Confirmed: Kids like Sugar better than XP

It's hardly a scientific test, but when a Cnet editor's 8 year old daughter was given the choice between an OLPC XO laptop running Windows XP or the Linux-based Sugar UI, Sugar was the winner. As Cnet points out, either OS when properly incorporated into the teaching curriculum should serve the children of developing nations equally well. Only one, however, promises to prepare our youth for middle management.

P.S. Amazon's Give One, Get One program will be limited to Linux according to Cnet and confirmed in the OLPC Wiki -- no dual-boot for you Santa.

[Thanks, Justin G.]

[LondonConsultant @ Oct 24th 2008 8:10AM]

Fortunately there wasn't Vista as well. The poor child could have been traumatised.

[From My Cube @ Oct 24th 2008 8:13AM]

are you here all week?

[Andir3.0 @ Oct 24th 2008 8:17AM]

They'd still be granting permission to use the mouse.

[Albert @ Oct 24th 2008 3:50PM]

Sweet so uhh... One stupid kid now defines the entire world of children and the OS battle?

[James @ Oct 24th 2008 11:27PM]

OMG kid likes sugar
knock that s off kids

[Greg Mcp @ Oct 24th 2008 8:12AM]

Of course it should be pointed out that kids are stupid.
That's why they have to go to school

[meist3r @ Oct 24th 2008 8:44AM]

Maybe you should go back to school then ... kids aren't necessarily stupid. They just don't know anything yet, that's a major difference. I know lots of people that know a lot and are still stupid. On the other hand I know some people who know very little or specialized in one particular field and those are actually incredibly smart. Most kids aren't born stupid, they're made stupid. Kids don't go to school to become smart ... they already are when they get there (or not).

[zoara @ Oct 24th 2008 9:13AM]

Intelligence and knowledge aren't the same thing.

[Blondie @ Oct 24th 2008 9:34AM]

Would you two assholes shut up? He was just making a joke. Christ.

[StrangeBum @ Oct 24th 2008 9:47AM]

A joke which, I don't really need to point this out, but it was great.

+1 comment, would read again

[meist3r @ Oct 24th 2008 10:02AM]

@Blondie: Well at least he could stick to the unwritten (someone probably DID write them down) rules of the internet and put some weird symbols behind his "humor" to mark it as such for other people. It's not like the quirky way in which the font is displayed on my monitor can lead me to discern between his humor and his serious attitude. I'm being an asshole for that? OK fine. I'm an asshole, kiss me.

[Blondie @ Oct 24th 2008 10:13AM]

God meist3r, you really suck.

[happy_penguin @ Oct 24th 2008 10:29AM]

Sometimes a statement is just absurd enough that it can stand on it's own as a joke without tagging it as such. Tagging it would have ruined it.

[happy_penguin @ Oct 24th 2008 10:31AM]

And damn engadget I can't fix that unneeded apostrophe.

[falafeln @ Oct 24th 2008 2:02PM]

yeah, they could need a good ol' brainwash

[iEye @ Oct 24th 2008 8:17AM]

What normal kid turns down Sugar?

Thats why as adults we can't turn down iCandy! :D

[Kevin Farley @ Oct 24th 2008 1:14PM]

iCandy's dandy but iLiquor's quicker.

[AB @ Oct 24th 2008 9:45AM]

Phhh... Kids today! In my day, all an OS did for you was give you a blinking cursor. We had to go through 15 floppy disks just to beat a Sierra game, and we liked it!

[Troels C @ Oct 24th 2008 9:00PM]

Damn strait!
Set Blaster /to /kill !

[Blondie @ Oct 24th 2008 8:27AM]

A CNET editor's child prefers an easier to learn OS. This might be the story of the fucking century.

[carl @ Oct 24th 2008 8:56AM]

The comments should just end here.

[Michael @ Oct 24th 2008 4:36PM]

I think the real story here is that linux is for little girls.

[Ike Turner @ Oct 24th 2008 8:56AM]

In other news: Microsoft Reports Record First-Quarter Revenue.

Steve Ballmer laughs straight to the bank and pimpslaps allthe haters at the same time.....

[[e-mail] @ Oct 24th 2008 8:56AM]

She just doesn't know any better....a future Mac user in the making.

[chrisp @ Oct 24th 2008 9:00AM]

Thats until she realises all the games are on XP hehe

[Mr. Picklesworth @ Oct 24th 2008 10:29AM]

Except... that's an OLPC XO-1 so actually won't be running those games anyway! In fact, for her spec and for that system, there are more (and more interesting) games out of the box on the Linux environment.

[maveric101 @ Oct 24th 2008 12:22PM]

that thing could run StarCraft in XP.

[Saad Rabia @ Oct 24th 2008 9:15AM]

Holly fuck! Did you guys just say "Kids" based on the opinion of one kid from I don't know where?!

Is this article really necessary at all?

Come on Engadget; just go back to Apple articles.

[Blondie @ Oct 24th 2008 9:33AM]

Just be glad the headline wasn't "MICROSOFT ALIENATES CHILDREN."

[shmengie @ Oct 24th 2008 10:01AM]

thank you! save me a post.

[Andir3.0 @ Oct 24th 2008 10:13AM]

Saad (aka: Microsoft Shill) just made more Microsoft bucks! Woohoo!

[iofthestorm @ Oct 24th 2008 7:29PM]

Andir3.0 (aka troll) just got some troll points!

[K Nang @ Oct 24th 2008 9:18AM]

but will she blend?

[matt merritt @ Oct 24th 2008 9:30AM]

In Soviet Russia, cheka children blend you.

