I'm never sure what to expect when I try a new desktop. I don't know what I was expecting when I started this VM, but it wasn't what I was expecting. It starts off asking some questions.
I suppose this symbol represents you as the user. You can change what color your avatar is. Your name first, and then your age group. I nevr had an OS care about how old I was before, but it starts to make sense as you start using this desktop.
I selected "Adult" as I feel like I qualify most days.
Once you answer all the questions, it starts off with this circular menu. I could guess at what some of the icons were, but I didn't know what all of them were.
Hovering over an icon will give some information about what it is. I was lucky, I correctly guess that icon was for the internet browser.
I am told this is a re-skinned version of firefox. All of the buttons, and the mouse cursor itself are almost cartoonishly large. I was beginning to understand why my age was important. This desktop could be handy for smaller children, also perhaps for the elderly (like myself somedays) who have bad eye sight. You might notice there is no "close" X up in the top right corner. You click on the white donut, and then click on "Stop" to close an application.
Everything seems to work OK, but it take a little getting used to. Like Gnome, SOAS (Sugar) will only let you have one application open at a time. It's always in full-screen mode and you can't move ot resize windows. You can't have two applications on the screen at the same time.
There is a search function at the top of the screen, but it wasn't very intuitive to me. I first tried "software" and it found nothing, I then tried "terminal" and it brought up a command line console.
It's interesting that the console/terminal doesn't show up as an icon on the main screen. I suppose they don't want younger children or us elderly folks typing in any commands that might get us into trouble.
I did click on some of the other icons. This is simply called... (you guessed it) "clock". Again, it takes up the entire screen and looks a little cartoonish for my taste, but hey you can definitely see what time it is. The icon that looks like a par of lips, is a speaking option. It's speaks the current time to you in an audible voice.
It took me a little bit to find it, but I was wondering where the "shutdown" and "restart" option were. I didn't expect the "settings" to be here.
That brings up this screen. I was surprised to see modem settings here. I suppose there are people who still use dial-up. In a way it makes sense to have this pre-installed. This is also where you do software updates, and configure your network.
The software updates are fairly simple and straight-forward, but I didn't see any option to install a specific package. I know I could do this from the command line, but I guess I was expecting a way to do it from the GUI.
The network settings were also fairly basic and simplistic. I'm guessing the main audience is someone who is not familiar with networking as a whole.
If you don't like the circular menu, there is an option to show the applications as a list. I did notice that the terminal/console application shows up when you are in "list mode".
This program is simply called "Physics", I didn't do much with it, but it comes across as a simplistic drawing program with pre-defined shape objects, maybe someone who is more familiar with it can give me lessons on how to use it.
There is also a simplistic text editor, I won't really call it a word processor. One nice feature is the text to speech function that will read your text back to you. I actually find that helps me sometimes as my grammar checker doesn't always find missing words.
I suspect you can install any programs you want to, but I was running this from a "Live" iso, so it wasn't actually installed to a VM, therefore I didn't install anything that wasn't included in the base image.
All in all, everything works, I didn't encounter any problems at all, most of the errors were user errors with the guy sitting at the keyboard (me). But it does have a bit of a learning curse, and it does take a little getting used to. I personally would recommand this for two groups of people. Either the very young, say children six and under, or else the elderly person who isn't really computer savvy, and maybe has bad eye-sight.
Let me know what you think.
I suppose this symbol represents you as the user. You can change what color your avatar is. Your name first, and then your age group. I nevr had an OS care about how old I was before, but it starts to make sense as you start using this desktop.
I selected "Adult" as I feel like I qualify most days.
Once you answer all the questions, it starts off with this circular menu. I could guess at what some of the icons were, but I didn't know what all of them were.
Hovering over an icon will give some information about what it is. I was lucky, I correctly guess that icon was for the internet browser.
I am told this is a re-skinned version of firefox. All of the buttons, and the mouse cursor itself are almost cartoonishly large. I was beginning to understand why my age was important. This desktop could be handy for smaller children, also perhaps for the elderly (like myself somedays) who have bad eye sight. You might notice there is no "close" X up in the top right corner. You click on the white donut, and then click on "Stop" to close an application.
Everything seems to work OK, but it take a little getting used to. Like Gnome, SOAS (Sugar) will only let you have one application open at a time. It's always in full-screen mode and you can't move ot resize windows. You can't have two applications on the screen at the same time.
There is a search function at the top of the screen, but it wasn't very intuitive to me. I first tried "software" and it found nothing, I then tried "terminal" and it brought up a command line console.
It's interesting that the console/terminal doesn't show up as an icon on the main screen. I suppose they don't want younger children or us elderly folks typing in any commands that might get us into trouble.
I did click on some of the other icons. This is simply called... (you guessed it) "clock". Again, it takes up the entire screen and looks a little cartoonish for my taste, but hey you can definitely see what time it is. The icon that looks like a par of lips, is a speaking option. It's speaks the current time to you in an audible voice.
It took me a little bit to find it, but I was wondering where the "shutdown" and "restart" option were. I didn't expect the "settings" to be here.
That brings up this screen. I was surprised to see modem settings here. I suppose there are people who still use dial-up. In a way it makes sense to have this pre-installed. This is also where you do software updates, and configure your network.
The software updates are fairly simple and straight-forward, but I didn't see any option to install a specific package. I know I could do this from the command line, but I guess I was expecting a way to do it from the GUI.
The network settings were also fairly basic and simplistic. I'm guessing the main audience is someone who is not familiar with networking as a whole.
If you don't like the circular menu, there is an option to show the applications as a list. I did notice that the terminal/console application shows up when you are in "list mode".
This program is simply called "Physics", I didn't do much with it, but it comes across as a simplistic drawing program with pre-defined shape objects, maybe someone who is more familiar with it can give me lessons on how to use it.
There is also a simplistic text editor, I won't really call it a word processor. One nice feature is the text to speech function that will read your text back to you. I actually find that helps me sometimes as my grammar checker doesn't always find missing words.
I suspect you can install any programs you want to, but I was running this from a "Live" iso, so it wasn't actually installed to a VM, therefore I didn't install anything that wasn't included in the base image.
All in all, everything works, I didn't encounter any problems at all, most of the errors were user errors with the guy sitting at the keyboard (me). But it does have a bit of a learning curse, and it does take a little getting used to. I personally would recommand this for two groups of people. Either the very young, say children six and under, or else the elderly person who isn't really computer savvy, and maybe has bad eye-sight.
Let me know what you think.
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