“If Linux is 85% of the way to being a viable alternative to Windows/Office, it’ll get the rest of the way soon. Very soon. The Mark Shuttleworths and Scott McNealys of the world will make sure of that. And unless Microsoft has a real rabbit in their hats – like, say, a mind-reading operating system – I cannot imagine how they’re going to keep me and all the Windows users I know paying for something I can now – almost – get for free.”
Author seems quite unbiased, and tells it like it is. I’m not familiar with the distro he chose, but (like he says) a lot of those irritations are gone with a major player.
Agreed. The review does seem to be reflect a sincere attempt at using Linux as a day-to-day desktop. His comments about some of the peculiarities of Linux, like starting print services–CUPS–brought back memories for me. It all seems natural now, but when I was trying to understand printing on Linux I was genuinely surprised that I could communicate with my printer through my web browser. There are utilities in gnome and kde that make adding printers more facile now, but for someone who is a newcomer to UNIX/Linux it is all a little surprising. The good news here is that some manufacturers like Xerox are making ppd files available for their printers so that even if your distribution doesn’t include your printer type you can download the ppd file and import it with gnome-cups-manager or some similar utility and you are up and running.
His criticism of fonts in Linux still rings true, today. To this day I do not really know how get many of the opentype fonts in my Adobe Font folio working on my Linux machine. I have a feeling it may not be all that hard, but I cringe at the thought of having to fiddle with xorg.conf.
Greg
“His criticism of fonts in Linux still rings true, today. To this day I do not really know how get many of the opentype fonts in my Adobe Font folio working on my Linux machine. I have a feeling it may not be all that hard, but I cringe at the thought of having to fiddle with xorg.conf. ”
It isn’t hard, but the exact details depends on your distro.
Scott McNealys never failed at anything in his life.
Freaking free dude!!!! It’s like Scott’s Wife packed in every download! Yes and I said packed ;-o
OpenOffice! is FREEE!!!!! It’s quality and its FREE so you know it must be better than anything else!!
Freedom or death. We can’t innovate on any closed source platform! We must have free to innovate!
Free pot, free beer free speach, free redneck software!
The Author says that PCLinuxOS is Debian based, but checking the site and Distrowatch indicates Mandrake (Mandriva) based and uses rpm files. Which is it now?
It is Mandriva based. And very nice too. Its a real contender.
yeah, PCLinuxOS is indeed based on Mandrake. Mandrake 9 to be precise.
PCLinuxOS is actually an offshoot of Mandrake. Their packages have the extension of .mdk instead of .rpm.
what’s the worst.
Yet another linux in 5 days review by a guy not too familiar with any distro or the fact that this guy reviews a distro and complains about irritations in the distro and later, in a footnote, informs that PCLinuxOS is an experimental distro. (sorry about the long sentence)
I like to read reviews of different distros in case I should have the time some day to check it out. But I’m pretty tired of reading reviews made by people who have been using Linux for less than a reasonable amount of time to make a review of it. I’ve been using Linux for some three years now and I wouldn’t claim that I’ve could write a review of my distros of choice.
A review of a piece of hardware can be done in a few days. Set up a test bed, run a bunch of benchmarks, compare to other piece of hardware, post on net.
A review of complex software can not be done in five days. In five days you can only get a slight feel of the system.
Finally, something I just kinda got annoyed by.
He says: Day 1: Installation. He mentions that PCLinuxOS “…boots fully working from a CD-ROM. ”
Now, I havent checked the distro site out, but that sounds a lot like a live-disc and not much of an actual installation.
/Cheers
PCLinuxOS can boot and install from the same CD. It’s the same concept that Linspire is using with their latest release. You can boot from the CD to test compatibility. Then, if everything goes well, you can install to the hard drive without needing to change CDs.
“Now, I havent checked the distro site out, but that sounds a lot like a live-disc and not much of an actual installation.”
It’s a liveCD which can be run from the CD or installed to harddrive, just like Knoppix, Kanotix, et al, etc.
“FOOTNOTE: PCLinuxOS is a somewhat experimental distribution. I can fully imagine that something like Ubuntu or Red Hat has several of the small irritations ironed out already.”
So before anyone starts the “my distro is better than yours” , take it with a grain of salt.
PSS: You can tell that the article has been re-worked. For example, check out day 2; something to the effect that he couldn’t get the printer working but it was fixed a few days later.
Please don’t take this as a complaint; with respect to the above statement. It is a fun article; so read and enjoy.
And quite realistic.