[Chris @ Oct 24th 2008 9:25AM]

Can Sugar use any Xp/Windows apps? Firefox? anything?

[cmonkey @ Oct 24th 2008 9:37AM]

There are Firefox 3 and Wine Activities.

More importantly, forget Windows, you can install whatever you want to from Fedora's repos. Instead of people downloading who knows what shady malware and garbage shareware for Windows off the internet, the stuff in the repos is free and tested for security and compatibility.

[Chris @ Oct 24th 2008 10:08AM]

I see, I didnt know you use a repository. Ive seen them in screenshots for Ubuntu and such but never actually used one.

[Inkreef @ Oct 24th 2008 9:47AM]

For ppl that actually went on the CNet website and watched the embedded video on the page... is the person on the right side... a girl or a dude ?

[fendee1 @ Oct 24th 2008 2:43PM]

holy cow! THAT'S A WOMAN.?;(

[jupiterthunder @ Oct 25th 2008 2:03AM]

and @fendee

From the "about" at the bottom of the article.

During her years at CNET News, Ina Fried has changed beats several times, CHANGED GENDERS ONCE, and covered both of the Pirates of Silicon Valley. These days, most of her attention is focused on Microsoft..

[Geoff @ Oct 24th 2008 10:04AM]

Anyone know where I can get that Vista-styled XP wallpaper? First time I've seen it.

[Andir3.0 @ Oct 24th 2008 10:17AM]

You do know that wallpaper is not OS dependent, right? It's just an image file placed on the background and is in no way tied to the particular OS (except I'm sure it's probably covered by the license and using it on any other machine will bring Microsoft lawyers out of the woodwork.)

[Paulmichael @ Oct 24th 2008 2:01PM]

Google.

[LameDuck @ Oct 24th 2008 2:52PM]

No offence, but what should this guy google? "wallpaper that was on the OX PC where the little girl liked Linux better" or "Vista-style wallpaper that comes on the OX PC that the little girl didn't like because it didn't have sugar"?

[Oli D @ Oct 24th 2008 10:55AM]

i like having injections more than xp...

[directive0 @ Oct 24th 2008 11:29AM]

I don't know if this is really a "Sugar is better then Windows"
argument, more "Sugar is better for kids". So people who prefer
windows should not feel threatened, Sugar will never overthrow
Windows in the "real world" (I say that with confidence) but maybe in the classrooms.

Keep in mind the goal here is not to teach kids about Computers, its
merely to teach. They are not sending $200 youtube or office
devices, they are trying to provide an adequate replacement for both
textbooks, calculators, and any and all educational requirements they
may need. It needs to be easily adaptable to suit any language, any
culture, needs to be cheap as free, etc. Sugar Labs have gone to a lot of effort and committee
design to ensure this. XP will certainly teach you about using
computers as we now regard them here in the "developed world", but I think out of the
box it provides little in the way educational software that is pick
up and play or easily translated into multiple languages.

I think the real benefit of Sugar is that its so simplistic, and that
its designed around the hardware. It's tailored to learning and kids
so it's pretty much a no-brainer to me that it would be more
appealing then XP for this purpose, especially on a machine with such
meager hardware like the XO. I haven't tried XP on the XO but I
imagine it would run pretty slowly. I have tried Ubuntu hardy with
xfce, and it's somewhat laggy on that hardware.

Plus comparing Sugar and XP is not just comparing the basic UI, Sugar
contains a large bundle of software WRITTEN for kids. Right out of the
box Sugar has games, some great music creation software, paint and
drawing programs, programming environments, photo and video
recorders, chat, writing tools, etc etc. I know that there are some
bundled commercial apps that come with XP for XO, but I can't comment
on them as I haven't used them.

My final point is that Sugar is FREE and XP costs money, not much
money (+$3 per unit). But with a minimum order of 1000 laptops per
deployment that adds up and we are talking about cash strapped
deployments.

However that being said I feel it should be noted that XP supports
the XO's stylus pad, whereas Sugar is still working on adequately
integrating this feature into all it's activities. So far as I know,
Sugar only uses the touchpad as a proof of concept and you need to run
a script to activate it as of the last Joyride I experimented with.
Also a number of other advertised features (view source for example)
have not yet been implemented in Sugar, but I doubt that has been
applied to XP.

Also of importance here is that while the bundled apps in Sugar are
great, it is a little tricky to figure out how to install and run
NON-Sugarized apps if you are not familiar with the shell. Since
sugar is Fedora through the terminal you can use yum to install a lot
of software and run it, usually without issue. But this is far from
easy for someone just picking up a computer. While I can guarantee
any child could figure out how to do it in time (teach one kid,
s/he'll teach everyone else) I bet it will be hardest on the
teacher(s) in the deployment. I would imagine most adults familiar
with computers would just prefer using a standard OS like XP.

[Jeff Lewis @ Oct 24th 2008 3:02PM]

Excellent analysis of the situation.

To be honest, someone could take most of the apps in Sugar and write a Sugar shell and stick it in XP. Then the end user wouldn't really even know what OS is running under it.

[XenoX101 @ Oct 25th 2008 10:02AM]

Do I get paid for reading this?

[brandon @ Oct 24th 2008 11:37AM]

CHANGE THE HEADLINE!
It is confirmed that kid, singular, not plural, likes sugar.

[steve @ Oct 24th 2008 12:26PM]

sugar is clearly inferior. the interface is innovative and unique, but how good is that when the machine hardly works? the software is unreliable and buggy as hell.