How to Kill PCLinuxOS in One Easy Step

Installation:

1) Start with an IBM Thinkpad R32.

2) Install PCLinuxOS 2007 from a LiveCD. Note that if you try to use the option to erase partitions and start from scratch, you'll get a message indicating that you should reboot first. Hm, cute.

3) Once installed, update the dern thing with Synaptic. Reload, Mark, and Apply.

Ok, now you've got your very own PCLinuxOS running and everything is groovy! Enable 3D Desktop effects and amaze your friends with the wobbly windows that didn't work in Ubuntu without manual xorg configuration. (when they ask why your focus window title bars are all blank, just change the subject)

And now, here's how we destroy PCLinuxOS:

1) Create a new network profile and activate it.

That's it. Voila. Easy as pie. Thanks for playing.

You will lose your graphical login manager upon restarting X. You will be able to start X manually after logging in to the terminal as root or another user, but alas, all is not well. A plethora of services will be off. You'll immediately notice the lack of any sound and the big error message indicating the lack of any sound.

To make things even more fun, your screen resolution might have dropped down a notch, making a brilliant desktop manager like KDE utterly useless because it can't resize windows worth a damn. This is especially frustrating considering how many configuration "wizards" in PCLinuxOS use the standard GIANT WIZARD DIALOG DO YOU WANT TO APPLY THE CHANGES OH YEAH WELL THEN CLICK THE GIANT YES OR THE GIANT CANCEL BUTTONS WHICH YOU WILL NOTICE APPEAR GIANTLY IN THE LOWER CORNERS OF THIS GIANT WIZARD DIALOG. OH YOU CAN'T SEE THEM BECAUSE YOUR SCREEN RESOLUTION IS SET TOO LOW WELL SORRY ABOUT THAT BUT NOBODY CARES STOP BLOGGING ABOUT THIS STUPID CRAP!

A neat fix is to delete your network profile which will bring things mostly back to normal, except for your resolution, which will be impossible to set. Oh, and you can't login as another user without being prompted for a root password and then being shown the 3D Desktop settings dialog and NOTHING ELSE. Ever.

Imagine the sound of a hard drive being wiped clean, and you'll be closely approximating the sound waves that are vibrating my ear drums this very minute. This is an all new time record for an operating system eating itself in my experience. The sucker went completely useless after about 30 minutes of use.

Oh, it's "Radical" alright.

Next up: Fedora.

PCLinuxOS 2007

Real funny, fellas. Har har har. Laugh it up, I don't care.

From freshly installed to completely demolished in less than 16 hours using nothing but a mouse. Sheesh. Your installer is plenty fast, thankfully, so I'm going to give this thing one more go before I give it the heave ho.

I was going to rag on you about your "Radically Simple" tagline, but then I noticed and appreciated the subtle ambiguity of that statement. You're going to have to work a lot harder to get this l33t hacker to break down!!!

FUbuntu

Goodbye Ubuntu. I sampled your Freaky Frog and poked around in your Greasy Goat and even noodled around with your Horny Heron for a few days. Es bunku.

For being the best supported community Linux distribution with the biggest desktop install base (I'm making that up), Ubuntu has its canonical thumb up its canonical arse when it comes to hardware support. I have no idea what that means, but I'm not good at clever insults.

Case in points: many wifi cards (specifically in my case anything with an ralink or hermes chipset) and some ATI video cards (namely mobility Radeon).

Ok, so really I'm just pissed that your Ubuntu sucks on my Thinkpad R32 laptop and completely drops the ball when it comes to drivers for my Linksys WUSB54G wifi adapter. When I came to realize that support for my adapter actually worsened in the Haggardy Heffer beta, I decided to kill this retarded installation.

Interestingly enough, I wiped Ubuntu from my laptop the day I got a new wifi adapter that would have worked with it. Why me so krazie? Well, because I'm just not terribly impressed.

My Ubuntu 7.10 (and 8.whatever Beta) experience:

1) Terrible installation process.

2) Poor performance with default software load installed. Very poor, actually. In your defense I didn't give it enough memory, but I've seen much better performance from other distributions.

3) It's damn ugly. A stock Gnome installation straight out of 1995. You want bling? Be prepared to manually install drivers and edit your xorg config if you've got ATI video. You want something besides a solid color panel? Break out the terminal.

4) Where are the features? There is no centralized management interface that I can find, just a bunch of disassociated applications stuck to a start menu. It's very difficult to remember where to find various settings. The printer management is horrible. HORRIBLE! The themer is easily broken beyond repair and features from some themes just don't work. Network management is a joke. File sharing is more painful than it need be.

From my perspective, Ubuntu brings exactly two things to the table: 1) Automatic updates and 2) a network applet in the panel. Those are the killer apps that are year-of-the-Linux-desktoping the world. wow. Oh, and thanks for the links to "non free" codecs and drivers. A little silly to have deliberated over this one for ten years though, don't you think?

Ok ok, it also has a very large repository which is a plus. No complaints there.

Is this the best that the free Linux desktop world has to offer? I sure hope not.

I replaced Ubuntu with PCLinuxOS 2007 (real clever name there fellas) which installed in minutes from a LiveCD and seemed to setup and use all of my hardware correctly. Yay! But not so yay. After doing nothing but configuration via the GUI control center, my sound has stopped working completely and I no longer have a graphical login. Oh, and installing Kismet broke some dependencies. And most notably, it's been installing updates for over 70 minutes and i have no idea what the hell is going on. Kubuntu? Fedora? I'll blog my little heart out about all this later. You can't wait.

Soon I may end up putting Windows back on this machine because in the long run, really, I've got some shit to get done. (no I don't, I'm just trying to stir some shit up)