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PC Mag Slams Cheap Wal-Mart Linux Desktop
Posted by
Zonk
on Friday December 28, @09:37AM
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."
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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."
Firehose:PC Mag slams Everex gPC by Anonymous Coward
PC Mag Slams Cheap Wal-Mart Linux Desktop
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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)
Re:Accurate, considering the caveats (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Accurate, considering the caveats (Score:5, Interesting)
Doesn't really qualify as unbiased reporting.
Re:Accurate, considering the caveats (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Accurate, considering the caveats (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Accurate, considering the caveats (Score:4, Interesting)
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.)
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
Re:Accurate, considering the caveats (Score:4, Insightful)
First and foremost - a 'driver disk' isn't a problem for 99.9% of users. If I go to Best Buy and pick out a TV Tuner and inside that box there is a disk with a driver that will make it work on my system - it is no extra work for me. I'm happy. I like that.
You'd be HARD PRESSED to go to Best Buy and find ANYTHING made for a PC that, with the contents in the box, won't run on Windows XP. Vista isn't quite there, often times you have to go and download crap and deal with drivers - but in 6 months that won't be the case. It's already getting a lot better.
I need an external, wireless, USB network adapter. If I go to Best Buy today and buy one of each unique model they have....with the contents of what is in the box - how many of them will work in Ubuntu? Half? Less than half? Oh wait, what is that? I have to use NDISWRAP or some bs...and then I need to get the Windows drivers anyway? So, how is that better? Oh, and I have additional overhead and CPU costs because I'm using a Windows driver on Linux.
I bought an Ubuntu book from the Library (yes, I like to buy books). I had THREE WIRELESS USB ADAPTERS and NOT ONE OF THEM would work in Ubuntu. I'm told a new version has come out and now ONE of my wireless USB adapters will work, but only with ndiswrap and some hacks.
Linux is *NOT EVEN CLOSE* to being hardware friendly. When I walk into Best Buy - where is the Linux hardware section? There isn't one. You have Windows, and you have Mac. And you can confident that your Mac hardware will work in your Mac - and you can be confident that your windows hardware will work in Windows. Linux is a crapshoot. It might work; but if it doesn't, you are screwed.
I own an iRiver T10 mp3 player. It holds 256mb of music. I've had it for years, I use it at the gym; I love it. It's everything I need or want in an MP3 player. It doesn't work in Linux. I tried it. It didn't. I found some blogs linking to Chinese websites that supposedly can do it (google: iriver t10 linux - visit first result). Read the comments, even using the hack that, as the author warns could turn your mp3 player into a paper weight - people have limited success.
That's not good hardware support. Linux is far, far behind Windows in that regard. I know, because I'm a windows user who has lots of crappy hardware and I install Linux very year or so and see if it's ready to become my desktop OS. And each and everytime I find that something I need doesn't work.
I had an old internal wireless card that, years back, Linux didn't support. Now, it does - but I don't use the internal wireless card - I use an external USB one...and Linux doesn't support it. I'm sure that, sooner or later, Linux will support it - right around the time that a newer, faster, better version is for sale; and then that new thing won't be supported.
Oh, and let's not forget about the crappy video driver issues Linux users get to deal with. I guess people gloss over that because, ya know, games for Linux are few and far between (and by that, I mean...games that don't suck. No offense, but google for 'best linux games' and tell me that compares to Windows.
It doesn't.
Re:Accurate, considering the caveats (Score:4, Funny)
bahh Windows fanboi !
Tuxracer WITH BINARY DRIVERS FTW !!!
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 ha
I agree with this one. (Score:4, Insightful)
Too bad it probably will not happen.
For some reason people seem to think that this will make companies release FOSS drivers. The fact that nVidia and ATI are still releasing closed drivers doesn't seem to matter to them.
Then you have the statment that they don't have to write FOSS drivers they can just release the specs and the FOSS community will write better drivers than they can.
Well ATI is releasing the specks for some of it's GPUs so I guess we will see.
"- 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 can not be done. How do you tell someone that they can not write a program? Why would you want to?
I figure choice is a good thing. And since most of these projects are free what right do I have to tell them what to do?
Re:Accurate, considering the caveats (Score:4, Insightful)
1. The dependencies reported from apt-get are declarative (stated in a manifest), not necessarily from actual code dependencies. As it has already been stated, upgrading some of these dependencies improves performance, but many of them are also security updates (the openssl update, for example).
2. Other OSs DO install and replace more than one file in their update schemes. This is a random update I clicked on the Windows Update site http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=938979 [microsoft.com]. I count 111 files to be replaced in the 32-bit version of Vista. Also, keep in mind that core updates, like the Windows equivalents of binutils and libc++ would have been taken care of in a previous patch, because they are system-wide enhancements, not just related to a small utility (kruler).
Re:Accurate, considering the caveats (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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".
Re:Accurate, considering the caveats (Score:4, Insightful)
The people not sure the difference among $200, $500, $1000, and $2000 machines and who don't understand the specs were already in deep trouble trying to buy a computer without help. Using those people as the supposed only target market is a bit silly. i do pity those who thought it was just some outrageous "doorbuster" price on a more capable machine, but the type of retailer Wal-Mart is doesn't serve the question-asking crowd. Sometimes there's a price to be paid for cheap at the service level and not just at the product level. A local computer shop with clueful employees could have saved those people some time and frustration, but the $200 PC isn't at fault for that problem.
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.
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.
Re:Accurate, considering the caveats (Score:5, Insightful)
They're different systems, just like the consoles (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They're different systems, just like the consol (Score:5, Insightful)