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PC Mag Slams Cheap Wal-Mart Linux Desktop
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Dec 28, 2007 09:37 AM
from the not-all-that-the-penguin-could-be dept.
from the not-all-that-the-penguin-could-be dept.
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?
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[+]
$200 Linux PCs On Sale At Wal-Mart 537 comments
Placid sends in a Wired blog entry on Wal-Mart's new sub-$200 Linux-based PC. Wired calls it "a custom distribution of Ubuntu Linux," and the AP identifies the distro as gOS, made by a small company in Los Angeles. Wal-Mart began selling Linux PCs in 2002 but they have been out of stock for a while. From the Wired blog: "It has a 1.5 Ghz VIA C7 CPU embedded in a Mini-ITX motherboard, 512MB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive. Normally, this would simply mark it as unacceptably low-end for use with modern software. By using the fast Enlightenment desktop manager (instead of heavier-duty alternatives like Gnome or KDE), the makers say it's more responsive than Vista is, even on more powerful computers."
[+]
Wal-Mart's $200 Linux PC Sells Out 619 comments
hankmt writes "About a week ago Wal-Mart began selling a $200 Linux machine running on a 1.5 ghz VIA C7 processor and 512 MB of RAM. While the specs are useless for Vista, it works blazingly fast on Ubuntu with the Enlightenment Window Manager. The machine is now officially sold out of their online warehouses (it may still be available in some stores). And the product sales page at wal-mart.com is full of glowing reviews from new and old Linux users alike."
[+]
A Review of the $200 Wal-Mart Linux PC 235 comments
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."
Submission: PC Mag slams Everex gPC by Anonymous Coward
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Accurate, considering the caveats (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words: move along, nothing to see here.
Re:Accurate, considering the caveats (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Accurate, considering the caveats (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Accurate, considering the caveats (Score:5, Interesting)
Doesn't really qualify as unbiased reporting.
Parent
Re:Accurate, considering the caveats (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Accurate, considering the caveats (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Accurate, considering the caveats (Score:5, Insightful)
Myself: when scrolling through different desktop backgrounds it has a tendency to hang and not want to update the background anymore. Not serious, but annoying. I've also had a very app crashes from apps installed with their package manager (Anjuta crashes when trying to create or import any Glade file). Now I know that's the app and not the OS, but given that it's installed from their package manager I expect some level of quality checking on the included version to make sure it's not going to crash on something so simple.
Overall I really want Linux to be better; I think it will eventually be the standard OS simply because of it's openness the community effort aspect. But, at this time there are just little quirks that MacOS and even Windows don't have (though they, particularly Windows, have a whole different set of problems, which is why I'm doing most of my general usage on MacOS these days
Parent
Re:Accurate, considering the caveats (Score:5, Insightful)
And regarding the "noob friendliness", this is always put forward with Windows although I keep seeing Windows users that just can't manage to make head from tails from their system, haven't really figured how to install or remove stuff or how to change basic settings. I don't really see the difference between that and pretty much any other graphical system/interface. If you don't know how to use it, you don't know how to use it. Whether it's Windows, MacOS or Unix doesn't really matter much. The interface is fairly similar anyway when you aren't already conditioned into the quirks of a specific system.
What's currently considered friendly is what you're used to.
No more no less. I find Unix/Linux very friendly because I'm quite used to it and understand the way it works. I find Windows downright hostile when I have to use it because none of it makes much sense to me. I can still use it fine because I've been around computers for a while, I just avoid it. Pretty much the same thing with MacOS : I have an iBook which I used for a year before getting fed up with it and replacing it with a small Samsung running Linux.
Parent
Re:Accurate, considering the caveats (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Parent
Re:Accurate, considering the caveats (Score:4, Insightful)
I've run (not in that order) RH, Slackware, Mandrake, Debian (still use it on servers), Gentoo and now (K)Ubuntu because it's less of a hassle.
The brittle side really depends on the choices made by the distribution packagers (at the time Mandrake tended to always package the latest bleeding edge beta of everything) but it seems to me that (at least with Ubuntu lately) it's definitely gotten quite a bit better.
