Fry's Electronics - Selling Linux... Or Not? 479
TheMadPenguin writes "For those of you who may not be aware, Fry's Electronics has been selling a Linux desktop PC loaded with ThizLinux for quite a while now. The question is, are they really selling it? The answer is a definitive no."
Fry's vs. The Rest Of The World (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:heh (Score:3, Interesting)
I get the feeling you've probably never come across one of these machines and you just wanted to show off your impressive Linux knowledge.
It's not what you say... (Score:5, Interesting)
This computer is running the Linux operating system. It is easily removed and can be replaced by Windows 98 or higher by formatting the hard drive and loading Windows. We will perform this service for you for a fee.
Had they said that it's running ThizLinux and could be changed to any PC OS, I might be a bit more understanding. But they're just trying to sell computers without the MS tax, and increase their OS sales.
The text showing up in Chinese could be the result of someone messing with the computer, rather than Fry's setting it up badly. OTOH, the author does a good job vilifying the Fry's staff.
Cheap boxes are good for small standalone terminals and for Joe Sixpack checking his email. Cheap boxes that make Linux look as awful as the article states are not helping our cause. If it were a single store, I would suggest a user group get involved. Being a chain store, the manager may be unwilling (or unable) to improve things.
Fry's will sell anything... dissastisfied customer (Score:5, Interesting)
You also have to be careful, because Fry's will take an item in as a return from a customer, and will shrink-wrap it and put it back on the shelf. Supposedly with a label, though I've bought shrink wrapped items that did not have a label and were obviously somebody's returns.
I returned a web-cam that did not work, and they put it with stuff to be "returned to shelf". Moral here, if you see a lot of items with "return" labels on them, outnumbering the non-returned items, avoid that product as most seem to be returning it for whatever reason and Fry's is just putting it back on the shelf.
I also purchased SuSE 8.0 Professional the weekend it was on the shelf, only to find out one enterprising person stole the CDs out of the box. I get the box home, open it up, and no CDs or DVD. I had to fight with two store managers and threaten public disclosure (hint: asking them for their first and last name and for them to spell it for you will often make the managers nervous) and who knows what just to get them to exchange the product so I could get disks. [The first box had no signs of tampering.] I opened the second box in front of the manager before leaving the store just to make sure I got the disks that time.
As a customer of Fry's I have had to return about 50% of the computer components I have purchased from them. Either they were DOA, they did not work reliably if they did work, or they would fail within about 48 to 72 hours. [Just to be fair, others I've talked to have not had the same experience, however I shopped at 2 different Frys in the Bay Area with the same results.]
The SuSE incident is also the last time I shopped at Fry's for anything other than a cable.
I'm also about to find out how well they honor their "extended warranty". I bought a five disk DVD player for the house (my wife bought it as an anniversary gift), less than a year ago, and now it failing too.
frys is missing the point (Score:2, Interesting)
You say Frys, we say PC World (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyway, the staff in these places are generally pretty braindead. There are exceptions - two friends of mine currently work in our local branch and they do know their stuff, but most of the staff just read whatever it says on the card next to the PC. Their technical support staff in the little in-store kiosks are usually dire. They know next to nothing about maintenance. I worked for a local company doing much the same thing, and we saw many a PC the guys at PC World had 'repaired'. One they deemed totally dead, never to work again actually turned out to have two bent pins on the hard disk. PCW kept it on a shelf for about 2 weeks before saying it was kaput.
This isn't to say PCW are totally bad though. They've lately started stocking a lot of OEM kit, and case mods. Their prices are coming down, and the range of kit they sell is pretty good. Rough with the smooth I guess.
Re:Sorry hardware and a okay OS (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd like to echo the sentiment- down to the reason. That Irving store's the best of the three in the DFW metroplex with regards to the quality of the store and the inventory that they seem to stock. It's really a nice store- but, sadly, it's still Fry's.
I was in there the other day, pricing parts, like I usually do in advance of a hardware project. I was on the far wall, pricing DDR memory for a machine upgrade when I overheard a conversation with a salesperson and a customer trying to purchase the parts for a whole computer. He was twittering on and on about clock speeds. He picked out an Athlon 2400+ and compared it to the clock speed of a P4 2.4 GHz and then compared the prices between the two. He said that the P4 had the same technology as the Athlon and you were getting nearly a full GHz of clock speed over the Athlon for only a slightly higher price. I was oh so tempted to chime in and shoot the salesperson down in flames- but I behaved myself and just walked away.
Moral of the story: Fry's sales people are told to up-sell whereever possible- even if it's wrong, customer spends too much, etc. Fry's is only usually a good/great deal if you know their antics and know what in the hell you're doing yourself. Of course, their media section's decent- and relatively safe- so it's probably okay to buy CD's and DVD's you can't find anywhere else there.
