Most of you must have read the story of "Prodigal Son." Actually I also had similar experience. Being a gadget freak I like bringing home latest notebooks and then complaining PCLinuxOS of not working well on that hardware, without realizing the colossal work going into making it rock solid and usable.
Lot of PCLinuxOS users do this only to come back to it after each distro-hopping. There are different kinds of people. Some complain and some find a way for them going to the extremes. Here is my example...
I had that base compaq presario c702 notebook which did not work well on pclinuxos 2007 for some hardware drivers. It started to work after I pulled in all the updates. In my office I had to access internet through wlan and unfortunately my broadcom wlan card did not work. Actually I never noticed it before because I was accessing internet by cable lan.
Time went by. I hopped to mandriva 2008 for a while. Every piece of hardware worked on it after a few tweaking. It is good distro, no doubt about it. But sometimes few problems showed up that never happened with PCLinuxOS. Then I though a while - what to do? I was so much nostalgic about PCLinuxOS that I sold off my latest notebook and brought home an HP notebook having only intel devices - wlan, ethernet, graphics, sound, and everything ensuring it works with PCLinuxOS. Now my notebook is an Audi - great looks, superb performance!
Moral of this True Story
Some people love pclinuxos so much that they can sell off their new hardware that does not work on pclos and get home a new machine confirming its compatibility with that great distro. Cases like this are rare as pclinuxos works fine on most of the hardware...
Plea to All those Distro Hoppers, Gripers and Grumblers
- Keep patience, look for workarounds instead of groaning.
- Thank Tex and the Ripper Gang. After all, if anything works in pclos it works the best, because it goes through much testing unforeseen on other distros.
- Or follow my path, brought home a machine that works just perfect on pclos.
3 comments:
Good post. I think it would be better by being more detailed, i.e. explaining some of the problems that you were having with Mandy.
thanks brendon.
there were many problems but the most annoying of them all is the packages.
i installed several packages from mandriva 2008 repo, surprisingly many of them did not work well. for example i installed winff (it's an ffmpeg frontend) and it just did not repond at all. even surprisingly imagemagick did not work the way it should. there are so many others problems. none of these problems happened with pclinuxos.
I also did the switch from PclinuxOS to Mandriva 2008.1.
I was happy PClinuxos but became frustrated with problems with HP Printer drivers and Intel Wireless devices that did not work out of the box. I did manage to get these devices working but with some effort finding the correct files.
I installed Mandriva 2008.1 on my Acer Aspire Laptop and it found the atheros wireless device, correct configuration of keyboard and powersave features.
The HP printer was found straight away. Hardware compatibility on Mandriva seems to be the selling point to me compared with other Linux systems.
I was getting impatient waiting for the new 2008 PCLinuxOS.The attitude of ¨It will be ready when it is ready¨ from the Hierarchy of the PClinuxOS team - I know it is a community based and does not have the manpower to push out updates quickly.
I need an Linux operating system with a direction and goals. Mandriva has that over PCLinuxos. It is fast stable, easy to use, the package manager Urpmi is excellent.
The OS of your choice is a personal matter and I understand that your feelings made you upgrade the Laptop to one that was capable of running PCLinuxOS.
For me I have not looked back. Mandriva has improved greatly of the past couple of years and in my opinion is as good if not better than PCLinuxOS.
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