OTOH I've had a number of odd crashes in XP as well (where the only applications I run are store bought games, an antivirus, and sometimes Firefox) in drivers, various apps, etc. No system is immune (oh and my Mac running 10.4 had its share of problems too)
Software nowadays... well, it's not as good as it used to be ya know
Parent
noob-free in 20 years (Score:5, Insightful)
EXACTLY. People always comment on how much friendlier Windows is.... I just don't see it. If it was so damn friendly, then why do I still have to keep answering questions about it from my family and friends? And seriously, at what point are we going to be noob-free? Teenagers these days haven't known when computers didn't exist. My 2.5 year old daughter can use the mouse and play her Reader Rabbit games on the PC pretty well, whereas an elderly neighbor had no clue how to use a mouse - she was hovering her hand over it and moving her hand around. Quite a clash of generations. I guess we'll always have noobs in a sense, but they won't be as prevalent.
I've been using Linux on my home machine since RedHat 6.1, and the advances it has made on the desktop are nothing short of amazing. But there are still things I don't know, and things that frustrate the hell out of me with it. But I wouldn't have it any other way. I'm more comfortable with Windows than Mac, those things just do not mesh well with my brain. It will be interesting in 10, 20 years to see how things have progressed. Hopefully I'll be able to keep up.
Parent
Re:Accurate, considering the caveats (Score:4, Insightful)
Linux on the desktop right now still has a few rough edges but compared to several years ago the difference with MS products is really too small to notice. Favorite gripes:
- IE only websites (yes, some people really don't get it)
- proprietary codecs
Faults in linux that I think need fixing urgently:
- make it so that when you try to fix a small problem (say upgrade or install some small application) that you don't end up with having to upgrade more and more of the system.
I mean this sort of thing:
root@jam:/home/jam/Desktop# apt-get install kruler
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
binutils binutils-dev cpp cpp-4.1 cpp-4.2 gcc gcc-4.1 gcc-4.1-base gcc-4.2 gcc-4.2-base kcontrol kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3
kdebase-data kdebase-kio-plugins kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelibs-data kdelibs4c2a kdesktop kdm kfind kicker konqueror kpersonalizer
ksplash libart-2.0-2 libasound2 libc6 libcupsys2 libdbus-1-3 libfreetype6 libgcc1 libgnutls13 libgomp1 libhal-storage1 libhal1
libjasper1 libjpeg62 libkeyutils1 libkonq4 libkrb53 liblzo2-2 libncurses5 libopencdk10 libopenexr2ldbl libpam0g libpoppler-qt2
libpoppler2 libselinux1 libsepol1 libslang2 libssl0.9.8 libstdc++6 libxml2 libxrandr2 locales tzdata util-linux util-linux-locales
zlib1g
Suggested packages:
binutils-doc cpp-doc gcc-4.1-locales gcc-4.2-locales gcc-multilib automake1.9 libtool flex bison gcc-doc gcc-4.1-multilib gcc-4.1-doc
gcc-4.2-doc gcc-4.2-multilib libgcc1-dbg libgomp1-dbg libmudflap0-4.2-dbg libmudflap0-4.2-dev fam kicker-applets ksvg gij-4.1
libgcj7-awt libjessie-java libasound2-plugins glibc-doc libfreetype6-dev gnutls-bin libjasper-runtime krb5-doc krb5-user libpam-doc
Recommended packages:
libmudflap0-dev
The following packages will be REMOVED:
build-essential g++ g++-4.1 libc6-dev libjpeg62-dev libncurses5-dev libopenexr2c2a libssp0 libstdc++6-4.1-dev zlib1g-dev
The following NEW packages will be installed:
cpp-4.2 gcc-4.2 gcc-4.2-base kdebase-bin-kde3 kruler libgomp1 libjasper1 libkeyutils1 liblzo2-2 libopencdk10 libopenexr2ldbl
libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler2
The following packages will be upgraded:
binutils binutils-dev cpp cpp-4.1 gcc gcc-4.1 gcc-4.1-base kcontrol kdebase-bin kdebase-data kdebase-kio-plugins
kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelibs-data kdelibs4c2a kdesktop kdm kfind kicker konqueror kpersonalizer ksplash libart-2.0-2 libasound2
libc6 libcupsys2 libdbus-1-3 libfreetype6 libgcc1 libgnutls13 libhal-storage1 libhal1 libjpeg62 libkonq4 libkrb53 libncurses5
libpam0g libselinux1 libsepol1 libslang2 libssl0.9.8 libstdc++6 libxml2 libxrandr2 locales tzdata util-linux util-linux-locales
zlib1g
48 upgraded, 13 newly installed, 10 to remove and 843 not upgraded.
Need to get 74.0MB of archives.
After unpacking 17.6MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?
Even if it worked (which it doesn't) it would still be unacceptable.
