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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It will never go away, it’s human nature... I just like to sit back and watch the show... (hehe)
New users also tend to come in and go around making comments as if they are one of the devs, that’s one which really urks me.
They love to make comments defending their OS, then run back to their forums to post links to it to show everyone how loyal they are... These are usually the types who get very little recognition in the real world and are desperate for acceptance and a pat on the back.
I have always remained the person who chooses to realize that
a. it’s just a car
b. it’s just a game
and finally... c. it’s just an OS
Many others in this world choose to remain in "high-school" mode and continue on with the constant drama... I guess they need it to keep life exciting
I can’t stand arguing with people in my own home, much less, with people who may very well live on the other side of the world..
But, it’s fun to watch the fights....
as linux is rising the Most Used Linux Distros are beginning to be a replacement from M$ .. I myself "hate" winblows i used to test security vulnerabilities but winblows is not a good OS for those type of things
pclos installed perfectly , allowing me to dual-boot with xp
pclos works with all my hardware with the exception of my wireless card which uses the new ralink chipset, but i dont use the wireless anyway
in my 5 days of using linux, i have set it up so it looks how i like it, installed some useful apps like nvidia drivers & nvclock, truecrypt, crossover etc
i have now installed pclos on my work pc, if crossover meets my requirements, and its clear that standard office work is not compromised by the switch to linux, i may roll out pclos across the company which atm uses warez versions of xp !!!
certainly for general web usage. mp3 and movie watching, pclos is a class above xp, feeling fast and fresh , with noticeably less heavy disk access and cpu spiking
Someone must really like this distro because it has really taken a lot of criticism over clearly personal choice issues, and Texstar et. al just got tired of it. But back to my point; here is what he did by his post: 1) rallied his troops and reinforced a sense of community, i.e., us and them. 2) Gave his troops a clear goal. What to do, how to do it and where. 3) Reinforced the idea of fair and balanced dialog. He did not suggest that the troops do anything nasty or underhanded-just tell the truth. Sounds exactly like what a leader should do to me.
Both distro’s are very good and appeal to lots of linux users for a variety of reasons.
Whatever your distro you use, enjoy it and accept that other people have different systems and experiences.
The’re entitled to their views which may be different to yours, but no less valid.
As the old saying goes : "One man’s meat is another man’s poison"
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Great point of view!!!!!!!!!!!!!! We got to work together as a strong, healthy and colaborative community. Ubuntu, PC Linux OS, Open Suse, Fedora, Debian, Mandriva and all the great Linux Distros we can choose from must be congratulated for THE WONDERFUL JOB their developers are doing, in order to give us the privilege of using stable, efficient, good looking, powerful and easy to use Linux Systems. Thank them all!!!
by Eduardo
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Couldn’t have said it better myself. Last Friday evening I was finally able to do something I had wanted to do for months. I nuked XP off my system. :) It feels good to be a ’Linux only’ house again. It’s been a while. :)
Vista is the best thing to happen to Linux in a long while. It’s so horrible Dell is offering XP to consumers, instead of just businesses which would be normal after an OS release. M$ is driving folks away in droves. We need to be ready to welcome them with open arms.
I run PCLinuxOS but I tried a multitude of distros. Ubuntu was the first. To this day, I can only get 800x 600 video, but I burn and try every release, to see if it’s changed. There are many distros that will simply not even boot on my system.
There are many reasons to pick a distro, it works with your hardware from the git is right up there as reasons to do so. :) Thank you Linus, and Alan, and all the kernel hackers, and especially rcs and the GPL.
People that don’t understand think that the multitude of distros is ’overwhelming’ to the newbie. Truth be told that is the single biggest strength of Linux. It runs on anything you can throw at it. Despite hardware vendors doing their absolute best to ignore us they are going to have to change their tune soon enough.
I have personally run a lamp system on a 90Mhz Pentium with a 2GB SCSI drive long ago. It had 32MB RAM. My video card has more than that now. I did that to learn about Linux and web servers and firewalls and mail and... I had a helluva lot of fun doing it.
Bill
PERSONALLY, I do agree that PCLinuxOS’s installer (partitioning) is pretty horrible, the DiskDrake or w/e really isn’t newbie friendly AT ALL, I know, I had to partition a drive for my friend like on Tuesday this week! And yes I would prefer Ubuntu’s installer because it is much more noob friendly. I don’t use either Ubuntu/PClinuxOS as my primary distro, but Arch. BUT i do believe PCLinuxOS IS a better migration distro from Windoze to GNU/Linux. SO whatever floats your boat people.
To repeat, the original article WAS correct in stating it installer can be better, AND I do support Texstars comment since there was nothing wrong in it at all, by hammering he meant advocating and informing others of how much they like the distro, not to attack/hammer the blog/post/article. So you are all making a mountain out of a molehill, and ill defend this Texstar guy because he NOR the blog poster was at fault 1 damn bit....
I don’t delete blog/article threads on principal* but I sent Texstar an email offering to put a statement from him on the actual post. Still nothing back. If you know a magical way to get his attention, ask him to read/reply to it.
* I get a million 404 errors popping through the system, links on other peoples’ pages break and this is something that happened.
He apologised but that doesn’t take us back in time before it happened. This is a lesson for anybody operating as a leader in public..
I’m not going to add to it or use it as a bad reason to use PCLOS... It’s just something that happened and people can make what they like from it.
I don’t think it’s "militant" to support avid postings in response to Ubuntu-supporting blogs, by supporting PCLinuxOS or pointing out valid balanced flaws in Ubuntu. Yes, even avid postings. I think it’s a response to have voices be heard in response, and obviously comments bear much less weight than articles themselves, so more would be needed.
With that said however, in the heat of the moment, I think Tex’s apology was a good move. Tex could have asked for avid postings in response, showed his general frustration, and at the same time, cautioned people not to ignite a mud-throwing contest, but to maturely point out the pros of PCLinuxOS and the cons of Ubuntu in appropriate places for publicity response. And Oli, don’t antagonize him for it and say that he could have handled his apology better -- come on. You reacted hastily in your review, Tex posted his thoughts hastily in forums in regard to it.
A little bitter rivalry never hurt anyone -- let’s just keep it on that level and not let it get out of hand! :)
You got your apology. The decent thing for you to do would have been be to remove the entry. The fact that you didn’t shows that you are lacking in some very important human traits yourself. At least Texstar showed some maturity after the incident. Too bad you can’t say the same.
Please notice I only got the apology *after* I published the blog post... Things could have been sorted a lot earlier with a simple email to me rather than an IRC kickban =)
I don’t think this is creating any sort of hatred inside the Linux community -- it’s just a lesson that everybody that might have an extreme viewpoint probably should moderate their language and even tone to better explain things to other people. It’s a lesson on how to collaborate when you have differing views from your colleagues.
If the Linux community as a whole wants to gain respect from real outsiders, it needs to show that it can be mature. Rather than calling for everybody to stop talking about it, why don’t we look at getting people to look at why we should respect other peoples’ views on a subject rather than calling then names and trying to undermine their credibility.
Look at davemc comment to see why publicizing that incident is wrong. Texstrar in human and spoke out of character one time. we should all be allowed the chance to do that, at least once, since we are all imperfect. But, Texstar is now generally known for being "militant", as Oli put it. That is why I call Oli’s blog entry sensationalist. He is taking one incident and trying to defame a very recognizable figure. It reminds me of those paparazzi that bump into famous personalities to get a reaction, and then publish their upset faces and angry words. I guess Oli is enjoying the notoriety. Maybe he has found the way to get the attention that he evidently craves.
You aren’t helping 1 god damn bit with any of these posts along the same line as the other crap. By the way, being HAMMERED wasn’t what he was referring to, hammering is repeating and just advocating his own ART, imagine makin the best you can, NO ADVERTISING, company backing, millio doller advocates, all is just good prise from the community and thier users. I’m defending the dictator of this distro since I believe he desirves SOME respect. I point noobs toward PCLinuxOS ALL THE TIME for an intro to Linux as a viable alternative, I myslef use Arch FULL TIME 100%, and some FreeBSD for sticky situations ( luv FreeSBIE ).
To me YOUR just as bad as any M$ ZEALOT reanting about and defending your own distro, don’t make it a personal battle. We ARE a community, if you don’t want to act like one, you aren’t welcomed into OUR community. Think with your head and not with your ass, sure consutructive critasism IS good, but man, no need to continue such shenanigans.
I humbly request you stop such COMMUNITY bashing, we have enough ditro bashing going around still theses days for this amount of unneded extra crap to deal with, EMPOWER OUR BRETHREN DAMNIT....PLEASE.