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 went and skimmed. Half a gig of RAM, 80G h/d... and it runs "Ubuntu, but not speedily"?
Pardon me, I'm typing this running on an AMD Sempron 2600, 512M RAM, and running SuSE 10.3, and it runs quite nicely, thankyouverymuch. In fact, it seems faster than the SuSE 10.0 I was running till earlier this week.
And I was running SuSE 10.0 on an old 900 MHZ machine in the first part of '06, and it ran just fine.
I'd say that evidence shows PC Mag's review for what it is: bs.
mark
Less the $200 in hardware, and an OS that never saw light before. A couple of things about the OS are less then optimal, and it runs slower then the Alienware desktop running XP they reveiwed last week. Gee, isn't that the same as saying it is just like any computer running Vista?
It comes with a modem that doesn't work in Linux. Flash isn't installed by default.
Of course, the reviewer is also a moron for complaining that it doesn't support programs written for other operating systems. It certainly does support Windows apps much better than Windows supports Linux apps.
Doesn't really qualify as unbiased reporting.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
To be fair to the reviewer, he is actually fairly spot-on, if not a little jumpy in his recommendations.
To clear it up, he says if you want a new computer, save up a bit more. If you want something that performs as good as this computer of better, go dig up an old PIII. If you bought this computer and are looking for something to do with it, set it up as a file server or something (by putting Windows Home Server on it). He also recommended that if you want Linux, to just install the regular Ubuntu instead of this weird gOS.
He had a lot of recommendations, and it takes actually reading the article, and not just skimming it to see that all of his recommendations make sense. Sadly, this is Slashdot and you'll get modded to +5.
Yes, the oversight of a flash player is curious. Very curious since the computer touts itself about allowing you to watch YouTube. But it doesn't out of the box, and the installer doesn't really go to the right location! It goes to the generic macromedia flash page instead of popping up something else. It is really inexcusable to not have a "big feature" that you tout not working out of the box.
The fact that lots of companies get the documentation wrong doesn't mean that it's ok to get the documentation wrong....something as simple as plugging in an ethernet cable should be right. Period. End of story.
ok, so he put in a disclaimer that you can't run Windows programs. Given the ultra-cheap nature of this computer, it's something that any competent reviewer would put in the article "hey guys, just in case you didn't know, this Linux thing can't run Windows or Mac programs." Anyone who does their diligence would put that in their review. It's not a knock, just a fact that quite a few people might not know.
Yea, so he recommends a more expensive option. That's because his review concludes, that spending $200 and getting this PC is not a good value. But, for $150 more you could get something that is a good value. Maybe not helpful for someone who only has $200, but it lets you know where he stands.
Now to be fair to the guy, he spends most of his time complaining about how the gOS is just a messed up version of Ubuntu with all this random marketing crap to make it sound like a google computer, and to put all this weird, crazy marketing stuff on it. Basically, he complains that you get Ubuntu as designed by marketing-droids. A very useful point of knowledge -- that the first Linux PC offering was bastardized by marketing people, and that gOS is not a good representation of what Linux can do!
I only got the "It's not something most beginners would want to do" undertones, not quite what you got from it...
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Thats all fine and dandy (and moderator friendly), but really bears no relation to what I said.
What I said is that PC Magazine isn't capable of reviewing this PC in the context of how a grandmother is going to use it. I didn't say anything about Linux being hard to use or Windows being easy to use. I didn't say anything about admin tasks at all. In fact, I hardly said anything about the computer in question.
My point is that if you want a fair review of how well this computer does what its intended to do, you need to bring in the correct audience and get THEM to review it.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I read the PC review with an open mind because I was curious about how a $200 machine would be. For a 1.5 star rating, I was expecting the review to say things like 'it died' or 'refused to work' or 'it was impossible to install the software that was provided' or something. Instead, the PC criticisms were: 1) "slapped together" (what does that mean), 2)"low-power, relatively low-performing VIA C7-D processor", 3)"the gOS team is working on a modem driver" 4)"the gPC defaulted to 1,280-by-800 resolution", 5)"it has no Energy Star rating" (but used only 50 watts), 6)"programs written for Mac OS X or Windows that you can buy online or in a retail store won't work on the Linux-based gPC", 7)"It would've been nice if the folks at Everex or gOS preinstalled Flash support".
The article summarizes the above with: "In the end, though, it has so many shortcomings I would have a problem recommending it to anyone." With the possible exception of 2), these are all minor nitpicks and hardly justify a 1.5 star rating. Based on the author's own description of his use of the machine, it should have been given a 3-star rating and that would be marked down from 4-stars because of the low-power processor. PC Magazine feeds on Microsoft to survive and this article shows that.
I got the kids one for Xmas.
.05 review:
My
gOS sucks. I was about 2 minutes into things and wanted to remove some of the icons from the 'dock'. I right-clicked - hit 'delete' (or maybe remove) and the whole dock disappeared! Ooops. A few more unintuitive things like that and I ended up formatting it and installed Edubuntu. Installing Flash took about 1 minute. Added a few other things TuxPaint, etc and was ready to go.
Kids are happy!
As one who has worked both with Linux and Windows extensively and watched both mature in their resective markets.
There seem to be three points here that are largely missed by the review.