I’ve set up systems for non-technical users, and its quite true, once set up, they are just fine, its very stable, and they are happy. But, there are these occasional glitches that they would be lost on their own with. And CUPS printing is one of them. On the other hand, talk someone through it once, and once they get used to the idea that you talk to the printer through the web browser – not a terribly intuitive idea, apparently, and the address you use even less so – they are fine with it. Once you’re familiar, its no worse than opening a control panel.
Part of the trick with doing this for people is, you have to have them do things their way, not necessarily the best or right way or your way. For instance, backups. If they feel like backing up files to floppies as they work, let them. If they want to write their book in chapters with distinct files, and don’t want to use outliners or the navigator in OO, don’t argue. If they get comfortable with KDE or Gnome, whichever, leave them on it. If they don’t want to use multiple desktops, don’t make them.
I would have picked Mandriva, rather than PCL, or maybe Suse, and put in Synaptic. But the guy’s reaction strikes me as quite genuine – the enthusiasm too. Like him, I don’t think my users will be going back in a hurry.
I’m a programmer at a very technology-forward local company and was hired by the CIO last year, before he became the CEO.
I would classify him as the Microsoft-biased type but also very open to new ideas…which is great. Recently he asked me what a new user would use for a linux desktop and I recommended Ubuntu based on all of the good things I’ve heard. I had never tried it as I’m a long-time Gentoo user but I didn’t want to try his patience and give him the impression that everything in Linux was that complicated.
In 20 minutes he took his laptop and made it a fully-functional Linux box…everything “just worked”…except for a couple of very small issues. The biggest was getting the “big desktop” with two screens…but he nailed that w/o my help in a matter of an hour once he knew what to look for (Xinerama).
He’s now quite happy with and is giving it an unoffical “trial” to see if it’s feasible to use it as a business desktop. This is very exciting and I’m hoping it might lead to us, as a company, standardizing on it in the future.
Given the “state of the Linux desktop” today…I’d say there’s no question that it is ready to go…especially in the “enterprise”.
The review is object and very positive.
I wish he had tried OpenSuSE 10 — I’ll bet that
most of his configuration issues would have been addressed. For example, cups is by default started
and the user just needs to configure a printer (local/network). It’s this way with Fedora and
the other desktop friendly distros….
Nice conclusion though
PCLinuxOS is indeed based in Mandrake and rpm based, but if the distro uses apt-get and synaptic(wich according to him it did) then the look and feel makes it more Debian-like than Mandrake-like.
In the end, he seemed to actually like Linux after trying it, and like many Windows(tm) newbies, He actually had his local Geek to assist him, something that many linux users don’t have at first.
It is interesting to read the first impressions of someone who hasn’t used Linux before (at least in the last few years). Like the guy said, Linux has come a long way. It reminds me of when I first tried Linux (not that long ago). I had just heard so much hype that I finally had to try it out. I’m glad that I tried it when I did because I’ve been able to learn along the way, but there were more irritations when I first tried Linux than there are now. There was no way that I would have tried to get non-technical people to use Linux even a couple of years ago. Now, there are cases where it’s not only possible, it actually is the best and easiest route.
I agree with Jarred. Linux has a lot to offer, and where it lacks, it can only improve. I can’t wait to see where Linux is a year or two from now.
this forum hasn’t degenerated into a flamewar. People might complain about “Linux on the Desktop” type articles, and others might complain about comparing alternative product X to dominant product Y. However, these kinds of articles can actually be very helpful to someone who would like to learn about an alternative product when they don’t have a friend that is an expert on the alternative product.
The article is fairly objective. The author doesn’t make sweeping generalizations. He just takes a look at a product and judges it based on whether or not it can do what he wants. He also comments on how easily he can accomplish tasks. His conclusion is that for him there isn’t much to keep him from using Linux. He did have some irritations, but it seemed that the benefits (nearly) outweighed any downsides.
The evolution of software (especially Linux) is a gradual process. Slowly open source alternatives are becoming sufficient for each individual’s needs. Some may still prefer commercial products, but each product will have to compete based on capability and functionality rather than lack of alternative options.
at least for highly skilled users. Problem is making good and cheap ready-made generic hardware available to the non-tech user. Another problem is that some high-end workstation apps don’t run on Linux. The MS license tyranny is a big motivator to switch though.
One thing we tend to overlook is that the Microsoft OS comes pre-loaded on new computers, so it’s already pre-configured out of the box. When the same thing starts to happen with [insert name of favorite GNU/Linux distro here], then alot of the installation/configuration problems will go away & [insert name of favorite GNU/Linux distro here] will “just work”.
A true test of Linux by an average Windows user. Well written and useful information.
