The Linux Ninja

I tried out the Moblin 2.0 Beta booting off of a USB key multiple times over the past week and I wanted to share my thoughts on the overall experience without griping too much about incompleteness since this is the first public beta.

The general experience feels pretty good on my EEE PC 1000HA. I like the auto-hiding of the top toolbar and the snappiness of the system in general. The network configuration tool and web browser both work well. The UI looks very nice and is smooth on the 10″ screen, but I am unsure how well it will translate to smaller screens. There are definitely incomplete pieces that I would like to toy around more with such as the twitter tab (difficult to find the account settings – they were under Applications->Settings->Web Services instead of on the tab) and the IM applications (no support for AIM), but those aren’t things that I expect to be fleshed out more as new betas are released.  There are methods for adding new applications and new applications that you install that are not part of the default desktop should also work seamlessly with the UI. There is also a concept of zones that appears to be dynamically created desktop areas to avoid window clutter. There also appears to be some Last.fm integration coming in the future from the Web Services settings box .

The Linux Foundation intends for this to be a base for other distributions and the Linpus team has already announced that they plan to base a new version of Linpus Linux Lite on it. This is definitely a promising start and something that has the potential to bring an influx of new Linux users via netbooks.