Re:heh (Score:4, Interesting)
ThizLinux (Score:2, Interesting)
ThizLinux ranks along with Lindows in my list of distros that are giving Linux a bad name. Lindows at least is improving though.. so ThizLinux gets my top spot of shitty distro. I don't know why Fry's uses it except for the fact that these machines are probably made in some 3rd world country and the Chinese-lang install is possibly easier for their employees to install.
I wonder if Fry's would let the local lug group (LVLUG in this case) pass out Knoppix cd's and business cards (with the lug's contact info) with each of these machines.
Re:the new mindset (Score:3, Interesting)
OK, I'm taking that out of context and interpreting it slightly differenly than you had in mind, but it's the question you should be asking before the question you actually did even comes up.
And the answer is no, but. But neither is Windows. Even the Mac isn't really ideal for the average consumer. They still manage to get them to work well enough for them, most of the time.
If the average consumer can use a windows box, there's absolutely no reason why he couldn't use a properly pre-configured Linux box just as well. That's a key phrase though. I've yet to see any of the people selling Linux computers doing that.
So they wind up with products no one wants. We geeks just format the disk and put something decent on, of course, but Mom and Pop that might buy the thing won't know to do that, and they'll get a very wrong impression.
I don't know why it seems to be so hard for these stores to do this right. All they need to do is hire one or two people that know what they're doing. They could take a regular distribution, Debian, Slack, Redhat, whatever they're good at working on, configure all the hardware properly, setup a user account and a GUI and so forth, with all the normal things that the average user expects at their fingertips. Then make a package repository for updates, a disk image for installs, and a short 'getting started' book. Maybe even a live tutorial. None of this would be all that difficult or time consuming to do, given that the code is Free and there's nothing really new here, just applying procedures already well developed. Then they could sell boxes that provide the Mom and Pop users with a real viable alternative to Windows, at a cheaper cost. That's a big market. Why do they keep doing these half-measures instead, and just giving Linux a bad name?
Re:Sounds like an OK machine, so who cares? (Score:2, Interesting)
I feel a lot better buying something that comes with a running Linux distro, because I know the hardware is compatible, even if I am going to reinstall right away (paranoid security-wise reinstalling is a damn good idea anyway). Thats why I bought a Zaurus, even though I didn't keep the original setup that was on it and immediately put OpenZaurus on it.
Thats why when my non-technically minded neigbor asked for my advice in selecting a computer on a budget, and after we agreed that she'd hold me responsible for the hardware only, we drove to Fry's and got her the 'Thiz Linux' machine in question. After I upgraded it with some parts she had laying around, I felt very comfortable letting it out of my hands, because regardless of what she installed on it, I could always pop a Knoppix CD in it and demonstrate that the hardware was fine.
She ended up installing a pirated copy of WinME on it, which worked for her eventually, it took her a little while to get the ethernet and sound working. (Psst, Bill, her name is Patty McCormic, and she lives at 751 19th Street, go get her for piracy -- just kidding...)
So if something is sold with Linux already running on it, at least I know I can endorse the hardware.
Re:Anyone work for Frys? Yeah. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:heh (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to be a door nazi at Fry's. And the reason why they are the way they are, is that they get a commission on "recovered" items. I caught a woman who had a 500$ laser printer on the bottom of her cart that she neglected to tell the cashier about. When I told her that it wasn't on her reciept she argued with me. I said "Your receipt totals 100$ and there is a $500 price tag on the printer" So she turned around and paid for it and I got a 50$ commission. The loss prevention people are always at odds with the cashier manager. Because our commission comes out of there budget. I had been verbally assaulted by the cashier manager on several occasions because I was "costing his dept too much money" I said "well maybe your cashiers need to lean over the counter and LOOK in the carts!" Finally he made up a story about me refusing to help a customer carry something to their car (even though loss prevention is expressly forbidden to do so)It turned out the "customer" was another loss prevention person who was carrying something out for someone else and he thought they were the customer. The store manager tore me a new a-hole.
Finally they gave me the "option" to take a position in any dept of my choosing. I chose the computer service dept of course, as that was where I had been trying to move into since it was Incredible Universe. The store manager was fired shortly after I left.
Re:Already dead - full article here (Score:5, Interesting)
Fry's (Score:3, Interesting)
I looked at their Linux machine in the past. I managed to find it on my own, but when I approached a salesman to ask questions (like, how do I log in), they were quick to push me to more expensive machines.
I'm never really happy to shop there. They do have a decent selection of cat5 cable and fiber patch cables.
