Linux » OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE
Robolinux 10.5
Mayank Sharma isn’t too gullible in real life, but has an uncanny tendency
to fall for distros that then don’t deliver on the claims they make.
FREE | HTTPS://ROBOLINUX.ORG
N
ever one to judge a book by
its cover, we let slide the fact
that Robolinux’s website is
very messy and a nightmare
to navigate. Sure, we appreciate the
fact that donations are key to
sustaining the open source
ecosystem, but we think this project
goes a little overboard. Its developer’s
heart is in the right place; he isn’t just
seeking donations for himself, but
that’s no excuse for the poorly
designed website.
Robolinux has three active branches:
Raptor 8, based on Debian; Raptor 9,
based on Ubuntu LTS; and Raptor 10,
based on Ubuntu. Each branch has a
bunch of releases for different desktop
environments, including Cinnamon,
GNOME, Xfce, MATE and LXDE, for a
total of 15 ISO images. Once you do
manage to navigate your way to the
downloads page, you find that they’re
actually hosted on SourceForge.
The ISOs are hefty compared to other
distros, ranging between 2-4GB.
There’s obviously no shortage of
pre-installed apps and you can get
more using the distro’s unique one-
click installers. When we last looked at
the distro in LXF227, the project was
charging US$10 for them. Unless you
shelled out the money, you couldn’t
install any of these apps. That’s
changed now and you can grab the
installers from the project’s website.
The apps are essentially just shell
scripts that use apt to get the apps.
We have two issues with Robolinux’s
approach. The first is that while they
do just take a single click to install, it
takes dozens to grab the scripts from
the project’s website. Secondly, the
project does a disservice to the open
source community by claiming the
scripts will help save users several
hours spent resolving dependencies if
they were installing the apps
manually. They don’t make any
mention of dependency-resolution
binary package management tools like
apt, which is what they themselves use
in the scripts.
Then there’s the other highlighted
feature of the Robolinux project,
dubbed Stealth VM. Together with
another script descriptively named
C-Drive-to-VM, this helps you move
your physical Windows installation
into a virtual machine. Again, both
scripts were available only after the
payment of a small fee, but are now
available for no cost. Peer under the
covers and the process is pretty much
the standard affair. C-Drive-to-VM
gives you a couple of freeware utilities
to resize your Windows partition and
fold it into a VHD file. After moving the
VHD file to your Linux installation, use
Stealth VM to first convert it into VDI
and then import into a VirtualBox VM.
We aren’t fans of the project shielding
this information from its users and
projecting it as a novel approach.
The distro also appeals to privacy-
conscious users by inviting them to use
a script to route all its traffic via a VPN,
which is also Robolinux’s third
distinguishing feature. This too is adisappointment as the service it relies
on requires users to have a paid
account, which is a fact that is
conveniently missing from Robolinux’s
website. Once again, we aren’t against
paying for a service, but it’s the
project’s lack of clarity that upsets us.
Lastly, for a distro that targets new
users Robolinux doesn’t have a public
forum board. Instead guaranteed
support is doled out by the developer
himself – for a fee. There is an option to
email your tech support queries for
free, but that’s no excuse for not
hosting public forum boards. The
amount of documentation on the
project’s website is also negligible and
isn’t properly arranged inside a
dedicated menu, which make it hard
to access.
Sure, projects need to sustain
themselves – but the tactics employed
by Robolinux not only make it look
shady but also reflect poorly on the
larger open source community as
a whole.The project’s poor taste in user
inter face design extends from the
website to the desktop, with gaudy
wallpaper and silly desktop icons.“The documentation on the website
is negligible and isn’t properly arranged.”