Good review.
I liked the impressions and finally a review from a Windows user who had actually installed Windows from scratch before.
Its an alternative OS linux and I feel some things will always be just a bit harder.
But his open-minded approach and even-handed criticism and well-thought out commentary was welcome.
This is despite a few technical mistakes in his statements.
“a very technology-forward local company”
What does that mean in English?
“I cannot imagine how they’re going to keep me and all the Windows users I know paying for something I can now – almost – get for free.”
Now change the equation to Free versus “Free”, as in copyright violation “free”. How well do things hold up?
In a lot of places “free” isn’t as much the Linux selling point as advocates would like.
We’re talking about business users, here. There’s a lot less piracy in businesses than there is for home users. Audits happen.
{copyright violation “free”. How well do things hold up?}
Very well indeed. Way better than any alternative (with the possible exception of BSD).
Linux does not violate any copyrights.
By its very nature you are entirely permitted to use Linux without ever having to worry about “managing licenses” or ever worry about a BSA audit.
If you think about it, Linux is also 100% worry-free in terms of ever having to worry about copyright violations. You see – Linux is open source. Anyone writing code for Linux does so in the knowledge that the entire world is going to be able to see the source code. If an author was mad enough to try to put some copyrighted code in, then that author is bound to be found out very quickly indeed. Therefore contributions to Linux are never copied code – too risky of being caught if it were.
“Free” of cost is not necessarily a big selling point – it is more of a bonus really. “Free of encumberances and EULA’s and other license hassles” is a huge selling point.
“Free” of registrations and activations and “authenticity checks” and viruses and worms and malware and advertising and keyloggers and “phone home” and backdoors and spyware and paid upgrade cycles is also a huge selling point.
17000 on-line zero cost installable packages vetted by “many eyes” to also be free of any sort of malware is yet another selling point.
“Free” of the need to install half-a-dozen bolt-on security programs is yet another selling point.
“Free” of the need to purchase additional software to get a barely functioning Office desktop is yet another selling point.
How many selling points does it require to make attractive a zero-cost computing software solution?
People forget all that they know about Windows that allows them to work with it. They forget all of the hours they have spent over the last 10 years learning Windows tricks. Linux is no different but starting now you could probably get up to speed on Linux with a fifth the of that effort and have so much more when your done. And, it is free.
Mandriva is still the Microsoft of Linux. While they have made improvements they still lack overall quality in their distribution.
when was the last time you tried mandriva ?
and, are you basing your finding on a download edition, or are you a club member ?
“For example, mapping network drives which in Windows is a rather simple process, in Linux requires editing of a configuration file.”
Has he ever tried setting up an NFS drive on Windows? Oh, yes, it doesn’t come with software for that
. The third part utils aren’t bad, assuming you buy one of the good ones out of the thousands available.
It’s really not very fair to be down on an OS because it’s interoperability stuff isn’t as easy as it is to use those features in the program they’re native too.
In a world with devices for which good linux drivers exist (ie, the manufacturer makes them) and no interoperability with everyone elses ideas; Linux is pretty stinkin’ easy to setup. It’s moving over with your old devices and network that’s not so easy.
A strange review. For a start, he complainned about things not working, and then revealed that he was using an experimental distribution! Calendaring and integration with email was important to him, so why was he using Thunderbird? On KDE, he should be using Kontact. I think if he’d tried a distribution like Kubuntu he would have been even more impressed.
Well worth learning from the article is the extent to which this user puts the apps first and the OS second. His main concern is whether Open Office will provide an acceptable alternative to Microsoft Office, and whether the crucial email/contacts/calendar axis on Linux is up to speed. I guess many Linux folks can get too close to the plumbing and forget that many folks might judge, say, Gnome 2.12 or KDE 3.5 by the quality of Evolution or Kontact rather than by technical questions to do with libraries and background processes.
Joe User wants some fine, quality applications that Just Work and he doesn’t really want to know about the plumbing. A good lesson to learn.
Unusual for a software reviewer to choose a Linux distribution that is classed by the developer as Beta, not final release. Quote from PCLinuxOS home page “PCLinuxOS is currently under heavy development and should be considered beta software.” So knowing this it’s understandable the reviewer had issues with hardware and software. Also that his so called resident Linux Guru isn’t really a Guru of Linux at all. Even an experienced Linux user wouldn’t recommend someone to use software in Beta stage as a means to replace Windows. The reviewer would of had better experience trying a more commercial and developed distribution such as from Novell or Red Hat that offers technical support for their customers.
Edited 2005-11-02 17:46