brian hefele's untidy spaceI've been using MeeGo as my secondary OS (well, my primary OS on my secondary machine) for a week, week and a half or so now, and I'm still pretty happy with it. Stability is not quite where I'd like it to be, the wifi driver randomly seems to crash (without notice, except that all network activity disappears), and Evolution is not sending mail properly (at all). Minor issues add up, and I would not feel comfortable recommending MeeGo to anyone who wasn't a hacker, or who didn't have extremely kind hacker friends. Yet, if you do have a bit of patience, it's still less of a struggle than any other desktop linux I've ever run, and its performance on weak hardware is nothing to sneeze at.
I was excited to learn that the OpenSUSE team had taken the Meego UI and applied it to a (theoretically) slim version of OpenSUSE. The result is, for now, at least, known as Smeegol. There are some very convincing reasons to try this out - Smeegol uses NetworkManager, which is an amazing tool. Far more packages are available, since OpenSUSE is already a strong distro. Also, additional social networks are available for the front page - including FaceBook (boo) and Flickr (yay).
I downloaded Smeegol, kicked it off to an SD card, and power up the Eee. I waited, and waited, and waited. I didn't actually time it, but I would guess that this took longer to boot than XP does from a crappy 5400RPM HDD. MeeGo boots very quickly off of the same SD card, which is what I would expect out of a 'mobile' OS. Now, one of my positive notes was that Smeegol has a ton of packages available to it. I suspect part of what makes it so slow to boot is that a ton of packages are actually included as well. Three web browsers come installed: Chromium, Firefox, and some mysterious third browser. First of all, Firefox has no business on a wimpy Netbook. Second, even people who aren't convinced that choice is a negative user experience should realize that preinstalling redundant software on a distribution that should inherently be minimalist is rather backward. So, first strike against Smeegol - heavy and slow as molasses to boot.
NetworkManager, though, right? Well, yes, Virginia, that is a nice touch. Except that booting up spawns a NetworkManager GUI that is positioned well out of reach of my cursor. If we call the upper left of the screen (0,0), the window must've been positioned at (-512,-300) - that is, it looked as if there was an attempt to center, but the origin was thrown off. Anyway, that window was useless, and the networking menu widget thing either crashed immediately, or never spawned, so I had to handle the network from the CLI. Fine for me when I'm just dicking around with a new OS, but annoying for day-to-day use, and ridiculous for any attempt at penetration among the common user.
Once on the network, again things just felt sluggish compared to Meego (that is, compared to a Meego which is already set up to be checking my mail, IM, &c. in the background). But, now I can check out the Flickr addition to the 'status' page. Except, as I should have expected, it just didn't work. The UI simply didn't open up (enough) to get to the Flickr account controls. Possibly a CSS bug, I'm not really sure how that UI is managed. By then it was about time to 'dd if=/dev/zero of=$MY_SD_CARD' and boot back up into Meego. Conclusion? Smeegol sounds good, but ultimately disappoints. Where Meego has quirks, Smeegol has outright failures.