the Enlightenment window manager promises are just not there.
One thing I do like about gOS — and this may be a feature of Ubuntu 7.10 for all I know — is that when you’re in a terminal and try to run an application you don’t have installed, the terminal outputs what you do need to do to get it.
For instance, I tried to run the Joe editor:
$ joe
and I got the following:
The program ‘Joe’ is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install joe
bash: joe: command not found
Whenever that message comes from, it’s a very nice touch and is more than enough to get even a novice user going with apt.
But sheesh, at least give me Leafpad, Mousepad, Gedit … whatever. Normally I would just add the editor I want, but for this evaluation of gOS, I pledged to stay with Google Docs; that’s what they want you to use, so I’ll use it. In the past, I’ve even gone as far as automatically posting a Google Docs item to one of my Blogger blogs, but that feature, in my opinion, is pretty much useless. Why not just write directly in Blogger? And since you can only auto-post from Google Docs to a single blog, the write-to-blog feature won’t work for me. However, the post-to-blog feature does work with WordPress and LiveJournal blogs, plus a few others I’ve never heard of. That makes it more useful, but what I need is for Google Docs to act as more of a “dashboard” app for my various blogs — I’d like to be able to publish from here to more than one blog (actually about six, and therein lies my sickness).
Update: I was all set to complain about Google Docs’ browser-printing problem, but I just printed a document from Docs on my Windows PC, and what Docs did was turn my document into a great-looking PDF, which opened in Adobe Reader and was easily printed on paper. I’m not sure how seamless this integration is in Linux systems, but I plan to find out soon. Printing on actual paper seemed like the weak link in the whole Google Docs scheme, but it looks like they have that problem solved very well — I may never use a traditional word processor again (especially if the promised offline extension of Docs is ever released).
Google Docs is a whole lot better than many people let on. I never need to insert tables or pictures into my documents. I write stuff. Stuff with words, and if I need to insert photos, I’m generally already in a blog post or on a printed page that I’m dealing with in a publishing program that is a whole lot bigger and more complicated than Google Docs. But Docs CAN insert images, tables, links and more. And it’s not a bad HTML generator either. You can look at the HTML source at any time and copy/paste it into your Web content.
For the everyday writer of articles for publication, Google Docs is pretty kick-ass. When not connected to the Internet, or for those who don’t want Google to see their documents, there’s always the option of using OpenOffice, though I think AbiWord and Gnumeric are more in keeping with the lightness touted by gOS.
Getting back to gOS … almost: Even though this is supposed to be about gOS, the bare-bones Linux distro relies heavily on the Firefox browser and links to various Web tools like GMail, Google Docs, Wikipedia (see, they’re not all Google), Facebook, Blogger, YouTube, Google Maps and Picasa. So any review of gOS must take heavily into account the browser experience.
Since I work on four or five separate computers a day, working with docs online and using Web-based (or IMAP-delivered) e-mail is a must for me. I could add a standalone mail client to gOS as easily as I can with any Ubuntu or Debian system, but for now I won’t. Even so, a user with gOS can pretty much make it do anything they could do on Ubuntu. Or they could wipe gOS from the drive and replace it … or perhaps dual-boot.
One of the most attractive things about gOS and the Everex PC is that the combination promises full power management, making for a more green PC than most anything else out there on the desktop, so if you have the Everex PC, making gOS work the way you want it becomes a more attractive option. Hopefully Linux, as it matures even further, will include better power management for all motherboards.
More mail: I’m divided about the use of mail clients anyway. Most of the time, a Web portal is fine for me, especially if the entire session takes place in a secure connection (thanks, DSL Extreme). And I suspect that the vast majority of computer users have never heard of a mail client — they barely know what Outlook is — and have been accessing e-mail through the browser as long as they’ve had e-mail access, so gOS is going in the right direction there.
Gmail tip: To keep your Gmail session secure throughout, start out in your browser with the following:
https://mail.google.com
Note the “s” for a secure connection. You can also type https://gmail.com. Unsecure e-mail, particularly over unencrypted wireless connections, is a real problem, and it makes me reluctant to use Yahoo Mail because only the password is sent over a secure connection. The rest of your e-mail is right out there for others to intercept and use for ill.
