(Review) - First off, I'm by and large a full-time Ubuntu user. However, I'm also one of their most vocal critics for becoming so detached from their core market as well. In response, I have used both operating systems and it has been interesting to see how each deals with the issue of usability for the casual user.

The PCLinuxOS Approach. When I started off looking for support from their wiki for my NVIDIA card, I ended up using the search box as a means to locate the support I was looking for. Why this was needed remains beyond me, but this is hardly the only distro to show this fault.

A fast search for NVIDIA brought me to this page . Great! This is exactly what I was looking for, it's just a shame I had to 'search' for it rather than logically adding it into their quickstart guide.

The Ubuntu Approach. Now for the same query, this time on Ubuntu. Right off, we seem to be missing any sort of search box - fantastic. So after using Google's domain search of all things, I finally located this page . Alright, so the big question is why it took Google for me, pretending to be a Windows user looking to install restricted video drivers into Ubuntu, to get the job done?

What is bothersome here is the apparent reliance on the restricted driver manager. Let me share something with you - I have yet to have it install anything correctly, hence my reason for not using it. Smart money would be on providing links to the manual method as well, much like we see with PCLinuxOS as a failsafe.

BulletProof-X: Windows Safe Mode Comes to Ubuntu
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Ubuntu's Documentation Ways Off. With much, much less resources at their disposal, PCLinuxOS has managed to out-think the layout of the user documentation even though much of it is still missing when compared to Ubuntu's. Obviously it could still be laid out better, by good grief, how many new users to Linux are seriously going to happen to wander into the Community Docs section of Ubuntu Help and know to browse under restricted drivers? Easy - zero. Yet with PCLinuxOS, they have at least provided a means of discovery, should the information be available. That and it is listed under hardware, which just makes more sense.

Ubuntu's Community "Migration Guide" for Windows Users. Something that PCLinuxOS might have, be it not obvious to me, is the Switching From Windows guide . Perhaps the single best piece of documentation I have seen to date from either distribution, Ubuntu webmasters should be smacked for not linking to this directly underneath the "download now" link for the distro. бесплатная эротика

That single page covers more frequent questions and frustrations than anything else out there for desktop Linux. Drive paths, software installation and the list goes on. Rather than relying on people to know to go looking for this information, it's laid out in such a way as to become truly accessible for the new Ubuntu user. If Ubuntu's sponsor would care to make it a little more available, we might be getting somewhere.

As for PCLinuxOS, it's a great distro, if you like RPM-based distributions. On the software and marketing front, they are doing very well. But like Ubuntu's docs, they still have some layout fixing to do, as I'm not finding the obvious stuff right away. Short of that, keep up the good work.