Helix Preview Release 2 Review (Score 3)

I was impressed with Helix's work.

Riding off of a stock RH6.1, it installed like a dream. I chose [INSTALL ALL PACKAGES]. Installation was maybe 30 minutes off of a T1, bombed out once... I restarted the script, it picked up what was already downloaded, and continued without a hitch.

The UI polish is exceptional. The new Sawfish windowmanager default is a godsend from the clunky old Enlightement. The MacOS-style menu up top is actually usful. The width and breadth of applications it comes bunded with is incredible.

I got:

Development Tools
15-odd games
A word processor
An extremely competent spreadsheet
A flowcharter
Themes for everything
Multimedia applications (xmms et al)
A dozen and five text editors, and mini-word-processors
Hex editors, calculators, basic address books, index tools, palmpilot tools, calendars...
The panel/applet system which is extremely pleasurable to use coming off of Win9x
A goddamn online dictionary reference
A much improved control panel
Endless tools and monitors and just tons of other things...

Cost:

Economic price of $0.00
Time price of 30 minutes
Effort price of Zero

This is a significantly better value proposition for me than paying 100 dollars or more for a near-useless-by-default Windows 9x, several hundred dollars for a flakey and inflexible WinNT, lots for a MacOS-capable hardware setup, or anything else...

Helix gives gnome polish, like Corel and SUSE did for KDE... It's nice.