Speaking about the greenish gOS desktop, the Enlightenment window manager isn’t that bad. I think gOS could’ve been done just as well with Xfce — maybe even better — but I know that some Enlightenment developers are behind the project, and I’m always happy to see any desktop environment taken to the next level. At least it sets gOS apart from the dozen or so Xfce-based distros out there. But speedy, it’s not.
One of the first things I did in gOS was add some virtual desktops; it’s one of the best features that Windows doesn’t offer, and I think the gOS people should ship the OS with more than a single desktop showing. I like the traditional four, so I left-clicked on the mouse and went to Desktop — Virtual — Configure Virtual Desktops. I could’ve added more than four, but I didn’t. Switching between desktops is done with the usual ctrl-alt-arrow keys. You can’t tell in gOS which desktop you’re on, but at least they’re there.
One feature I turned on in Enlightenment that I’ve never seen before in any other window manager (although I’m pretty sure it’s there in most window managers) is the ability to switch or “flip” screens by moving the mouse pointer to the left or right edge of the screen, effectively scrolling to the next desktop. It’s kind of neat. I don’t know if I need it (I discovered it by accident after forgetting that I set it), but it may just be something that gOS users will grow to like. I had to turn the feature off because I kept triggering it by accident — I like my Firefox windows to fill up the screen, and more than once I found myself on the next desktop when I didn’t want to be there just yet. Ctrl-alt-arrow is good enough for me. But if you like the “flip screen” feature, you can make it look even more groovy with “animated flip.”
One successful install, one less so: Both my regular test box (the VIA C3 Samuel-based Maxspeed Maxterm converted thin client) and the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) are very Ubuntu friendly, meaning installs of Ubuntu-based distros generally go well on both. gOS installed like a champ on the thin client, but it won’t install at all on the Gateway. On the latter, the live CD environment comes up fine (and the graphics are much snappier than on the Maxspeed), but when I do the install, I enter all the relevant information, and about six seconds into the actual install, the program crashes — and that’s it. Since I recently did an install of Ubuntu 7.10 on this very same laptop, it’s curious, indeed, that gOS will not install. It’s regretful, but at least I got gOS on one box. Hopefully the bug, whatever it is, will be squashed in future editions of gOS.
Potential problem: I’m running top in a terminal window on one of my four desktops, and it consistently shows Enlightenment using 9 percent to 12 percent of my CPU and 12 percent of my 256 MB of memory … at idle. That’s not exactly light. I’ll have to go back to Ubuntu and Xubuntu and see how much CPU and memory GNOME and Xfce take up. I don’t think it’s this much. That said, gOS seems to be running as well as anything else, but not radically better. I’m able to switch windows in Firefox fairly quickly and do the same with my virtual desktops. Again, I’d have a better feel for how gOS compares if I could install it on my Gateway laptop.
So I decided to install the next distro I’m testing — Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0. In case you haven’t heard of Wolvix, it’s a live CD based on Slackware that runs the Xfce and Fluxbox window managers. It can be used as a live CD, or put on the hard drive as a frugal install or traditional hard drive install. I opted for the traditional hard drive install.
The Wolvix installation process is excellent. I already had partitions set up, but the Wolvix installer offered to start up Gparted and make some or modify those I have. I also had the option of designating separate partitions for /home and other directories (I declined but would have configured a separate /home if I planned to use Wolvix long-term). The installer also gave me the option of booting Wolvix at the console or in a GUI (I chose the GUI), and it offered to put GRUB on the master boot record (I accepted). It also detected gOS, which allowed me to dual-boot. If whatever I install on the remaining partition messes up GRUB, I can easily reinstall it from Wolvix without having to geek out too much. (Note: Wolvix didn’t do so well on GRUB, I instead used the gOS install disk to reinstall GRUB, and it recognized gOS perfectly).
I ran top in a terminal in Wolvix Hunter running Xfce, and at idle, with the Firefox window open on another screen (just like in gOS), the top running process was X at between 2 and 4.6 percent CPU and 7.6 percent memory. In short, a whole lot lighter than Enlightenment.
Maybe Wolvix isn’t the best distro with which to compare gOS, but the Xfce vs. Enlightenment comparison is more than valid. Is it possible that the Everex PC could perform better with Xubuntu instead of gOS? (The answer is yes.)