- stop switching kernel API's around every few releases, release a binary driver spec and stick to it
So that those of us that want to get some work done can just concentrate on that and leave the 'information wants to be free' bs to others
- get rid of all those duplicate halfbaked projects and put all the effort into a single set of office software.
What use is to have 3 different versions of everything, with every forked and me-too project the chance of large scale end-user adoption for linux goes down.
That said, I haven't had windows on my desktop box for the last 4 years and in spite of the above I'm very happy with it.
Parent
Re:Accurate, considering the caveats (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it didn't point out flaws in "Linux". The complaints were that the desktop wasn't very functional and that Flash wasn't installed. Also that the hardware was "slow", though he didn't give any numbers at all for that.
So these flaws, if they are that, pretty trivial and not fundamental parts of Linux, could be and probably will be fixed very easily. It wasn't really unfair, but you can see this guy spends his life using top end machines and apps, he's just not interested in a cheap machine. And of course, the page is full of ads for Vista-equipped PCs, as he suggests you "save up for instead".
Parent
Could kill Vista and proably rightly so. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:Accurate, considering the caveats (Score:4, Funny)
I wasn't sure if you were being sarcastic. Now I know you are. Thanks for the followup!
Parent
Re:Accurate, considering the caveats (Score:4, Informative)
...sure, 'cause it's a LOT harder to move the mouse 'n' click icons in Linux than it is in Windows...
Yeah, that MS-Paint has GIMP beat somethin' fierce. If you're thinking Adobe, enjoy paying $649 for functionality the average Ubuntu user has built-in.
Hint: An Apache server is NOT a web server run by Native Americans. It's used by many providers for a reason. Guess what that reason is?
Installed Ubuntu 6.10/XP dual-boot on my work and one of my home PCs. XP needed me to hunt down drivers for my video card, TV card, NIC, and sound card. Ubuntu recognized 'em all and I was watching TV on it 20 minutes later. Yay, TVtime!
Still not convinced? Friend of mine asked me to get their PC to recognize their digital camera. Took a driver disk before Windows would recognize the cam. I plugged it into my Ubuntu box....
...and lo and behold, pics!
Linux is starting to get device drivers down better than Windows, if you're willing to look.
Parent
Re:Accurate, considering the caveats (Score:4, Informative)
Been installing Linux on various types of PC's for over 10 years. Been installing Linux on PC's since before grub even existed. Some have been randomly selected laptops. Some have had poor support for "multimedia devices". None have ever choked on installing the bootloader.
Sure I might end up with the Linux equivalent of a overpowered cablemodem router but I never ended up with a brick.
My most recent "Dirt-Cheap Vista PC" purchase installed Ubuntu without a hitch.
So did my Mac Mini.
Parent
Re:Accurate, considering the caveats (Score:4, Insightful)
This is total fabrication. The entire world is actively working to avoid Vista because the hardware support is terrible, it's full of bugs, and it doesn't support all the legacy windows programs people use.
They reviewed a bargain basement PC and recommended people spend more so they can use an OS that made every top 10 worst product of the year list that matters. Clearly, this isn't a review, it's a MS advertisement.
Parent
Re:Accurate, considering the caveats (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
They're different systems, just like the consoles (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:They're different systems, just like the consol (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:They're different systems, just like the consol (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:They're different systems, just like the consol (Score:4, Insightful)
The linux box they were selling was a great deal: a complete, functional, preconfigured PC that will do basically everything BUT gaming. Plenty of people understand that and the ones that want more will buy more or build their own.
What's really stupid is the tendency to judge products by an unattainable ideal. You can't buy a PC for $199 that is a screaming fast, green gaming machine that runs linux, windows or anything else. It is what it is - buy it if you want it, if not buy something else.
Parent
Re:Accurate, considering the caveats (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, were it a 'windows computer' you still couldnt pick any game off the shelf and expect it to run.
"they will probably expect that they can buy something like Age of Empires or Civ II or whatever and be able to run it on their computer."
Of course, for those who want to run Civ II that PC is perfectly qualified to run Freeciv (which the cheap walmarter doesnt even have to buy!). In fact, in the range of games that hardware can be expected to support there is a selection of free Linux games that could easily have the walmart customer wasting a year or three.
Parent
Re:Accurate, considering the caveats (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Accurate, considering the caveats (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmmm...
Purple Chicken.
No..
Hmm.
Okay-- the linux PC SOLD OUT. How can you argue with a product selling out? It may be a 1.5 rating compared to a new whizbang box (that sells for $1800) but at $200, a lot of people felt it was a 4.0 rating.
