Slashdot Mirror
PC Mag Slams Cheap Wal-Mart Linux Desktop
An anonymous reader writes "PC Magazine reviews the $200 Linux desktop wonder sold by Wal-Mart. This desktop sold out quickly and has been cited as proof that consumers are tired of the Windows tax and ready for Linux. Not so according to PC Magazine, which gave the gPC a 1.5 star rating." Previous discussions we've had about system reviews were realistic but not quite so harsh; is this just nitpicking or is the 'shiny' starting to wear off of the cheap Linux PC concept?
I'm comparing ease of use, availability of quality software, reliability, and hardware compatability.
Granted, I'm not a typical user and run developer tools on my desktop, but even for basic things Linux would fall short, and there ARE bugs, whether fanboys lke to admit it or not (no, I'm not calling you a fanboy).
A 450$ PC with Vista on it? Quite expensive for a brick, dont you think?
No, *YOU* missed the point: it doesn't do what it's supposed to well.
* The screen resolution issue is unforgivable, period. That's the kind of crap Linux *cannot* afford if it's ever to maek serious headway in the desktop market. Say what you will about Windows, virtually any version, but when you buy a PC with it preinstalled, it will generally always work out-of-the-box, all other criticisms aside, and this resolution problems is just something that plain doesn't work.
* The very slow loading of Firefox is unforgivable. This is partly Firefox' fault, even on my Core2Duo with 3G of RAM it takes probably 10 seconds or so to load up (granted, got a bunch of plugins installed, but still). What the reviewer described, Firefox itself aside, shouldn't happen.
* It doesn't ship (or at least make very easy to install) Flash, which, for better or worse, makes web surfing these days a very limited experience.
* The whole modem with no driver thing is also unforgivable. Even though I'd agree that a modem in a new PC these days is all but worthless for most people, you simply can't ship a PC with hardware that is unsupported out-of-the-box. Come on, if Dell did that everyone would be bashing them to no end.
No, in the end, based on what this reviewer says he saw (and I suppose he could be lying, but I don't believe that), this thing doesn't do properly what you claim it's meant to do, doesn't work in the way it's intended to be used by your estimation, and therefore it's a failure and deserves the review it got.
Now, all of these things can be addressed, so it'll be interesting to see how the next revision of it does... boost the speed a little bit without raising the price, fix all these things that the reviewer mentioned, spit and polish a bit, and maybe then it'll be worth something, but as of right now, nope, sorry, it didn't work.
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
Ok, he says it's no good because you can't install Windows or OS X apps on it. STUPID.
And look at all the sad little Microshaft fanboys on Slashdot defending the review. tsk, tsk.
Nope. MacOS is not Unix. MacOS is Mach+FreeBSD. Linux is more similar to traditional Unix than MacOS.
Time makes more converts than reason