This page serves as a reference for you readers so you can know what to expect from my articles, and it serves as a reminder for myself as well for what I should include in my articles. It has been developed to ensure the highest possible quality articles.

General guidelines
The point of view in the articles, is seen from the general user who uses Linux, or would like to use Linux, for general purpose appliances such as word-processing, surf the Internet, play games, listen to music, watch movies, burn CD’s/DVD’s, manage photo-collections, et cetera. Finding the most user friendly, intuitive, easy to use, yet powerful Linux-applications and -distributions are the main goals of the articles.

All articles will, to the widest extend possible, go through a review-process before they end up publicly available at the site, to ensure spelling errors, grammatic errors, factual errors and the like, are all fixed before posting the final version. If I feel there’s a need for more reviewers (for instance if too many comments on the articles criticize the errors rather than the content), I’ll announce so on the site.

I will try do as objective journalism in my posts as possible, though there is a before mentioned point-of-view.
I aim at posting an article once a week, posting Sunday evenings (CET/GMT+1). Once a month, a Linux-distribution will get reviewed and all other weeks of the month, an application review or an application comparison is posted. I aim to be a bit ahead of myself, usually having the next weeks review ready to be posted a week before it’s supposed to, to ensure a high-quality post once a week, even when a week might be too busy for me to do much work on the articles (I’m a full-time student so my available spare time varies from week to week).

I will not guarantee if a week might skip once in a while, but I will do my uttermost to ensure that will not happen.

Application-reviews
Applications will have gone through a testing-period of minimum a week, depending on the complexity of the application in question. I’ll always use the latest officially recommended version by the author.

This is somewhat the skeleton I use for writing the articles:

Introduction:

• What is the application supposed to do?
• Who is behind? (anyone interesting?)
• License? If not free, what price?
• Availability (direct download, torrents, mail-order product, physical stores)?

Expectations:

• What do I believe is reasonable to expect from this application?
• What do I hope it does besides that?

First impression:

• Was I greeted by a wizard or a welcome-screen?
• Is the user interface understandable?

Functionality:

• Does it do its job?
• Anything (unexpected) that doesn’t work?

Stability:

• How easy is it to make it crash?

Bug-tracking:

• Are there any publicly known, yet unfixed bugs?

Error messages:

• I’ll try out “stupid” things. Are the error messages well written and understandable?

Speed:

• How well does the application handle large amounts of data?
• In the case of multimedia-applications and games: How is performance and quality?

Third-party support:

• Can it import/export other file formats and how well does it do so?
• Is it extensible (plugins, themes)? If so, is it easy to work with extensions?

Integration with the desktop environment:

• Drag-n-drop-support?
• Copy-paste-support?
• Does it inherit the icons, colors, fonts and sizes from my desktop?

Language-support:

• Spellchecking?
• Is it translated into other languages than english?

Documentation:

• Easy to navigate around in?
• Well-written (good examples, screenshots, video tutorials, et cetera)?

Support:

• Are there any official support-solutions?
• Does the project have an (active) official forum, maillist and/or IRC-channel?
• How does it react to (from a “techie” point-of-view) stupid questions?

Future:

• Does the maintainers have any future plans with the product?

Alternatives:

• Other, very briefly described, similar applications.

Conclusion

Distribution-reviews
Distributions will have gone through a testing-period of usually around a month. I’ll always use the latest officially recommended version by the author. I do default installations, simulating a user who accepts the default choices. If any complex answers have to be taken into consideration by the user, that’s not user friendly and thus not good.
This is somewhat the skeleton I use for writing this type of articles:

Introduction

• What is the purpose of this distribution?
• Who is behind?
• License? If not free, what price?
• Availability (direct download, torrents, mail-order product, physical stores)?

Expectations

• What do I believe is reasonable to expect from this distribution?
• Do I have any additional hopes for it?

Installation:

• Welcoming
• Possible to choose an easy installation? If so, what features are not in this version?
• Is it user friendly and is installation localized?
• What kinds of partitioning does it propose?
• Does the default package-selection seem reasonable?
• Any non-free packages selected per default, or are some available during package selection?
• Does installation propose doing an automatic package-upgrade during installation?
• What desktop-environment is default? KDE, GNOME, Xfce, FluxBox, et cetera.

First boot

• Does it have a special welcome message or perhaps even a wizard?

Hardware

• Does all hardware work out-of-the-box?

Distribution specials

• What special tools, besides the installer, comes with this distribution?
• New theme(s) or just standard themes?
• Special firewall-configuration?

Productivity

• What Office-suite is bundled and how well is it integrated?

Movies and music

• Which formats are supported and which are not?
• How easy is it to get support for WMA/WMV, MP3, DVD (w/o CSS), DivX 3.11a, et cetera?
• What players are installed per default

Internet-browsing

• What browsers?
• Flash-support?
• Java-support?
• Multimedia-support?

Package-management

• What tools are available per default?
• What kind of repositories are officially available (free/non-free/non-us)?
• What is the default configuration regarding automatic software updates?
• Does automatic updating require any kind of interaction with the user?

Localization

• If another language has been chosen, how consistent and thorough is that done? Are applications unaffected? Localized spell-checking everywhere?

File sharing

• What kinds of file sharing between Linux, Windows and Mac OS is possible per default (SAMBA/NFS/FTP)?
• Any issues?

Documentation and support

• How thorough is the bundled documentation and the documentation from the distribution’s official website?
• Is it well written?
• How easy is it to get support in general?

Alternative desktop-environment

• If choosing an alternative desktop-environment, how well is the alternatives to the default environment set up?

Web server (Apache + MySQL + PHP + phpMyAdmin)

• How easy is it to install and set up?

Conclusion