Anyway, since Wolvix includes Fluxbox, I decided to go further and check top again. I opened Firefox, opened this document, switched to another window, opened a terminal and ran top. X was still the top running process and veered between 0.3 percent and 1.7 percent of CPU, and 6.1 percent of memory. Again, much better than Enlightenment in gOS.
To provide an even clearer picture of the performance of gOS and Enlightenment, I tested the load times of Firefox and OpenOffice Writer in a variety of Linux distributions and window managers. (Note: Slackware 12 doesn’t include OpenOffice, and I haven’t bothered to add it, so times are provided for KOffice’s KWord — which is generally quicker to load than OO). Load times were checked twice for each setup, since the second load of each of these two applications often happens much more quickly than the first.
Other variables that may have affected the times: Ubuntu 6.06 uses Firefox 1.5. All others used variants of Firefox 2.0. OpenOffice versions ranged from 2.0 in Ubuntu 6.06 to 2.3 in gOS.
The distros and window managers tested on the Maxspeed converted thin client (1 GHz VIA C3 processor, ECS eveM motherboard, 256 MB RAM) were:
gOS 1.0.1 (Enlightenment)
Ubuntu 6.0.6 LTS (GNOME)
Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 (Xfce and Fluxbox)
Slackware 12 (KDE, Xfce and Fluxbox)
Ubuntu 7.04 (GNOME)
Xubuntu 7.04 (Xfce)
Debian 4.0 Etch (Xfce)
To sum up before the results are given, gOS was the slowest of the bunch — even slower than Slackware under KDE — and also slower than Ubuntu. It may be surprising, but Ubuntu with GNOME compares somewhat favorably to other distros running Xfce; you don’t lose much speed by running GNOME as opposed to Xfce. Slackware and Debian with Xfce were another story; both were extremely fast when it came to loading applications. I didn’t include Debian Etch with GNOME in the test because I didn’t have it installed on one of the thin client’s drives. But Debian compared very well to Slackware when both used the Xfce desktop environment. Curiously, Xubuntu — Ubuntu’s Xfce variant — was slower than Debian with Xfce; in fact (as I already mentioned), Xubuntu didn’t provide much of a speed advantage over regular Ubuntu.
I expected Wolvix to be the fastest, or at least as fast as Slackware. but it was buried by Slack. Not surprisingly, when Xfce was chosen for the window manager instead of KDE, Slackware was the undisputed winner, with a first-load time for Firefox of 8 seconds. That said, Ubuntu was slower, but not overly much, so if you prefer Ubuntu and GNOME to Slackware and Xfce, it’s not like night and day in terms of application load time; it’s more like noon and 2:30 p.m. — a difference, but not so much as to make the slower of the two unusable.
The reason I even did this test was that from a “desktop feel” standpoint on my underpowered test box, gOS lacked the quickness of most of the other distros, including the Dapper and Feisty versions of Ubuntu.
And while Ubuntu has made some performance gains between 6.06 and 7.04, compatibility with hardware and desire for (or lack of interest in) more up-to-date apps should govern users’ choice of the LTS vs. regular releases of the distro. For instance, on the converted thin client, hardware recognition is great in both versions, but on my Gateway laptop, ACPI and touchpad configuration work better in 7.10, and almost as well in 7.04. But ACPI management of the CPU fan only works with the kernel provided in 7.04.
Another aside: I saw practically no difference in application load times between Xfce and Fluxbox. So if you prefer Fluxbox, go ahead and use it, but you won’t be gaining any performance over Xfce, at least in 256 MB of RAM. On the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt), which only has 64 MB of RAM, I ran Debian with Fluxbox for months, and it runs just as well now that I have Xfce on it. And the superior tools included in Xfce put it ahead of Fluxbox when it comes to usability on the desktop.
The Slackware KDE vs. Slackware Xfce numbers are the most startling; using Slack with Xfce will save considerable load time on slower systems.