This is like when the PS3 people were saying Wii sucked-- while PS3's were sitting unsold and Wii's were rare as hen's teeth. Oh wait... that's still true after 14 months.
Microsoft gives tons of money to these magazines- a magazine recently fired a reviewer for giving a bad review to a paying advertiser (like 40 days ago-- big scandal).
Hmm.
The key is this... Microsoft's "network effect" is fading. Vista sucks so developers can't count on it being installed and more and more linux boxes are out there creating an increasingly large market for hardware and software that works with linux. And the more "consumers" who buy linux (and do not install it and are not gear heads) the friendlier developers of hardware and software are going to make their linux products.
For the first time since 2000- I'd say we are really approaching a tipping point. Microsoft will always be big in the market but very soon there will not be an assumption that it is the market.
Parent
Re:Accurate, considering the caveats (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Is this just nitpicking? Yes. (Score:5, Insightful)
Look who the biggest advertiser is in PC Mag ... you know ... follow the money ...
The box does everything most people want - safe browsing on the web, email, and word processing. Throw in an extra stick of ram, and its a decent second box for a developer.
Re:Is this just nitpicking? Yes. (Score:5, Insightful)
Take an honest look at it.
1. The modem doesn't work... Yes it is a Winmodem but should you build a box and put a none functioning modem in it?
2. They didn't install Flash and don't seem to have a super easy way to install Flash.
3. gOS? Yet another flavor of Ubuntu but not really Ubuntu.
I would love to see this box compared to one of Dell's Ubuntu PCs.
Maybe it is just not that great of a Linux Box.
I am tempted to buy the motherboard from it and put it in one of the extra cases I have sitting at home. Maybe toss on Openfiler and see what if I could create a little Home server to replace my old PIII server.
Parent
"PC" Magazine--How Are They A Neutral Reviewer (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"PC" Magazine--How Are They A Neutral Reviewer (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it not that hard to imagine that WalMart sold a piece of crap computer with Linux pre-loaded to keep the costs down.
Parent
Re:"PC" Magazine--How Are They A Neutral Reviewer (Score:4, Insightful)
You are a about 2 decades too late for that. Personally, I think that the confusion was deliberate and brilliant marketing - I can remember getting into "yes, this is my personal computer but it is not a PC" arguments with people about my Mac back about 1985 or so...
Parent
What did they expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What did they expect? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
For PC magazine's target audience, sure (Score:5, Insightful)
But for grandma? Do you really trust PC Magazine to be *capable* of reviewing something the way your grandmother would see it, rather then how a full time PC user would? Its a similar problem when someone like 1up does a review of a "casual" focused game. The review is meaningless because who the game is aimed at and who the review is aimed at are completely different markets.
The only way to review this thing properly is to give it to someone in the Walmart crowd who doesn't use a PC very much now, and see how they do with it. Unfortunately, I don't know of a magazine that does that sort of review.
Re:For PC magazine's target audience, sure (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Parent
crap review is what it is (Score:5, Interesting)
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
My Review of the Stupid Review (Score:5, Insightful)
Save up for just a little longer and buy something for at least $450 that runs Windows Vista, or get the ASUS Eee PC 4G laptop.
A major selling point of this is that it is cheap and his first recommendation is buying something more than twice as expensive. Not only that, but he recommends buying a $450 system with Vista. Are there companies selling systems at that price with hardware even capable of running Vista? If so, sight unseen, I can gaurantee you that they suck. The Eee PC is a sweet little machine, in my estimation, but it is no replacement for a desktop. Whenever I see someone griping about the Eee PC it is because they are expecting it to act like a desktop and it isn't one. Also - the Eee PC doesn't answer his critique of this system not running windows and mac apps. So he is just fishing for things to pile up against the system even if they aren't consistent with one another.
The upside is that the processor consumes only 20W peak by itself, and during use, the PC did keep its overall power usage to the 20W-to-50W range.
Another nit to pick about gPC's green claims: While the VIA processor is low-power-consuming and Everex claims the gPC is fully RoHS (Reduction of Hazardous Substances) compliant, it has no Energy Star rating or EPEAT certification.
That's not a nitpick. It's stupid. The thing uses less energy than most other systems, he says so himself, so he complains that this fact is not certified. Apparently certified and using more energy is more environmentally friendly than not certified and using less energy.
You could buy this PC to use for a hardware project, such as for installing Windows Home Server or another flavor of Linux. For those purposes, however, I would recommend you just use that old Pentium III box in your closet,...
