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A Review of the $200 Wal-Mart Linux PC
bcrowell writes "Wal-Mart's new $200 Linux PC has generated a lot of buzz in geek circles. Although they're sold out of stores, I bought one for my daughter via mail order, and have written up a review of the system. The hardware seems fine for anyone but a hardcore gamer, but the pre-installed gOS flavor of Ubuntu has a lot of rough edges."
...does it run wind... Never mind
the pre-installed gOS flavor of Ubuntu has a lot of rough edges.
If you think gOS is bad, you should see gladOS.
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It would appear that there are two kinds of PC users, hardcore gamers and normal people. Not so, there are also people who enjoy an occasional game of HL2 or people who work with huge amounts of data or who run extensive calculations on their PCs (or hell, even Photoshop). Lumping PCs into two categories, "Bleeding edge, $2000 PC" and "Everything else" isn't that informative. Maybe he should have said "very good for the average user (web browsing, flash games, office suites)", which I don't doubt it is (average users require fewer resources than even today's cheapest PCs have).
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It's full of inconsistencies;
- The guy claims to be experienced with Ubuntu, but didn't know to type his user password at the sudo prompt.
- He manually installs the Flash plugin and calls it unintuitive, when all you need to do is go to a website with Flash content, and it'll automatically install for you.
- He can't find the "log out" menu item...
- He thought installing Gnome would fix a network problem.
And so it goes on. There's almost no real review of what's installed, how easy it is to use, or even how to solve the problems he encounters.About the only thing you learn from him is that a little knowledge is dangerous.
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If you're desperate (?) to get your hands on one of these, I noticed the other day that ZaReason's got them too. Don't know if they're 100% the same, but they're the same price and so possibly worth a look.
The machine is not actually available in some Walmart stores at this time, but you can mail order it and get it shipped to your local store (aside: No way in hell -- I'd rather drive in Boston than navigate the parking lot at that place). Everex has this in other stores besides Walmart now. What Walmart has in your local Walmart store maybe is a $300 version that runs Vista. A Monitor is extra in all cases so it's really a $400-500 PC.
Hardware is fine -- really. Power consumption is OK. Not great, but OK. OS has some rough edges including, but not limited to, no obvious way to shut the thing down. The author scrapped the included gOS and installed vanilla Ubuntu which is, he thinks, what most users should do.
All things considered he says, it's OK except for the OS.
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It is cheap to add another 1GB of ram. Most users want to be able to run a word processor, look at pictures, and surf the internet.
Most of the stores just keep pushing faster and faster machines on people, more than what they need. Vista helps with that being such a pig.
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It shows that a 'random' person couldn't get the system/OS to work according to his wishes. To be really fair, you really should ask yourselve wether a 'random' person could get other system/OS combo's to work. This includes asking yourselve how well the average random person would deal with installing windows. If you ever had to deal with tech support you would know that most users stumble just as hard with MS software as with OSX and other unixes. Hell, people stumble with their toasters.
To be specific, the SUDO bit had me wondering too, but as I am neither familiar with Ubuntu or sudo (don't use either on my own linux systems) I really can't comment. If Ubuntu does use sudo a lot then it is odd, but does the box say you need to be an experienced Linux user? Couldn't they have provided a help function? Please type in your password?
As for flash, it would have been better if it had worked out of the box, but yes, recently installing it from your browser when prompted has been known to work. This however was not always the case, especially for Opera users.
Enlightenment is a WM that does things a bit differently and the screenshots make it clear it is NOT a straight windows layout copy like KDE and Gnome use (By default). Perhaps he really just didn't know how to get it. Under E17 (The sequel) it is left mouse click on the desktop -> system Might be confusing to a person who normally would NEVER left-click anywhere on the desktop.
He didn't think it would fix a network problem, he just couldn't get the tool too work. That is different. If you know how to setup your network in Windows XP and not in Vista then installing XP again 'fixes' your problem. Granted it does sound like "oh they are not doing everything 100% like I am used too, it sucks" but that is how most users are.
So is it a good review? No, but it does tell us something and that is that Joe Average is a moron who doesn't like change and that it is very hard to develop an OS for that guy. See it not as a review but one of those usability reports usability experts so love to go one about. It might help you to develop an OS for average user.
And no windows ain't that OS either and NEITHER is OSX (before the Apple fanboys pipe up), if ANY OS out there was the perfect OS for the clueless I wouldn't constantly be asked by the clueless to help with their machine.
Recently I had to help people setup their network under Vista and OSX, and none of the users seemed to know how to do it. None of them make it very clear or easy. (Why does Vista break with DHCP run on linux anyway?)
I do agree with your end conclusion, give me a clueless user who knows he/she is clueless anyday, they ask, you answer, they listen, problem fixed. The ones who think they know a little ARGUE with you over the solution. ARGH! If you know it better, why ask? But the horrors of support is another rant.
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I have been waiting many years for Linux to get to a point where I could dump Windows. Well, I installed Ubuntu just a couple of weeks ago and was extremely impressed. Over the years, I have gone from somewhat of a power user to doing little more than surfing the web and doing e-mail, so it should be perfect for me, right? Over this weekend, I really got to start using the Ubuntu system. The very fist issue I ran into was the Evolution address book wouldn't display contacts you added...if you could get them to even add. I researched the problem and found people describing the exact same problem, in forums dated 2005. The next thing I wanted to do is search and replace some hard returns in OpenOffice's word processor. You can do it to some degree, but you have to search the web for an explanation on how to do it. In the end, it wouldn't work properly, and I had to transfer the file to my Windows system and do it on Word, which just has a menu option to search for special characters (really cool that Ubuntu saw my Window's share and I could just transfer the files over the network). Also, someone said that you could add Flash just by going to a web site that required it and clicking on "add plugin." Well, I tried that, and I had to manually install it, myself...it wasn't hard, but it took me about 15 - 30 minutes of reading some "how to" forums before I got it installed.
All in all, it is hard to complain about something that is free, and I totally plan on continuing my move away from Windows. But I think anyone would be pretty darn hard pressed not to say that Ubuntu doesn't have some rough edges.
One really nice advantage I see, too, is that it sure if nice not to have my hard drive constantly thrashing from all of virus scanners, spyware scanners, etc., running in the background!
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