The other day, I downloaded and created a LiveUSB installer for Moblin v2.0 Beta, because after seeing the preview video (below), I was just blown away by the interface, and planned on installing it onto my Aspire One. In mine, and many other’s opinions, it’s the first properly designed OS for netbooks. However, after trying out the LiveUSB, I quickly changed my mind about Moblin.
Yes, it still had the beautiful and fluid interface, but it was as buggy as hell. I always jump straight into betas when I see them, but this is by far the most buggy beta I’ve ever seen, and some things just didn’t make sense. You can add your Twitter account, and update your status from within the OS’s status tab. However that’s all it did, just allow you to update your status. It would have made sense to show your Twitter stream below it, but no. That was on the m_zone tab, basically a dashboard. There was just one problem. There was 8 boxes each containing a seemingly random (although prioritising replies) tweet, or a link to a song from your linked Last.fm account. The rest of the dashboard was nice though. Recent/most viewed web pages, and your agenda and tasks from you calendar.
So, that I could have gotten over. After all, I usually just use Twitter’s web interface. So it didn’t help that the web browser was horrible and buggy. Like, it’s a tabbed browser, but you can’t right click and open in new tab. Now that I think about it, I never tried Ctrl-Click, but that’s besides the point. The browser is built on Firefox, but rendering can often take a long time, and I couldn’t manage to download Flash Player. I also tried using the package manager and terminal to install it, but both failed, so I couldn’t test out flash in the browser.
And my last gripe (although this is most likely something they’re working on) is the built in IM. It only supports Jabber, Google Talk and some other service I can’t remember, so again I couldn’t really test this as I use Windows Live Messenger.
It may seem like I’ve been just bashing this OS based purely on a beta version, but I consider this more constructive criticism and definitely see potential. I do love the interface in general. Here’s hoping they combat the problems mentioned above, as well as any other bugs and launch a viable competitor to Ubuntu Netbook Remix and plain ol’ XP.
Here’s the preview video:
