PCLinuxOS and Ubuntu - communities divided
Oli from ThePCSpy wrote a review on PCLOS2007 where he proclaimed a strong distaste for the Draklive installer, arguing that Ubuntu's partition manager (Gparted) was a superior implementation. Many read his review as a means of promoting Ubuntu by pulling PCLOS down and that certainly wasn't his intention - but let's not get into that now.
I stated in my review that I was deeply concerned by the actions of the PCLOS community and while I was very impressed with the release itself, the childish actions of *some* community members soured the taste a little bit. This spread over into my review where discussion remained off topic and most users felt the need to comment on the situation rather than my review. I can't help but wonder what's going on?
The impression I get is that there's this massive, unhealthy rivalry between PCLinuxOS and (K)Ubuntu
It feels as if the PCLOS community feel threatened by Ubuntu and believe that underhand tactics may be at work. Don't people realise that it's just different horses for different courses? You're all working towards the same final goal; your releases ARE different and deliberately so. It goes without saying that SOME PEOPLE will consider elements of Ubuntu better than their PCLOS counterparts, and VICE VERSA. Linux weights a lot of decision on the user's personal preferences so it seems daft to become ultra defencive when one such user expresses their opinion.
I'm a PCLinuxOS fan - I love the way it works and think that it has an awful lot going for it, but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate the good things about alternatives.
Why have these two communities become so secular and divided in their joint goal? It's unhealthy and I do believe that it's ill-founded too. The Linux community needs to distance itself from that stereotypical "fanboy" view and events like this do nothing for the cause. So please, let's learn to get along before things get entirely out of hand.
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