My experience with LinuxMCE

First of all congratulations to those who released a product with a great future! Thanks to all of you who spent their time and money to bring it up to this level. it is already an amazing package!

I just did a trial installation of a Core and a Media Director. Installation was not too difficult, still there are plenty of quirks. I have been using Linux for close to an year and tried several distributions just for fun (LinuxMint is my favorite). I don't think the LinuxMCE installation would be very easy for a hard core Windows user or even a not-too technical Linux User. DVD installation is a better bet in those cases.

I think new users should be advised to try out only those hardware and configurations that are already tested by the community. Even though there are wiki pages for this purpose they are not helping much because users do not update it (wiki is a little intimidating for me too!). If the forum moderator can create a sticky thread for users to post working hardware configurations that would be more interactive and should better serve the purpose.

I also think that developers should not claim that one can use any hardware and accessories with it and everyone is going to have a heavenly experience with LinuxMCE and all that. Usability features of LinuxMCE (look and feel in general) itself needs lot of improvements before it can compete with other MCEs like Windows MCE, Media Portal and such. LinuxMCE already has plenty of functionality no other popular MCE's ever imagined. Now with low power multi core machines and disk-less media directors, I certainly see a very bright future for LinuxMCE if we can get more developers, users and companies to support the idea. It certainly would make ones life and home computing scenarios easier.

Even though I am a windows developer (knowledge and experience somewhere between a system programmer and Database application architect), I was thinking of helping the Linux community however I can. May be I should start with LinuxMCE. LinuxMCE turned out to be one of my favorite projects in the recent past.

Thanks again for the interesting project!