PCLinuxOS is boring!
One great thing about Linux is the furious 6 month development cycle that most major distributions use. That’s right, no matter if you use Ubuntu, Mandriva or Fedora you will get a fresh bleeding edge version of the operating system twice a year. The fresh releases have loads of bugs on the release date, then they are maturized for a few months and once the projects get the stability up, it is time to install or upgrade to the next bleeding edge version. Unfortunately there are also distributions that do not offer this excitement. One of these distributions is the PCLinuxOS, usually abbreviated as PCLOS.
The PCLinuxOS uses a somewhat different approach. Instead of pushing out an entirely new distribution versions twice a year, they have been incrementally updating the distribution in terms of application versions and system core components. This is often titled as the rolling update approach. The previous full release of PCLOS is the 2007 version which was released almost a year ago. It shipped with Firefox 2.0.0.3, OpenOffice 2.2.0, KDE 3.5.6 and so on, but with the rolling updates philosophy it is still up-to-date after applying the updates with Synaptic. A PCLOS 2007 user still has latest stable versions of applications, and a fairly new kernel as well.
The approach that PCLOS has chosen makes distribution boring and extremely non-challenging. First of all, the PCLOS seems to be very stable and doesn’t have any of the embarrassing bugs that the bleeding edge distributions have. The upgrades are incremental, so the risk of regression errors (new bugs introduced by updates and fixes) is very well managed. This is not the case with distributions that make a new release every 6 months, as they seem to be able to break a lot of things in between the versions. In other words using PCLOS you miss all the anticipation of waiting bug fixes and the excitement of installing your system for scratch twice a year, not to mention the feeling of guts and glory if one is brave enough to perform a system upgrade to the latest release.
Seriously speaking, I think the 6 month development cycle is hurting the popularization of Linux operating systems. The whole point of frequent cycle is to keep the development pace fast. Indeed, desktop Linux distributions have made amazing progress for the last few years and are now more and more considered as suitable for regular desktop user as a Windows replacement. However, now that Linux has caught up with the competition in basic features and usability, the path to success would be to finalize, fine-tune, stabilize and productize the distributions. This finalizing effort takes time and does not fit to the twice a year upgrade cycle. After all Microsoft has ben stabilizing Windows XP for seven years and a new service pack is still to be released!
Another problem is that due to release frequency the Linux distributions way too short product life cycle – the main applications may only be offered updates for about a year or so. This is very unfortunate, as key applications are showing rapid progress, like the OpenOffice for an example which has been improving a lot recently in every updated version. Linux by nature is a very well upgradeable system, so why this feature is not utilized more? Instead the users are pushed with releases that are buggy on the release date and have a very short life-cycle – both of these characteristics are very unappealing for the Joe Average.
The Linux distributions should look more into the rolling updates approach, slow down the release cycle to at least 12 months. Product life cycle should be extended to three years, to provide stability and predictability for home and small office users. Many Linux distributions have trouble working out a business model, so perhaps the extended life cycle with applications updates might be a feature that people would be ready to pay for? Linux would be very suitable for small and home offices, but no entrepreneur is willing to reinstall the computers every year.
Luckily PCLinuxOS is different and I can continue the boring life of actually working with the operating system, instead of working on it. Radically simple!
August 10th, 2008 at 6:17 am
Les. who are you adressing to – you are not making too much sense with your comments.
August 9th, 2008 at 4:33 am
You need to email me and tell me just what you have against a negative attitude of Pclinux. It’s not the cure to computing. It’s not the next generation os. In fact, of all of the great things it offers, it is only a Mandriva copy–yet still a generic for a real os. I will not stop posting until I get a response. You have my email. Try to be brave and express yourself.
August 9th, 2008 at 4:22 am
I guess you didn’t like my post. I guess I expected to communicate to adults. I guess I was wrong. I wrote a comment and obviously it was deleted. What kind of imbred myopic mugwumps visit this site that they cannot accept another opinion. What a bunch of non-computer losers. Go to Microsoft. You act like Bill Gates–all of you. I am using Pclinux now and it’s a bitch. It is garbage. It will never be what Ubuntu is. In fact, Pclinux is no better than a typewriter.
July 15th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
#Amuhy1001
“rolling release Distro, every so often, the Distro’s devs release a new updated ISO.”
Sounds similar to “service pack”, “rollup”, whatever.
Instead of “silently” updating the downloadable, i think appending a 3rd level to the iso ver number should indicate an update. This append number could be the update date… e.g. hypothetical (all of these would be full iso):
In 2007, pclinuxos2007.iso – the new release.
2 months later in 2007, pclinuxos2007.1.iso – includes all bugfixes for the 1st release (plus some package updates).
In Feb 2008, pclinuxos2007.1.20080207.iso includes package updates, patches, etc as of 20080207. So, pclinuxos2007.1.20080207.iso is the 2008 iso, after a bugfix (2008.1), and w/patches as of 20080207 (2007.1.20080207)
(For readabilty, i’ve omitted the “i686″, “ppc”, etc from those iso names)
July 2nd, 2008 at 3:50 pm
The comments about those releasing cicles are totally flawed. That sounds as the people saying Gentoo was dead because they didn’t released a 2008 version at that time -People who doesn’t know what a release cycle is-. I was using it (real bleeding edge) and never had to upgrade because I had the last of the last. Gentoo 2007.1 was just *years* ahead from Ubuntu “Hardly Linux wow edition” and I don’t know why some people associate Ubuntu so often with bleeding edge. Do they know what it means?
Lets face it: the people who doesn’t know anything about the “state of the art” of free software tends to loose perspective in favor of *technobable*.
PCLOS design and usability as a complete distro is very ahead of things like Ubuntu. (And I wonder why the RPM system works so cool there…) Ubuntu “technologies” (ie. Upstart) have demonstrated across the time that Ubuntu’s ideas just doesn’t work. But the propaganda pushes the noobs to repeat the stupidities they are told. They change their perception of a product at the same time they doesn’t know what they want (many of them use Windows concepts to make parallels of linux distros…)
In the end PCLOS with the many tools they took from Mandriva can be some day the n00b tool of choice, and they will be respected by the people who knows what is under the carpet because they have got a correct sauce: simplicity good design power for customizing the system.
That’s my sincere opinion.
June 23rd, 2008 at 12:09 am
manmath sahu I agree with you but read in one of the pclos forums that the community is working on releasing an updated iso quarterly. I think it’s a great idea and hopefully they will deliver the goods for those without high speed which was me not too long ago. When I’m trying a new distro I still like an updated iso even with a fast connection with a rolling update release. PCLOS has been running so stable for so long it truly is boring. I wouldn’t want it any other way.
June 13th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
i am a long time pclos user. though i use various distros now and then i stick to pclos. it’s a good distro if you are connected to net. but many people who are not connected (there are many in the third world especially india, pakistan, bangladesh, nepal etc. and many african countries) find it very hard to configure if they are installing it on the latest hardware….they can’t download a jumbo 500mb of updates. so this time many people are waiting for pclinuxos 2008 quite eagerly.
April 3rd, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Great review.. rolling updates are very good for PCLOS and I like it… The best distro with a release cykle is ubuntu… OpenSuse, FEdora etc etc has to many bugs at the beginning.. Ubuntu had the nvidia driver bug that crashed the system during install and really weird screen problems so I vote for Sidux, PCLOS, Arch and all the other rolling updates distros…