Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Watch out for PCLinux OS

Looks like PCLinuxOS is destined to reach its well deserved place in the Desktop Linux world.
More and more of my friends, both in India and abroad, are switching to PCLOS. Its like a unanimous verdict. It is truly a system that just works and works fine. It's fast, it's decently stable and has all the Desktop oriented configurations by default.
I know many of us rubbish the distrowatch rankings, however, it does give an indication to a distro's popularity. I still remember Ubuntu replacing Mandriva became a big news and then Ubuntu never turned back. History repeats itself, only this time it is Ubuntu which is at receiving end. Today's ( 12th September 2007 ::12:04 PM) stats for the last 6 months are
1 Ubuntu 2541
2 PCLinuxOS 2511

Here the interesting fact is that page hit of Ubuntu is decreasing, while PCLOS is increasing.
In last 3 months, 1 month and past 7 days, the page hit rankings of PCLOS is much more than Ubuntu. It is just a matter of time when PCLOS will be at the top of 6 months page hit ranking too.

This is not to say that PCLOS is in any way more popular than the mighty Ubuntu. If we look at any other popularity criteria, we find that Ubuntu is way ahead of others ( including PCLOS) . The current Lenovo vote about what Linux distribution would users like to see on Thinkpad also has Ubuntu leading at 47% (16274) of all votes, while PCLOS gets a meager 1%(425) votes.
Another poll by tuxmachines is much more encouraging for PCLOS, where Ubuntu get 26%(1436) votes and PCLOS get 25%(1396) votes. This looks more on the lines of current distrowatch page hit rankings, with Ubuntu and PCLOS being neck to neck or Ubuntu having a very slight edge.

However, lets not forget that Ubuntu has the commercial backing of Cannonical, hence many users would opt for Cannonical support ( a la Dell Ubuntu option) instead of non-commercially supported PCLOS. Also Ubuntu people know how to be in media and hence many users believe Ubuntu to be the most user friendly distro. This might be true for some people ( Ubuntu Fanboys), but for other normal people like me, Pradus, Mint and PCLOS presents a better default desktop.

Lets check some comparisons
  1. Ubuntu Hype
  2. Ubuntu and PCLOS
  3. Seopher report on tuxmachine poll.
Lets check what Ubuntu users say about PCLOS on Ubunut Forums ::
  1. On Dell 1420n Ubuntu Fiesty does not boot into a GUI, PCLOS does.
  2. Fiesty Crashes, PCLOS is stable.
  3. GNOME faster in PCLOS.
  4. People looking forward to OpenSUSE, Mint and PCLOS.
  5. Ubuntu Fiesty does not work on old hardware, PCLOS does.
  6. Easy way to get Broadcom 43xx based wireless cards working -- PCLOS.
I can go on and on about Ubuntu users themselves praising PCLOS against Ubuntu, but thats not my point. I just want to state that PCLOS is a viable alternative to Ubuntu for Dekstop use.
What PCLOS lack badly is a good community and this is the area where Ubunut scores heavily over others. I think Ubuntu has the best and the most exhaustive forums. This provides users with adequate free support to get their problems resolved.
If PCLOS overcomes this shortcoming then there is no stopping them. Who knows some big commercial player might purchase them and provide commercial support. It is for sure that without support no hardware vendor will pre install PCLOS on desktops and laptops.
I just hope that PCLOs gets some backing, for it has all the elements to make it the best possible desktop Linus distribution.

EDIT::
Disclaimer::
I do not mean to say that PCLOS is more popular than Ubuntu; definitely not!!!
Ubuntu is anytime more popular.

With respect to comments about Desktop Linux poll, lets take the observations at this site
http://www.huliq.com/31587/2007-desktop-linux-survey-results-revealed.

"Perhaps the most surprising result of our survey was that PCLinuxOS showed so poorly. On DistroWatch, PCLinuxOS has been at the top of the site's page hit ranking for the last 30 days. Frankly, we're not sure why this popular, easy-to-use community distribution didn't do better. The site supporting it had recently had problems, but that problem's long been history. Perhaps, it's simply that unlike the other popular community distributions -- Ubuntu, openSUSE, and Fedora -- PCLinuxOS doesn't have corporate backing. Canonical, Novell, and Red Hat all provide support and hardware partnerships for their community distributions that PCLinuxOS can't match."

All find PCLOS to be user friendly and stable distro, yet its a fact that many users do not know about it, being on top on Distrowatch can bring about the required publicity. As for commercial support --- there is always a hope.......

24 comments:

defcon said...

distrowatch.org goes by statistics just from there own site, if you use google trends, pc linux os isnt even on the map, check out http://ubuntu-unleashed.blogspot.com/2007/09/ubuntu-vs-pclinuxos-on-google-trends.html
for more information

Anonymous said...

