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Three LindowsOS PCs Reviewed
Eugenia writes "Not one, but three LindowsOS-based PCs (in the value range of $199 USD) were reviewed online by WashingtonPost. A TigerDirect PC, the traditional WalMart/MicrotelPC and one from Nova Computech. The reviewer says that these PCs while are very low-end today, compared to PCs 2 years ago, are actually pretty good solutions for home usage. The reviewer found them lacking in the gaming (no respectable 3D gfx card included), expandibility departments and while he mentions that Linux-based LindowsOS is affordable, is not a panacea as it lacks in good USB support and other demanding areas of our modern times."
Mr.Robertson said recently in the wake of the SCO vs IBM filing, that he'd paid money to SCO to keep quiet, atleast as regards his flavor of Linux.
This sounds so cowardly and backwards for true Linux enthusiasts. Those who really buy Lindows to use the bundled Linux can load other and better distros as well.
It doesn't sound right - being aggressive against Microsoft and a weakling against puny SCO.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
This is the second story I've seen where the text on the main page didn't match the text of the real story. On the main page I see:
mentions that Linux-based LindowsOS is affordable, is not a panakeia
and in the story:
mentions that Linux-based LindowsOS is affordable, is not a panacea
Obviously a correction of a typo, but why doesn't it show up on the main page?! (I'm not caching the page either, this happens on PC's that I've never used to visit slashdot.) Sorry for the OT post, but I'm losing my Mind!
Go away, or I will replace you with a very small shell script.
I know it's commonplace in newswriting, but the contradictory style of the author is particularly annoying in this review:
.] but they generally worked surprisingly well and offered room to grow"
"A $200 Computer Can Perform, Barely" [emphasis added]
"[. .
And soforth. Why not just put a positive headline as opposed to putting a negative headline and contradicting it throughout your article? I know I know, negative headline increases readership. Feh.
Loomis
"The television is the retina of the mind's eye" - Videodrome
Think about it. Opening an application means reading from the hard drive. If the hard drive is slow (By the sounds of it, it was a freaking 2.5" laptop drive!) then your application will take longer to load. Imagine loading Mozilla or OpenOffice.org and how much data you have to read just for the executable image alone.
is that in the drive to push the price of Lindows PCs down far below Windows PCs and to sell to a mass market, that some good means are made available for utilizing software modems (a.k.a. Winmodems) that have plagued Linux users for years as (i)being ubiquitous, (ii) having proprietary, hard to decipher interfaces.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
This isn't a review. This is a freaking ad for these things. I've seen more in-depth info on freaking packaging. This isn't even a good *description* of these things, just a tiny blurb.
I wouldn't buy *anything* based on information this limited. Well, maybe if it had really complex and shiny packaging. That makes *any* product better.
http://xkcd.com/386/
Most of the people out there bought a PC b/c they thought they needed one. We could be surfing the internet on a 3.7GHZ intel with HyperThreading, but why?
/. sees a computer, like a stock machine, begging to be customized and scrutinized. Last thing they see it as is an appliance.
A Lindows PC is for the average consumer. They need something to type and print documents with, view digital pictures and print them, surf the web, etc. It's something that most consumers thought it was; an appliance.
Average
The Lindows OS is just an affordable solution. Most consumers are probably wondering why Window PCs costs as much as it does, when all they want to do is are basic functions.
This is a machine you'd plop in front of your folks and friends who want to read their email and check out last night's baseball highlights without having to pay so much for options they've never heard of and will probably never use.
I don't work for Lindows or any of the computer distributors mentioned above. I own a PC with windows, and a PC with slackware.
For $200 plus another $80 in parts we recently purchased 10 machines that we are using for 20 users (via RedHat 9 and the multiple XFree86 hack). They are working quite well for data entry via the internet and at under $150/seat (purchased more RAM and a video card) they're quite a bargain if you ask me.
A short and free review by Consumer Reports can be summed up by the quote: We weren't impressed
Although you can argue that these PCs are sufficient for most tasks, the fact that they are being sold at Wal-mart opens them up to criticism like this because, really, are wal-mart customers going to know the difference between buying a Windows PC and a Lindows PC? I would buy one of these as a techie, but I wouldn't recommend it to most folks that shop for electronics at Wal-mart.
"would you suggest that a motorist should at least know how to replace a broken timing belt"
I suggested nothing of that sort. I merely opined that Joe ServicePack must, in his own interest, learn that Linux is GPL'd code, free for inspection and modification, that it's much superior to Windows XYZ in elegance and design, that it's free from viruses, that the SCO FUD is rubbish, that copying Linux CDs is not a guilty act, that sharing Linux and associated knowledge is not analagous to sharing music (as SCO implies) etc. etc.
Until Joe stops believing the bad press and 'informed' opinions such as yours, he can't overcome the first crucial hurdle to start using Linux. And it is unreasonable to expect Linux or GNU to evangelise, educate, enlighten, aggressively market, promote or teach Joe. It isn't elitism, merely practical wisdom.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Walmart had a Lycoris OS pc for. $199 .
Some of the Microtel systems come with an MSI 6390 board . The MSI Metis barebones ( $138 at Newegg also uses this board and I have used these boards extensively due to their tight integration, small form factor, high degree of reliability and stability.
... Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed...
I just love competing with people who feel they have to decide whether their customers deserve their product. Also those who are convinced that convenience is an impossible dream.
Support for Radeon and NVidia pretty much covers every decent 3D card released in the last 3 years. Linux also offers excellent 3dfx Voodoo support too, for us old timers.
I'm gonna stick my neck out and guess that more than half the people who care about decent 3D are currently running an NVidia card - before ATI recently woke up they've ruled the roost fairly consistently since 3DFX died. Many knock NVidia for their binary only drivers, and there have been some issues in the past, but in my experience the latest version is truly excellent.
In fact the only halfway useful 3D chipset I can think of that _might not_ be well supported is PowerVR, and in truth that would not really be a big deal. So tell us what decent 3D hardware isn't well supported under linux!
The specs mentioned on these PCs include a 1.1GHz CPU, 128MB of games, a 3GB "old slow laptop" HD, and you think that a GeForce 4 will make it good for games??? How many games run on Linux/Lindows? Where can I buy them? If I go into an EB, what games run on Linux?
Being Windows free means that 99.9% of consumer software won't run on it. Having good USB support is critical to using the computer for anything with external devices. If I am Joe 6 Pack and I go to CompUSA and buy a NEW $200 digital camera, then I am screwed if the camera doesn't have Linux drivers. If I get one that's cheaper than that, I am even MORE screwed (how many geeks do you know that buy a < 1MP camera and write drivers for Linux).
I'm not asking about do-it-yourself computer nerds with 10 years of Linux experience, I'm asking about normal people who are intimidated by what they don't understand. Most smart teenagers can wrap their head around Linux, but given the choice between Linux on a REALLY cheap PC and Windows on all their school computers and their friends computers, which do you think they're going to have a more positive experience with?
Also, I'm sure that these PCs come with a CD-ROM, but do they come with CD-RW? How similar to Windows is the OS? When I insert a blank CD ready to burn, what happens? Can I drag and drop to manage my files? Is there a manual? Help? Support? Microsoft Windows has a "Help and Support" section built in to the start menu, and step-by-step help instructions for doing just about anything tricky for a typical PC user. Most Linux software is aimed squarely at the do-it-yourselfer-with-the-CLI.
I'm not trying to dis the system as non-functional. I'm simply saying that for the low end computer user, it's going to be a real struggle to use when anything new comes out, and 99.9% of software that a consumer will want to run only runs on Windows. The other .1% is obscure and hard to find. $89 for Windows XP isn't unreasonable. A $150 pile of hardware will seem like a 5 year old computer when compared to a $400 computer with decent specs in today's market. Imagine what that computer will be able to do in 2-5 years.
My best home PC is an 850MHz Athlon with 512MB RAM, 120GB HD, USB2+Firewire, a GeForce 2 card, and it runs Windows XP Pro/Office XP Pro. The hardware cost about $1000 2 years ago. That's a little more than $1 per day that I've gotten out of it. Imagine that software costs an additional $1000 for Office XP, Windows XP, and Photoshop 7. I've spend about $2 per day on this computer over the last 2 years, and over the course of the 5 year lifetime of the computer, it will be averaged to about $0.50 per day.
The nice thing about this computer is that when Windows XP detects a new device, it either installs the driver from the Microsoft driver cache/horde somewhere, or pops up a window to help you find the driver. In my experience, I only need drivers for new, exotic devices like my $1500 Digital SLR. The other devices like my new USB2/Firewire PCI card and the CF card reader that attaches to it just work. All you see is a little balloon in the corner notify you that Windows found the driver and you can now use your device.
I very rarely need to install the floppy or CD that came with the new hardware, but even if I did I can be confident that the CD works with my Windows computer as long as the CD says Windows (XP) somewhere on it, which all of the CDs that come with my hardware do. Many of these also supports Mac OS. I haven't purchased a single device which comes with any support for Lindows, or Linux, or BSD.
Lindows is just not as big of
I didn't even know they still made 3 GB hard drives. :-/) as everytime I come home my mother bitches about how slow it is. This would be perfect for them.
They say its a refurb from an IBM ThinkPad. That must be at least three years old if not four. I wonder how long it will last. That said, the Microtel or Tiger systems are a much better deal. I've been looking at getting one of these to replace my parents K6-233 (overclocked even
I just installed Red Hat 9.0 and I was shocked that it didn't install the correct drivers for my NVidia video card. Sure, 2D worked okay but it didn't bother to install any 3D acceleration so I had to download drivers myself and edit X configuration files manually. The average user wouldn't be able to figure this out.
This isn't red hat's fault, this is Nvidia's fault. Blame the card manufacturer, and be impressed by the quality of the support it did have out of the box. Remember the drivers in question have been developed without help from Nvidia who keeps the specs needed to write drivers to themselves.
(Yes I read TFA. I wrote TFA.) No, they're *perfectly* suitable for word processing and Web browsing. With a bit more memory and a bigger hard drive, these machines would all run circles around the PIII-700, my office machine that I used to write the article. I think any of these machines, with some extra RAM and hard drive that I know Slashdot readers have lying around, would be great Linux boxen.