Windows home server? So now you are better off buying an underpowered Vista machine at twice the price or taking Linux off this box and replacing it with a buggy windows product. Nice. But dig up an old PIII because for some reason that's better. No explanation of how or why but the mind boggles.
The setup sheet rightly notes that, for the PC to fully function, you need a broadband Internet connection with an Ethernet cable. The picture on the setup sheet, however, points to the included modem...
The words are right, the picture is wrong. In other words the documentation doesn't exactly match with reality. I have to say that this has been true of more products that I've bought than has not been true. Anyone wanting to run a PC that is advertised as relying on the internet for full functionality over dial up, is going to be frustrated by anything they buy, no matter how powerful because dialup sucks.
He had to change the monitor resolution. That's rough. He had to install Flash and had choices that confused him. That's a curious oversight on the part of the manufacturer but hardly a show stopper.
Needless to say, 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 it's mainly a Web-based PC.
Wow - that's almost like investigative reporting. It's a web-based PC? I'd have never guessed that from all the advertising. I shouldn't get snarky I guess, but come on. He's upset because this isn't a high end desktop that can run mad and windows apps. He wants it to be a G5 but it isn't so it gets a low rating. If he rated cars only high-end sports cars would get a chance. Anything else would be under powered and without the luxuries he expects on every vehicle regardless of price.
He is right about getting what you pay for. And more is quite often better. But the slightly more difficult question is "How much is enough?" And for many people, in my experience, this cheap little machine is enough. Why should it be punished because he wants more?
Re:My Review of the Stupid Review (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
Parent
Asumes too much. (Score:5, Insightful)
From their site:
CONS:Ethernet "Internet Connection Required." Modem is nonfunctional (for now). 1,280-by-800 resolution forced by internal graphics. Adobe Flash installation can be confusing for a novice. Google search window goes to WebRunner, not the expected Firefox. Programs written for Mac or Windows will not run.
The market for the gPC isn't for everyone, just folks who want to get online and not worry about getting in trouble. PC Magazine missed the point, and the 1.5 review can just be tossed out the window.
Is it backwards pants day? (Score:4, Funny)
It actually does suck (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Stopped reading (Score:5, Funny)
"My advice to these people? Save up for just a little longer and buy something for at least $450 that runs Windows Vista..."
Bias? (Score:4, Informative)
target audience (Score:4, Insightful)
For either group the OS makes no difference. if the machine runs and can do these simple things, that is ok. I know that this computer does not have the advanced MS features of one click changing of the background image, or one click changing of the orientation, or other critical one click hourly tasks, but for $200 I think many people can live without those luxuries.
Of course, if one needs a second computer that runs specific MS Windows only applications, then buy an MS Windows machine. But in most cases to run such applications, one will not be able to buy the cheapest machine on the market.
I am SO tired of Linux always being cheapified! (Score:4, Informative)
Looks like nitpicking... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
It's rather sad (Score:4, Insightful)
I read TFA. Are all the negative points it brought up real or fair? Of course not. For one thing, I don't like how the author criticizes gPC for not preinstalling the flash player. I believe that was due to licensing limitations.
On the other hand, I see very valid criticism. For instance, according to TFA, gPC defaults to 1280x800, and will revert back to it after rebooting even if the user manually sets it to 1280x1024. I think that's something inexcusable - defaulting to an inordinary screen resolution, and somehow mysteriously insisting on it.
My point is - not a novel one at that - if people truly want Linux to be adopted more widely, they should learn not to take criticism the wrong way.
My Kids Like It (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
Comments on Walmart's site (Score:4, Insightful)
Then there were the one star raters. These people talked about how cheap the PC was, and couldn't understand why it couldn't run their other software. They found the desktop confusing and the programs it came with overly complex.
It appears that this was a thrown together piece of cheap hardware. However, those who were tech savvy viewed this as a bargain of computer parts. A little tweaking -- better keyboard, more memory, more diskspace, etc., and you had a fairly cheap Linux machine. The rest were typical computer customers who bought it because it was only $200. They found it sloppily put together, cheap and unusable components, and a confusing OS. These people didn't have the time, energy, nor technical skills to tweak this computer to make it usable.
This computer was an interesting experiment, and we'll see many more in the years to come. There's no way companies can sell $200 computers while buying a Windows license. Something is going have to give. You're going to see a lot more Linux computers for the masses before the end of next year. Someone is going to get it right.