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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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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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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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