Blogternals

I certainly make no secret that my favorite Linux Distro is Ubuntu, but I felt compelled to give PCLinuxOS another shot. Before I get to PCLinuxOS 2009.1 let me tellyou a little about PCLinuxOS 2007.x. About, two years ago a college of mine convinced me to give PCLinuxOS a try. OK, he did not have to try all that hard, I do like to try new distros from time to time and I had not tried PCLinuxOS. I do remember that I initially liked PCLinuxOS, but in the end my experience left me with the feeling that some how the distro was not managed by a group that understood usability. I feel like they were to focused on what I call “Type one users” that they were failing to address “Type two users”.  “Type two users” generally have expectations about usability which can be summed up by following buzz words:

Scalability – The ability to customize, the frequency of updates, and the easy of finding packages for the distro.
Functionality – This will include hardware detection, and inclusion or certain packages.
Presentation – The eye candy and location of common tools.
Comparability - How it compares to other features in other distributions.

I would like to point out that in my opinion there are three types of users that a distro needs to address in order to be successful. The first being the newbie, everyone knows that a newbie is hard to please. Newbies, because or their always present pre-conceptions placed by their former OS (Mostly Windows Users), tend to dislike anything unfamiliar. The second is the intermediate, I group two persona of users here. Those who understand how to use Linux, but don’t know how it is put together and don’t care; And, those who both know how to use and understand how Linux works under the hood, but mostly just Google for the answers to any problems that araise. The intermediate crowd can be the toughest to please, and it is also known that they are vital to a distros existence and longevity. Then we have the experts which generally use which every distro they are actively participating in the community with at that time (This includes those writing tutorials, participating in the forums,doing real debugging on applications, and other technical writings for or about the distros).

The intermediate users are the ones that a distro should keep in mind when they do things. And personally two years ago I felt they failed to please this group of users.

So enter the 2009.1 PCLinuxOS experience. To start things off I started up trust old VirtualBox and created a machine to run PCLinuxOS on. Strapped on the 2009.1 iso as the cdrom drive and away I went. Churn, churn , and a few minutes later I was presented with a login where I could choose guest or root. So I chose guest, no special reason other than curiosity, why do I actually get a choice after all it is liveCD. To this point the graphics have been exactly what I would expect from a new distro, nice and clean, professional, and a touch of web 2.0, very polished look.

At this point I am presented with a little dialog box which says “Error KDesktop” The process for the file protocol died unexpectedly. This is not good, I don’t even get this thing booted good and I have an error. I began to ask myself is this a beta release or is this the real thing. At this point for the sake of looking I looked around and found pretty much the same distro I found 2 years ago, and found the same great disappointed feeling in my stomach.  This is where I shutdown the Virtual machine and began to ask myself a few questions.  How could two years have passed anf the only thing you guys really change is the Eye Candy? What about improvements to the repositories? What about improvimng the overall community?

PCLinuxOS has some nice eye candy but that is about as far as it goes. In my opinion I an no longer take these guys serious as a Linux Distro. At least not until they truly makes some improvements other than security updates and eye candy. I guess the error just as KDE was loading just sort of sums it up. Linux is trying to make a move on the market, how can a distro launch a new version with this kind of carelesness.