OSNews

Interesting review, good grist for the mill. Libranet is, IMHO, one of a number of very good distros out there. I also feel that the subjective viewpoint of the reviewer is perfectly valid.

That said, I have problems with this review, which I shall put as if speaking to its author:

When GRUB filed on one of your computers, a very serious problem surfaced. You say you were in the position of someone who is off the other side of the black stump with a broken leg, and you had to take care of yourself without medical help. That is simply not true, now is it?

In fact you were able to contact Libranet on your other box, get a response of some sort from them, and do some searches of posts on the 'net to see whether your problem had already been reported. Heaven knows, I would have gotten to another box somewhere and done all that -- because a GRUB failure is a serious concern that I want to prevent if possible!!

As your review makes clear, you encountered another problem before the GRUB mess came up, and you immediately contacted Libranet for help AND then looked for and found a specific cure already posted. You investigated. That's the way to do it; that's the way a real user does things when he has a problem with a new distro.

And what did you get for your trouble? Plenty of help. Information.

How come you did this with the first problem, but not with the second?

It is clear that you did not deal with Libranet's new version as if you planned to use it; folks who look at a new distro that way fix it and try to make the fix permanent. Your intent, obviously, was to fix things without bothering to try to prevent more trouble down the road, and then toss the distro out. That's very abnormal behavior, nothing like what I do when I put a new distro to work for me.

As things stand, we are left with nothing to explain the GRUB failure. We can't even say, "Well, we don't know, even though we tried to find out."

If I'm hit once with a GRUB failure, I darn sure won't just reinstall and forget about it. Sure, there are some gremlins that hit the apps that must run in a GUI from time to time, but they are not serious, so I just cuss them and fix as needed. I expect the very occasional quirk there; these are just minor irritations, and highly infrequent. But a GRUB failure?? Cripes, NO!!

Yet you dismiss it as uninteresting, not fundamental, not anything to look into, not something that must be prevented. Sheeeesh.....

We are left wondering what happened and whether it might happen to us, if we try Libranet. So we can only speculate. Question raised, question not delved into. Big hole.

As a reviewer, don't you have a responsibility to shed light, if possible, on whatever murky, seriously troublesome situations arise? "No?" Well, OK.... Your call.

So: Interesting, +1. Failure to follow through as a real user would, -1. Failure to provide as much required information as realistically possible, -1. Score: -1.

Maybe now you would like to "weight" those points <g>.