For PCLOS to really overtake Ubuntu, then it has to offer alternative desktop enviroments other than KDE

konstantine said...

I use pclos with the xfce4 desktop. (GNOME is also available). I switched to PCLOS from ubuntu when I found that fiesty fawn sound did not work on my laptop. PCLOS works just fine on my laptop.

User community support is very good.

Abhay said...

Defcon::
I agree that in many stats PCLOS is no where close to Ubuntu, I have even mentioned this in my blog. I have reported the results of Lenovo laptop poll, where Ubuntu got 45% votes against !% votes of PCLOS. However in some stats PCLOS does scores well.
Lets accept this fact.

Abhay said...

I do not think that having just one default desktop (KDE centric) acts as a disadvantageous point for PCLOS. The most used version of Ubuntu is GNOME; Kubuntu, Xubuntu etc does not even come close.
However, we can easily install GNOME or XFCE4 in PCLOS using Synaptic.

Anonymous said...

Heh, just wait, when Gutsy comes out officially, PCLOS is gonna fail from its high rank on DW.

Anonymous said...

I have just downloaded and installed PCLinuxOS today. I was pretty much overwhelmed by how good it is. Everything worked out of the box - flash etc. Ubuntu Feisty can't even support 1440x900 by default. Kubuntu is just rubbish. Installing the nvidia proprietary driver totally borked the system.

Anonymous said...

If you look at the last 30 days PCLinuxOS is clobbering Ubuntu. Sabayon is getting very popular too.

steve said...

The only reason I won't never consinder to use PCLinuxOS is because most of the people there seem to be aggressive fanboys.

They have easily scored the second place on my most-hated-and-annoying-distro/linux-company-list after Novell (+Linspire+Xandros) just for being arrogant hypocrites.

Maybe those fanboys should do some math before citing distrowatch.org every other day.

As you easily see, the different desktop enviroments and flavours are counted seperately.

EITHER you count only PCLinuxOS' Gnome desktop too or you count all Ubuntu distros. That's called a "fair comparison".

2541 (Ubuntu) +451 (Kubuntu) +271 (Xubuntu) +268 (Ubuntu Studio) +244 (ubuntu CE) +144 (Fluxbuntu) +65 (Edubuntu) seems to be a bit more than PCLinuxOS (2511), even if Mint (1016) isn't counted and Distrowatch's "Page Hit Ranking" is a stupid idea comparing popularity.

Don't like it?
STFU.

Abhay said...

Hey Steve,
I like PCLOS but I totally agree that Ubuntu is far much more popular. I again say that I have mentioned this even in my blog.
"If we look at any other popularity criteria, we find that Ubuntu is way ahead of others ( including PCLOS) ."

The reason why I do not want to count all of Canonical Distributions is because I am comparing PCLOS and Ubuntu and not PCLOS and Canonical distros.
Canonical offers many distributions, Ubuntu is the most dominant of them all. However, Kubunut, Xubuntu etc are all different distros, probably this is the reason they are listed separately on Distrowatch.

Do excuse me, but are you still sure that I am acting as a fanboy, or it could be someone else who "Hates" many other distributions.
Just kidding...

Anonymous said...

PCLinux ir fine, much better than Ubuntu, faster, stable and just works :)

Abhay said...

Thanks for all the comments.
I am yet to see a comment or a comparison which says that Ubuntu is better than PCLOS, usability/stability wise.
At the same time I agree that Ubuntu community is perhaps the best, but PCLOS is also growing.

Anonymous said...

Steve, going on about people on thhe PCLOS site being "rabid fanboys" is ridiculous. They are no more "rabid" than the people on the Ubuntu forums, take your blinders off.
I've used both, and frankly, PCLOS isn't perfect, but it's far more usable with less work, and most stuff "just works".
Personally I prefer Gnome, but as far as KDE distros go, PCLOS is damn good.

Anonymous said...

What I am seeing left out in this discussion is the fact that when you say PCLOS is "BETTER" than ubuntu just because everything "Just works". You are forgetting that Ubuntu tries not to ship with proprietary software intentionally to encourage people to use and support the open source community. Yeah, they could have mp3 playability, Flash, Java, DVD Codecs right out of the box if they wanted to, but they CHOOSE not to do so! If everyone keeps using proprietary "free as in beer" software from adobe or sun, projects like gnash will never get the support they need and deserve to become viable alternatives to using non-open source "free as in speech" software. I like PCLOS, it is a pretty stable linux distro, but it would not be considered better than ubuntu by some people if it tried to support open source more as ubuntu does.

