Wednesday, September 19, 2007

PCLinuxOS

I'll start by telling you where this distribution comes from. Mandrake is what PCLinuxOS is based on so ultimately that means its rpm based. I guess there are some that feel this is the best distro around. I am not one of them. For starters it uses KDE which is always a miss for me because of the convoluted nature of KDE. Second PCLinuxOS tries to be the end all new user distro and doesn't come any closer to helping Linux come to the desktop than Ubuntu or any other distro that has that goal in mind. It uses the synaptic package manager which for some reason kept failing to download packages. Not to mention that one big kicker is that it didn't come with GAIM initially either. I mainly reviewed this distro out of seeing that it had reached a pinnacle lately with fan-boys. Every day or so in the forums they have some user wanting to tell the already in the know users that they have to try out this distro they think that no one has heard of yet. In Actuality its no better than what i have used before. Especially not good enough to drop what i use and use it in its place. I use Ubuntu currently but don't even feel its the best distro around but that it works for me. Take this as a lesson for fan boys of this particular distro, for every user of a distro that is in love with it there is another who hates it. For a new user looking to find a distro this one would be good to start with as well as Ubuntu Mandriva and Fedora. For seasoned users probably not the greatest distro around and may not even spark your interest.

ID software giving up on linux?

Well nothing is been said as definite yet, however in an article for a German publication ID representatives stated that there were no plans to release a Linux version. I will state that I am saddened by this and that the only reason I buy ID exclusively is that they build a Linux binary of their games. The market has been so dominated by DirectX that game writers are being locked into it as the standard which includes locking it into windows. If somehow ID software gets a chance to read this. I will state that you will want to think about it before just ignoring us altogether. I buy the windows game exclusively to download and install the Linux version. I will stop buying games altogether if another company decides to drop Linux. While I don't fault ID for this trend I feel its another company saying to us users that we cant get what we want because of the Gates Lock-in.