Ark Linux Review, A Distro with an Identity Crisis

mikemuch writes "ExtremeTech has a review of Ark Linux 2006.1, which launched earlier this month. Overall, the reviewer likes this free KDE-based distro, but had to question some implementation choices, such as using the less-compatible Konqueror over Firefox for its default web browser. And for a distro that bills itself as 'a Linux distribution for everyone — designed to be easy to install and learn for users without prior Linux' the installation should hide command-line scrolling and be able to more automatically install standard graphics card drivers."

Rule #1: Don't try to please everyone

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Anything that is "xxx for everyone" is going to fail. You can't please everyone. If you do you end up with something that has no niche value.

If you're going to build a distro, or any product for that matter, think long and carefully who you really want to target.

Easy linux for masses

[QuantumFTL]

'a Linux distribution for everyone -- designed to be easy to install and learn for users without prior Linux'

Seriously, isn't this what Ubuntu (or Kubunto, for those who prefer KDE) is supposed to be? Or Red Hat? Or did I miss something?

Am I the only one who finds this article [bbspot.com] insightful, rather than funny?

Re:Reviewer missed the point

[WJMoore]

Yes they would also be the same libraries that Apple forked for WebKit, which is used by Safari. I don't think you can say that Konqueror is not a capable browser. Its much lighter than Firefox and has much better desktop integration, such as with the system wide KDE wallet and inline spell checking.

Re:Konqueror

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox makes use of available memrory, oh noes, ze horror! Did you bought lots of RAM for it to sit there?

Re:Who cares about saving 4% of memory footprint!?

[dbIII]

Sharing? A User does not care about 4% less hard disk consumed or 4% less memory consumed.

Isn't the entire point of this paticular linux distribution to be to run as fast as possible on older hardware where that extra few percent may be enough to start the disk swapping?

Swiss army knife? Call it KParts integration

[vdboor]

Konqueror on the other hand is a file manager, also a file viewer. It's such a good file viewer that you can view either local or remote files, and not only pictures and pdfs, but also html files, meaning you can also view graphic html files on remote servers, aka the web. As such, firefox is dedicated to being a browser where the web is a primary focus, whereas konqueror is more like a swiss army knife where the web is an included convenience.

This myth should actually be seen as a compliment to KDE. Why? The components you mention all come from the standard KDE libraries, or they are supplied by additionally installed applications. Konqueror is just a shell, host for all of them. Just like ActiveX/OLE integrates applications seamlessly together in Windows.

Konqueror can host a KHTMLPart, KatePart (text editor), file-viewer part, image-viewer part. They can all be developed by separate appliations. Install a PDF viewer, and Konqueror can load it's PDFPart too. The networking support you mention come from the standard KDE-IO libraries, they haven't been klunged into Konqueror at all (every KDE application has KDE-IO and KPart support!).

Saying that this would remove developer resources from KHTML isn't really true. Developers working on a PDFPart likely wouldn't have ended up coding for KHTML anyways.

Re:Let's be accurate.

[Anonymous Coward]

The need for Firefox-style extensions is due to the fact that the overall architecture of Gecko and Firefox is seriously flawed. Since the C++ codebase is so inaccessible to all but a small group of developers (due to its overwhelming complexity and lack of clarity), they had to come up with their JavaScript/XUL extension doodad. Such an extension scheme is needed because Firefox and Gecko are so difficult to natively extend using C++.

When such additional functionality is needed for Konqueror, on the other hand, it's just written in C++ and integrated with browser. What we end up with are extensions that far more stable, far quicker, and far less memory intensive than the equivalents for Firefox.

Gecko is fast, very standards compliant and trivial to extend using reasonably well documented APIs and technologies. For instance look at XTF. It has support for a lot of new things like SVG, MathML, designMode and so on. KHTML might support these things, depending if you use the Apple fork ... or it might not.

Perhaps Gecko is fast compared to Internet Explorer's rendering engine. But please, compare the most recent version of Firefox against the most recent versions of Konqueror and Opera. Make sure you load local files, to avoid delays in the network. What you'll find is that Konqueror and Opera are faster on the vast majority of pages. As for SVG and MathML, KHTML has supported those technologies since the 3.5.x release series. That's in the normal branch, too, not whatever Apple has worked on. With each subsequent release its SVG support has been improving.

It wasn't Firefox's portability that allowed it to gain popularity on Windows. It was the fact that it was basically the only alternative to a massive pile of fecal matter (Internet Explorer), people got fed up enough, and switched. Had Opera been free a couple years back, it's quite possible that they'd be up there with 25% or so of the browser marketshare.

Is this a way to drive traffic to extremetech?

[Anonymous Coward]

5 or 10 lines per page so you can cram more ad impressions down users throats sucks.
Does OSTG own extremetech too? :(