Anonymous said...

Most people want a desktop where things just work. They don't care about how or why, they just want to use it, not spend hours/days installing crap to make it actually usable. PCLOS accomplishes this.

I've lost count of the number of distros I've test-driven, but I always seem to keep coming back to PCLOS. It just does what you want, with little fuss. Everything is just so easy to setup and use.

Anonymous said...

I used ubuntu 7.10 with the following hardware CPU-AMD athlon64 2800 chipset VIA K8M800, Video card- XFX Nvidia 6200 , Monitor - OLD analog monitor 15"

I had many problems like
1.garbled display running live cd & after install(it tries to display something at high res or high refresf rates). fixed it by editing xorg.conf

2.proprietary nvidia drivers from nvidia did not install properly.

3.no multimedia support out of the box.

4.applications like d4x quit unexpectedly

5.firestarter quits after some time on its own

6. had much better xperience with mint cassandra which is ubuntu 7.04 based. everthing worked.

tried pclinuxos 2007 & ican say it is much better in every aspect than ubuntu7.10. pclinuxos 2007 rocks!

thanks
s r patnaik

Anonymous said...

Does it really MATTER Which Linux is the most POPULAR?? I've used many distros over the past 8 years and AS A Linux user on DIAL-UP I can only say that PC Linux OS 2007 is unique and soo EASY....

THE FIRST & ONLY TUX WORKS OUT-OF-THE-BOX. Smooth & EASY install on any computer WITHOUT FUSS OR MESSING ABOUT WITH CHASING DRIVERS or anything!!

PC LINUXOS 2007 recognises all St Vincent de Paul's various machines hardware whether my own new Benq notebook or any of the old donated pc's which we at St Vinnies fix, or canablise to enable the needy to get a pc & go online.

We are not a group of HiTek nerds. We are an mixed bunch of oldies (ALL Volunteers) who want the strugglers of this world to join also the modern world without going without other essentials.

PCLinuxOS 2007 JUST WORKS FIRST FINE EVERY TIME, and WE Love it!!!!! Yes, we know many other distros ARE more popular or known but NONE ARE AS EASY ON ALL..

OLD BOX or NEW NOTEBOOK, Dialup or wifi or whatever.
AT LAST...
THX pcLinuxos 2007

Anonymous said...

PCLOS boots more than twice as fast as Ubuntu. Another great feature is that it lets me open and shut my laptop without a problem. Windows nor Ubuntu did that from a fresh install.

Anonymous said...

I bought a Dell 1501 lappy Xmas 2006 they had only just come to market. I dumped windows and installed Ubuntu 6.1 i think it was back then but alas it took till Feb 2007 before SATA drive could even be seen properly. I spent the rest of 2007 fighting with Broadcom 43xx crap drivers and ndiswrapper only to fight it some more each time a new kernel was released.

Then i found PCLinux 2007..oh my it works and the latest minime version is amazing. It actually brings on my wifi light and connects to my router without any hardware globs or downloading windows drivers etc and this is the first distro ever to accomplish this task!! Within 45 minutes i downloaded a pile of goodies i wanted on my system and had compiz working perfect ATI drivers everything rosy.

Of course i did get ubuntu working eventually but it was kinda of bland a bit boring actually and KDE eye candy is sweet compared to nome. Wine works so easy now with Wine Doors almost everything is a mouse click experience. The less often i have to play in that old terminal screen the better and PCLOS is one of the very few distros that meet this challenge.

Anonymous said...

I have an old Dell Precision 210 with dual PIII 600MHz processors and 512MB RAM. Neither MS Win 98 nor Win XP would run on it satisfactorily. I tried installing Ubuntu on it several times, but kept running into different issues--system crash after update, crash after installing NVidia driver, difficulty configuring ISA sound card, etc, and decided to try PCLinux. Worked like a charm (almost--had difficulty with the ISA sound card, but running alsaconf fixed it). Now the system speed is comparable to my Athlon X2 2800+ running MS Win XP. I'm sold.

Unknown said...

I know ZILCH about Linux, long time Windows user, disillusioned by all the flashy rubbish associated beyond XP.

Migrated to Mac but have been trying distros. I must agree with many of the above.

PCLinux installed easier, it picked up and allowed me to setup my wireless and was a pleasure to use. The only thing that gave me a bit of a problem was its initial screens were low res and it was only a matter of trawling through ALL the options to find a good one.

All this on an 'old' laptop I bought and have replaced twice since. It works an absolute treat and allows me to make it look like something I want to keep. I'm now thinking of running it in a Virtual Machine alongside XP Pro (the best EVER windows platform) on my Mac.

Anonymous said...

Very nice thanks you for you Fiyat

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