Posted by: jonreagan | September 5, 2007

PCLinuxOS 2007


Yup. That’s PCLinuxOS 2007… with Mini vMac. And transparency!

The real surprise - It’s running on 8 year old hardware. With full transparency, I couldn’t be happier. PCLinux is working out great on my old PC. (I would have used Ubuntu, but only 6.06 works, the other versions crash) I needed Linux of some type becaue I have been stuck using XP for school. There are all my favorite application available, and with over 100 preinstalled, I have all the applications I needed. The installation was much easier this time around, now that I knew what I was doing. I also installed KOffice, since OpenOffice was missing some fonts.

One thing, however, caught my eye today on the main PCLinuxOS site. The PCLinuxOS Magazine had an article saying that Ubuntu’s hype is misleading. This sounded — stupid, so it naturally caught my attention. The article tells a story of a computer class who’s students range in skill and age, and trying out different distros, just to give them a taste of Linux. The distros tested were Ubuntu, Mandriva, and PCLinuxOS.

Basically, the students said that Mandriva was nice, but PCLinuxOS was better. They also said that Ubuntu was the worst thing they ever tried… all because they could not play certain media files like with PCLinuxOS.

I wonder if they realize that certain codecs are illegal to distribute in Linux? While many are free to download, they can not be given out freely. Ubuntu has these codecs in its repositories, available for users to download. The folks at PCLinuxOS must have overlooked this little piece of information.

It is this kind of misleading articles, although in a distro-specific magazine, that is meant to divide users, and protect the current user base from switching to different distributions. It’s sad, really. The eventual success of Ubuntu or any other distribution will only help other distributions gain success as well. This elitist attitude that characterizes those who are jealous of Ubuntu’s success, especially with new users thanks to its ease of use.

By the way, did any of those students try Mandriva’s Metisse interface with folding, flipping, and exploding windows? If not , they missed out!

Posted in FUD, PCLinuxOS, Ubuntu

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Responses

I’m afraid you’ve missed what the definition of FUD actually is :/ http://linux-blog.org/index.php?/archives/30-What-is-FUD.html

The article was one users submission to a user submission based magazine. That user had a tough time with out of the box experience…I have also had this bad experience and posted about it in the blog linked above…the thing is, I was ridiculed and chastised for posting my own experience on my own blog…even more, my wife, who had never used Linux was also chastised and ridiculed by people who used Ubuntu. So, as you can see, no one should take one users’ experience for any more than it is worth.

By: Derrick on September 5, 2007
at 11:44 pm

I just deleted my account in PCLinuxOS forum. This forum is a bad example for anything like tolerance and freedom of speech. If you browse my blog:
http://xenh12-linuxcity.blogspot.com/
you will find posts where I give explanations. As for the article from this user about the students testing distros, he was actually begged publicly in the forum, by a PCLinuxOS admin in charge of the magazine, to accept that his post would be published in the mag. He never submitted anything. The wole article in the mag is the exact copy of his post. Browse the forum and you will find it.

By: Xenh12 on September 7, 2007
at 9:53 am

It appeared to me that the author of the post which was entered in the magazine was fishing for the results he “received” from his “survey” of students.

It appeared to me that it may even have fabricated the results of the 4-day “test” of 4 distros.

Almost all of the results were based on multimedia and not having used PCLOS I don’t know, but is it possible the opinions were weighted towards items that PCLOS does well?

I’m an Ubuntu user and Ubuntuforums member for 2 years, and I’ve never seen Ubuntu described as being a replacement for Windows. I have seen PCLOS described as just that.

Ubuntu “over-hyped”? I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it hyped at all. It is popular, for good reason I think.

By: Michael on September 10, 2007
at 7:13 am

PCLinuxOS is not a bad distro(well, neither is Ubuntu!). I think that an article like that hurts a Distro’s PR. If he had a bad time installing Ubuntu, then fine, he could have gone to the forums, or any other support option to find out what was going wrong.

As for the first comment, where did I write FUD? Even though I could not find it in my post, FUD details exactly what was posted in the magazine.

F = Fear that Ubuntu will not work.

U = Uncertainty as to whether or not Ubuntu will install/run correctly.

D = Doubt that Ubuntu will even work, and that Ubuntu is a good product.

And there ‘ya have it… F.U.D.

By: Jon Reagan on September 13, 2007
at 11:53 am

Remember everyone…this is ONE PERSON in the community that wrote an article. The magazine staff selects various topics that are both popular and not popular because they’re attempting to get a sample of the whole community and not just a select few ideas.

By: Derrick on September 13, 2007
at 2:10 pm

One last comment…

I’ve seen the same response to an article I did that compared desktop based distributions. I had just been married and my wife knew nothing about Linux…only that I used it. So, we searched for a desktop replacement for Windows. At the time, I was an avid MEPIS user and supporter. Ubuntu, Fedora, MEPIS, Mandriva, and PCLinuxOS were compared…guess which one won? Surprised as I was (I thought she’d pick MEPIS) she picked PCLinuxOS.

Her article she penned on my blog (linux-blog.org) received such negative feedback from Ubuntu users it wasn’t even funny…and they were trash talking someone who had participated in an experiment like this…and one who had just started using Linux. The Feedback caused her to ditch Linux and go back to XP. It wasn’t until 2 yrs later that I was able to convert her back to Linux…all thanks to a bunch of people who trash talked her because she found that it worked better for her.

In closing, this article you guys are going off on isn’t that bad. It isn’t trashing Ubuntu…it’s saying that in this situation with this user and those he was testing on…it didn’t work. That’s not a big deal…Ubuntu is still a great Linux distro…and in the end, this guy was using Linux. That’s a victory for us all.

By: Derrick on September 13, 2007
at 2:22 pm

That’s sad to hear!

Anyone getting trash talked to not using Linux is a shame. Hopefully things have changed now.

Different people will choose different distributions. I like Ubuntu for it’s ease of use and availability of applications.

The reason I had a problem with the article is simply a matter of calling out one single distro for being “the worst” that has already done so much for Linux adoption(10 millon = 1% of the market). If Ubuntu was the worst, then how does that make the Debian guys feel!?

I have nothing against running a fair experiment, but saying Ubuntu’s hype is misleading takes “fair” a little far, as it seems that it is an Ubuntu vs. PCLOS debate. I personally like PCLOS, as it is a great system with really great applications available — I just don’t like inter-distro bashing; it doesn’t help anything.

Anyways, thanks for the comment, and I am glad to hear your wife is using Linux again. :)

By: Jon Reagan on September 15, 2007
at 10:59 pm

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