I’ve been using Xandros Desktop Professional for a few days lately, courtesy of a friend who works at Xandros, for review purposes. My first impression of Xandros is how plain-looking it appears compared to the freely available distributions out there like Kubuntu or even OpenSuSE. But as my friend puts it, Xandros caters to a different audience (home user looking for an easy transition from Windows, but still want all the perks of multimedia, and business users, looking for a streamlined desktop and server offering without having to go through rigorous learning phases). Despite the great strides already happening in the GNU/Linux market, Xandros still seems to have a certain niche happening and it seems to work for them.

I’ve been using the said desktop offering in a fairly recent Toshiba Tecra M2, which had near-perfect support in Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, and the only complaint I have about it is not able to switch displays due to an issue in xorg and the nvidia chipset. In Xandros, I was not able to set this up using the nv driver, and I had to fallback to vesa to be able to have a usable desktop during and after installation. It didn’t provide an easy way to switch between drivers, and I had to resort to using the terminal to be able to do so.

Another gripe I have with Xandros Desktop Professional is not having sound configured at all.

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