I went to look for a stereo receiver there a couple months ago. They annoyed the shit out of me. I had an old Sony receiver that was way behind the times. I wanted another Sony as a replacement. They were hell-bent on selling me another brand. So I told him, "take out the books, and let me compare features", since their feature list is really just what's on the box, which was almost nothing on most of the boxes. They wouldn't do it. I warned him that he was loosing the sale if he couldn't give me an accurate feature list. I ended up going down to Circuit City. They had the brand that Fry's was hard-selling me on. Ya, it was more expensive, but the Sony was better, especially for what I wanted.
We went to Fry's to buy some parts for my friends new computer. He had bought some parts already, and needed a few final parts, including memory. He wanted it done that day, so we *HAD* to get at least some memory for it, and then ordered name-brand memory online. I opted for 256Mb of cheap memory. It was like $69 for the cheap brand DIMM. The salesman was trying to fast-talk my friend. The salesman offered him 2 128Mb DIMMS of what he said was a better brand for $69 each. Since none of them were name brand, it was all shades of crap.. I asked a few careful questions, being very sure to include verbage that had no way of being mistaken. He *SAID* my friend was getting both 128MB DIMMS for a total of $69 ($35.50 ea). He verified twice, and then rang up $138 ($69*2). My friend wasn't reading the nasty monochrome terminal screen that they work on, but I'm an asshole like that, and stopped him in mid-order. Like, WTF, I told him cheap. Cheapest you have, he's only using it for a few days til good memory comes in.
BTW, my apologies if I got the prices or sizes wrong on that last example. It's the general idea that they were doubling the price on him.
Generally, if I can make it through the store without talking to a salesman, it's a relatively pleasant shopping experience. I find it best to walk around with a "I'm going to kill you if you approach me" attitude, and growl if they ask "Can I help you." That actually works in most stores.
"I don't want 99%+ viruses/worms" (Score:3, Interesting)
In other words, usability is at least as high as what linux has been compared to for years.
My boss's boss, not a propeller head, just bought a used laptop with a linux distro. She couldn't recall the name, but it works fine for her.
Primetime, baby.
Re:Walk on by (Score:3, Interesting)
Imagine that: a customer service person who actually gives you good enough service to honestly tell you what you should but elsewhere! I'm not sure if the guy just didn't care one way or the other, which would be entirely reasonable, from what I hear and have seen of how Fry's treats their employees, or whether he was actually good enough at his job to recognize a semi-intelligent question, and know that I would come back to a place that dealt with me that fairly.
Of course, I haven't been able to find that guy again in a couple of return trips, so he probably got sacked for similar honesty with a manager within earshot or something.
For Piracy (Score:3, Interesting)
Better Article Summary (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree with this, but I also realize that the people in these stores are not computer experts of ANY kind. They can't answer questions about Windows either, although they are more inclined to react to Windows questions with something out of their own experience.
One of the biggest problems with Windows right now in fact is that there is so little DEFINITIVE reference material on it from a users point of view. Microsoft stopped documenting anything beyond the APIs a long time ago and now everything your read about Windows is speculation. Diagnosing Windows problems has gotten to be a voodoo art more than a well defined process. All the more reason for it to wind up in the sh*t can of history where it belongs.
As far as the bad version of Linux this thing is running, I bet the hardware AND software came bundled to Fry's from China at a super bargain price.
On the other hand, if my intention was to buy a cheap machine to run Linux on, I'd feel a lot better about getting one of these than one of the cheap Windows machines. Chances are the cheap Linux machine has more generic components that will operate with ANY version of Linux, while the Windows machines are more likely to include some proprietary component to make you either dependent on the manufacturer, Microsoft, or both.
If I were in the market for a laptop right now I'd probably get one of those $700 Lindows version and then install Debian on it. I bet it would work just fine.
Re:well, yeah. its fry's. (Score:2, Interesting)
I have never been back there and I will NEVER shop there again. Not only was I ripped off and had to return a broken mislabeled product, I was also blamed for doing it myself. I understand this happenes in retail but in this case, the previous person who bought that thing did it, not me. Not a single person of authority in that store even considered that was a possibility.
Re:heh (Score:3, Interesting)
Afterwards they'd have a meeting with their department heads and 'loss prevention' people. They even had this tired old video they showed, then I gave a little talk.
I think it's a safe bet to say there are professional thieves out there, and they cost us all something extra when we buy something. And stopping it is like stopping 'drugs' (or whatever your government has decided is bad for you)-you may as well try and turn back the tide with a teaspoon.
Look at some laws, you'll get your hand cut off if convicted of theft. The second time they cut off your other hand. Obviously getting your hand cut off is not a sufficient deterrent to theft.
The problem lay in the desire.
-cp-