On “modern” PCs, however, much of this is moot. With a dual-core processor and 512 MB to 1 GB of RAM, everything loads so quickly that for desktop use, personal preference for one window manager or another holds more sway than load times, which will be acceptably short in just about any desktop environment. And for those who like all the bells and widgets of KDE, if you have enough power to enjoy them, it’s probably worth it. Just Konqueror alone, with its ability to function as a Web browser, file manager, file viewer, FTP client and configuration portal, makes KDE very attractive. If only I could get X configured properly in Slackware on my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop.
Here are the test results:
gOS 1.0.1 (Enlightenment)
Firefox 2.0.0.10 1st load: 30 sec.
2nd load: 15 sec.
OpenOffice 2.3 1st load: 56 sec.
2nd load: 21 sec.
Ubuntu 6.06 (GNOME)
Firefox 1.5.0.13 1st load: 21 sec.
2nd load: 10 sec.
Open Office 2.0 1st load: 44 sec.
2nd load: 26 sec.
Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 (Xfce)
Firefox 2.0.0.6 1st load: 19 sec.
2nd load: 12 sec.
OpenOffice 2.2 1st load: 37 sec.
2nd load: 23 sec.
Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 (Fluxbox)
Firefox 2.0.0.6 1st load: 22 sec.
2nd load: 12 sec.
OpenOffice 2.2 1st load: 42 sec.
2nd load: 23 sec.
Slackware 12 (KDE)
Firefox 2.0.0.8 1st load: 24 sec.
2nd load: 14 sec.
KOffice 1st load: 19 sec.
2nd load: 16 sec.
Slackware 12 (Xfce)
Firefox 2.0.0.8 1st load: 8 sec.
2nd load: 8 sec.
KOffice 1st load: 15 sec.
2nd load: 13 sec.
Slackware 12 (Fluxbox)
Firefox 2.0.0.8 1st load: 9 sec.
2nd load: 9 sec.
Koffice 1st load: 15 sec.
2nd load: 13 sec.
Xubuntu 7.04 (Xfce)
Firefox 2.0.0.10 1st load: 18 sec.
2nd load: 9 sec.
OpenOffice 2.2 1st load: 36 sec.
2nd load: 22 sec.
Ubuntu 7.04 (GNOME)
Firefox 2.0.0.10 1st load: 17 sec.
2nd load: 10 sec.
OpenOffice 2.2 1st load: 40 sec.
2nd load: 18 sec.
Debian 4.0 Etch (Xfce)
Firefox 2.0.0.8 1st load: 10 sec.
2nd load: 10 sec.
Open Office 2.0 1st load: 17 sec.
2nd load: 17 sec.
As I say above the biggest thing to emerge is the speed advantage of Slackware and Debian, especially with Xfce. The relative slowness of Slackware 11-based Wolvix was puzzling. And while I didn’t have OpenOffice installed in Slackware, and KOffice is pretty much a quicker program, I included its load numbers for comparison’s sake. I did first and second loads of all apps because the second load is often — but not always — much quicker. Times for office suites were the number of seconds it took to open up a new OO Writer or KWord document.
While I didn’t expect Debian to be slow, I also didn’t expect it to be so comparable to Slackware. That’s good news for Debian users.
But the biggest thing to come out of this test is that standard Ubuntu pretty much crushes gOS. The new, hot distro may be green in color, but it’s incomplete and slow.
That said, the idea of doing most work in the browser and drawing on Web-based portals for not just e-mail and “social networking” purposes, but also document creation, photo editing and storage is becoming more attractive and viable all the time. In this realm, gOS is making a big “idea” contribution to the OS game, but in terms of sheer performance, polish and basic tools, it has a long way to go.
The average user — even newbies — would be better off with Ubuntu or Xubuntu on the Everex. And as these tests show, the Xfce desktop environment, in most instances, provides more bang for your MHz.
I wanted gOS to be great, but when it comes to Linux and BSD distros, greatness only comes with time and painstaking effort. After all the hype over the gOS-Everex-Wal-Mart effort — some of it even generated by yours truly — I didn’t expect to see gOS beaten by every single established distro I threw at it. I don’t usually do extensive time tests, but the sludginess of gOS drove me to it.
And while I expected Slackware and Debian to acquit themselves well, I wasn’t prepared for out-of-the-box Ubuntu to best gOS. It wouldn’t make as great a story — “Wal-Mart chooses Ubuntu” — but it would be way better for those buying the $199 box from the world’s largest retailer.
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