Top 5 XP Distros, Sour Musix, and GNIGNO

In today's news is a slideshow by PCQuest highlighting their top 5 Linux picks to replace Windows XP, and it includes more than Ubuntu and Mint. Jack Germain says Musix Linux hits all the wrong notes. Later, Bruce Byfield says GNOME designers violated the basic GIGO principal with GNOME 3 and PCWorld has a little look-see at Nvidia's $192 Tegra TK1.

In a slideshow today, PCQuest.com spotlighted their 5 Best and Top Linux Distros To Replace Windows XP. Their picks include ZorinOS, Linux Lite, and openSUSE. Yes, they do mention Mint and Ubuntu - as their fifth and sixth choices in a top 5 article. But it's nice to see some other mentions as well.

Musix Linux is a distribution designed to give audio and music geeks a system with tools just for them and Jack Germain at LinuxInsider.com recently took 3.0.1 for a spin. He found a few shortcomings. He says Musix should include tools for video work with all the music stuff and a bit more attention to regular computing tasks wouldn't go unappreciated. He said:

If you have a passion for a well designed, general purpose Linux OS, Musix will leave you tapping a beat for something else. More is neglected in musix that would make this distro more suitable beyond music mania. For instance, Musix lacks its own software repository. It also is too lightweight out of the box to serve typical non-artistic computing tasks.

Bruce Byfield said yesterday that GNOME developers broke the first rule of design (and computing): GIGO. His basic premise is:

GNOME 3's early history shows that development was mostly a consistent realization of principles described early in the process -- principles founded on the impressions of the Design Team and apparently backed by little theory. This inconsistency between how GNOME is marketed and how it was actually designed seems the major reason for its sometimes rocky reception.

Under pressure from KDE 4, Byfield contends, GNOME 3 was based on someone's "subjective impressions" and not based on any real user experience. He says designers assumed what they thought was rational would be rational to everyone else.

And finally today, PCWorld.com says Nvidia $192 Tegra TK1 board could be used as a Linux gaming PC. Similar to the Raspberry Pi and BeagleBoard in design, it "offers 300 gigaflops of performance through 192 graphics cores based on Nvidia’s Kepler architecture." Nvidia says it's powerful enough to be used as a Linux gaming PC, although it's designed more for mobile applications.