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!

• Smooth and responsive user interface
• Powerful shortcut keys and intuitive menus
• Search and find any Gmail message
• View attachments. Open message attachments, including photos, Microsoft Word™ documents, and PDF files.
• Gmail goodness. Spam filtering, search, labels, filters, stars – and lots of storage space

Author: Google
License: Freeware
Download URL for mobile phones: http://gmail.com/app

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