1) the $200 puts a very low price floor on a rather relatively functional PC (browsing, networking, etc) compared to higher prices systems in the $400-$800 ranage. The features will now no doubt a) smooth out some of the kinks and set a baseline for improvements at this $200 price.
2) At $200 a large market can afford one to do the mundane computing tasks that are typically take up about 80% of most PC users time (few PC users actually spend their cpu cycles actually "computing" in a strict sense).
3) with such a large potential MASS market (from THE MASS marketer) Linux is being tried and becoming comfortable to a much wider base of users, which puts considerable pressure on other OS makers who expect to make a profit in the "commoditized segment" of the PC business.
As a Vista user, this is a win for me as it puts pressure for the first time on Microsoft to really make their OS perform with a minimum of penalties both in terms of cost and performance, lest they be replaced by cheaper, as nearly functional equivalents.
As a Linux user, this is a win for me because it puts additional pressure on Linux software developers to make their software run in more standardly configurable modules to conform to the dimensions of an increasingly larger Linux market, so that installation, maintenance, and peformance tuning become ever easier.
The nice thing is that if you don't like it, you don't have to buy one, but at $200 (sans monitor) a lot of people, especially younger, poorer users with limited budgets will.
Oh I agree on the interface parts. I don't think a nicely configured Linux machine is any harder to actually use than a Windows or Mac machine (though some tasks like software installation can be harder, but many home users don't install software and just use what came with the computer, and many office workers aren't allowed to install stuff anyways).
:).
My main complaint with Linux is that it, as you quite aptly describe, feels "brittle" in a lot of aspects. Sure the system is more secure, and arguably faster, but little things crash quite frequently. So many of the apps behave in a "quirky" manner. Buttons that have a mouseover will have the mouseover effect get stuck sometimes for example. Desktop backgrounds stick. Little errors will appear during the bootup process of a default install that even though they don't affect the system, will take forever to "fix" (this has been more a problem on Red Hat installs than Ubuntu).
It's just those things that degrade my Linux experience. That's not to say I don't use it still. I've actually been using Linux on at least 1 computer since 1997-98 or so, and I admin several Linux servers here at work. Started with Debian (used for a few days only), then Mandrake for a few years, then Slackware for a few more years, then Gentoo for the last few, and lately I've been playing around with Ubuntu. There has been vast improvement, and I still can get things done on any of them personally, but they're all still a bit shakey for me to say, setup on my parent's computer. I wouldn't hesitate to put them in front of a Mac though, not because it's easier to use, but because the system just "behaves" better. Unfortunately they are stubborn about buying new computers and they basically just run hand-me-downs that I give them, so they are currently on Windows and though it's easy to use and the OS itself works, the constant trips out there to get it going again after they've bogged it down with spyware are annoying. I have a Ghost image that I can just slap back across the main partition when they hose it up (data files are on a seperate partition), but it's still annoying
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I should probably add that this is a machine that was installed about a year ago, but I feel that that should not matter, it performs well enough and I really don't see the point in fixing that which isn't broken.
So you tried to install a new application into a system that needed updates? What happens if you try to install a codec on win32 that wants WMP11 and you only have WMP9? Or an ActiveX control that doesn't work with IE6? How about some C# app that wants not only the runtime but the *newer* dotNet crap? Do you complain that you have to install a bunch of software there, or are you just picking on something silly?
Don't get me wrong; I agree that the Linux community needs to get some of this stuff straightened up right away, but to say that it's a Linux-only or FOSS-only thing is unfair at best.
Every other OS "handles" it in one of the following ways:
In other words, what you're calling "Linux's problem" is not a problem at all; in fact, it's the most optimal solution! (Making the libraries perfect to begin with is obviously better, but also impossible, so that doesn't count.)
Now, the only genuine problem is when such library updates fail or are incompatible, and cause breakage of the app. However, in a properly-maintained distro that's not supposed to happen, so it shouldn't be a problem novice users (who should only be using the stable tree of a conservative distro) ever experience.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Once I finally started refusing outright to "do windows", even for friends and family, it was really something to see how quickly most of my little social circle switched to Mac or linux. The moral of the story? When people say they "already know how to use windows" what they really mean is that the friends they use to keep their system running (at zero cost to them) only know windows.
Caveat Utilitor
Here's my experience with Ubuntu 7.10. The install was GREAT! On my mom's PC, one built for WinME, with a total of 640MB RAM, the install took less time than a WinXP install.
My experience afterwards was less than thrilling. I tout Ubuntu, and Linux, as a great system for people who want to do most things except gaming. Even gaming works with a little understanding of Wine.
Unfortunately, most web sites are using Flash 9, and I have had nothing but complete lock-ups with Ubuntu and Adobe's flash player installed. The mouse would move, but that was it, no keyboard response. Even Windows, for all of its problems, rarely locks up the keyboard without first locking the mouse.
Another issue that exacerbated the issue was their golf GPS device that works only on Windows. For a guy like me, who would like to get away from crappy OS and security design and paying the MS tax, this was nothing but frustrating and annoying to the nth degree. I suppose I could have tried getting the device to work in Wine, but that the Flash 9 issue caused me to reload Windows on the thing.
I do need to spend more time in Linux myself so that I can better support others using it. This has been a long process, though. (Mostly trying to get my Mythbox up and running... and they've taken away the biggest advantage it had, it's own free programming guide via http interface.)