mateo’s musings

I’m thoroughly ambivelant about Presto.  It’s fine.  It does what it does.  It took a lot of good ideas from other distros and combined it into a great netbook OS for your grandma.

Sure, it boots sort of fast, but honestly not noticibly faster than CrunchBang, or a lean-and-mean Ubuntu install for that matter.  You really can’t call it an instant-on OS in my opinion.  Sure, it’s got an “app store,” but it’s really just a nice web interface for a very limited repository (and nothing we haven’t seen before, right PuppyLinux/Linspire/etc.?).  They made it only available as a .exe installer, which is useful (again, not new at all… see wubi) on the one hand, but frustrating to me that I couldn’t just do a clean install on an old computer if I wanted to.

I think the best thing it’s got going for it is that there’s no way a beginner/novice user could possibly screw this up.  I saw that they ported it to ARM as a netbook OS, and I think that’s where it should stay.

This morning Kyle was telling me about the first Linux distro that he didn’t hate.  It’s called Presto and it’s the new instant-on OS from Xandros.  They just released the beta, and all the reviews (including Kyle’s) have been quite positive.  The beta is free to download, and the final version will cost $20.  I’ll give it a test drive here soon and let you all know what I think of it.