Yep, you saw that right. PCLinuxOS has bumped Ubuntu from the top spot on distrowatch. This is the first time since the release of Hoary Hedgehog several years ago that [tag]Ubuntu[/tag] has not held the number one spot. This blogger seems extraodinarily surpized by it, citing all the things which Ubuntu does right and [tag]PCLinuxOS[/tag] does wrong. But he doesn’t mention what PCLinuxOS has done right all along, and Ubuntu never did. See there were basically three generations of Linux distributions in history. The very first generation was largely confined to programmers and consisted of basically building the whole thing from nothing. Technically these were not even really distro’s. Modern source distributions like Gentoo cannot be considdered first-gen btw. since they do have structured install methods and packages. The second generation started with Slackware really, and the main difference was that they used prebuilt packages to install the distribution’s various software pieces. Distro’s like redhat, suse and Debian are still 2nd generation today, and 2nd-gen distro’s are the best server distro’s around. However, since the turn of the century a third generation began to appear.
These are primarily recognizable by one thing: they ship as liveCD’s, which can be modified live while booted, and installed ready to use (with such modifications in place). This has massive advantages for a desktop distribution – particularly as it lets the user verify his hardware compatibility prior to the actual installation. The major groundwork that would lead to 3rd-gen distro’s was laid by knoppix, though knoppix never really considered installation important and therefore never really became a complete 3rd-generation. It could be installed, but this was difficult and even today is largely manual.
To the best of my knowledge, the first true third-generation distro was OpenLab 4.0 – which I designed (due credit, I had a lot of outside influences). This made OpenLab actually a successful contender against the might of Ubuntu’s marketing forces. But OpenLab was just the first, since then a number of other distributions have followed suit. The best known being PCLinuxOS and SimplyMepis. These were true 3rd-generation distros. PCLinuxOS even shares with OpenLab the design concept of having a login screen on the LiveCD where a guest user is just a normal livecd experience, but the root account is used for installations.
Third-generation distributions do not leave the concept of packages behind, they are still used for the user to install add-on software later, but skips the complexity of packages for the basic install, providing a solid set of pre-installed and preconfigured packages right from the get-go.
Ubuntu is still not a true 3rd-generation distribution, although it did copy the basic feature in some later versions this remains unstable and Ubuntu states that it is still not the prefered method of installation.
It doesn’t end there. Ubuntu has a habit of ignoring bugs that aren’t fun, leaving users to struggle with things that (to them) are critical. For the longest time Ubuntu users had no way of graphically setting up a pppoe connection, in fact to do it at all you had to download a package… hold on – that’s right, to get online, you had to be online first (by comparison, OpenLab had this included before Hoary Hedgehog was ever released)
This lack of attention to detail is why Ubuntu never deserved to be in the topspot. Ubuntu was always a lot of hype, never anything else. I couldn’t say this when I was a distro developer, but now, not being one anymore I can give an unbiassed view that Ubuntu was never all that good and in fact the number of newbies who were referred to it probably did Linux growth more harm in recent years than even the Novell/Microsoft deal. I stand by my belief that there is no better desktop distribution available today than PClinuxOS.
Having said that, I don’t believe Ubuntu is always a bad distro, I myself recommended kubuntu to a customer on a major recent project. But, I knew I would be the one setting it up. That changed everything – I knew that no linux newbie would ever have to deal with the first six weeks of life with Ubuntu. Everywhere else, I will keep recommending PCLinuxOS until there is something truly better (which may be just the next version of it).
It took a long time, but finally, people are starting to see through the hype, and PCLinuxOS is holding the postion it should have had all along.
