Suspicious reviews? You decide!

[jj 5117]

All varieties of trolls for all motives, reasons, and any lackings thereof.
Could be (and sounds) rather computer illiterate,
Could be seeking a flame war or other attention,
Could be a hired hit job,
Could be drunk and having repeatedly bad days,
Could be someone that got kicked off of MX forum.

Because DW ratings and reviews have been an occasional forum topic, I left my first review there a few days ago.

[DukeComposed]

Though writing "I have erased all my bootup disks, and will be using another distro. Due to having to shutdown my PC using hard power off -- all the boot drives (SSDs) are corrupted", and then writing the exact same thing five months later... raises some questions on what has actually happened

MX-17 is a little before my time, but I have to guess the default choice of file systems offered in the installer was approximate to ext2/3/4, XFS, JFS, F2FS, btrfs, and FAT32. Of these, only ext2, F2FS, and FAT32 don't offer crash protection through consistency mechanisms such as journaling or copy-on-write. While I've never experimented with F2FS, I can say I tried putting MX on a FAT32 partition last summer and it was unusable.

Of course, I didn't expect it to work and if you set FAT32 as the file system of choice for the root partition in the installer, it will allow the decision but the install will fail.

To put it simply, you have to be doing something that isn't shown in the brochure to end up having a power cycle corrupt your data on a modern Linux box. Either the reviewer experienced a hardware problem and decided to blame the OS, which is all too common, or he installed his machine with, say, ext2, power cycled the machine, saw the fsck, and concluded "my disk must be corrupt". I could expect losing whatever files you were working on at the time, but corrupting multiple drives as this review leads you to believe? Incredible, in the literal sense.

All this assumes, of course, that an anonymous person on a post-shark website I rarely think of and never visit has been completely honest about his experiences and is leaving multiple copy-and-paste 1-star reviews without engaging in any amount of exaggeration or hyperbole whatsoever. To your point, this story seems unlikely. While I'll stop short of saying it flat-out didn't happen, I'll charitably say I suspect the reviewer believes his statements are factual and accurate, but I've been around too long to ignore the fact that some people have a pathological gift for misunderstanding things.

I'm with Eadwine Rose on this one: we should stop discussing DistroWatch reviews as a general custom, and limit conversations about them to the one or two knee-slappers that are bound to crop up every six months or so.

[Adrian]

I'm with Eadwine Rose on this one: we should stop discussing DistroWatch reviews as a general custom, and limit conversations about them to the one or two knee-slappers that are bound to crop up every six months or so.

I agree, because trolls want attention and we are feeding them.

[MXRobo]

Yes.
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I used to look at Distrowatch, but in the last half-year of so, I've been locked out while using a VPN (Proton), but I could view with the VPN when I used Startpage→ Anonymous View, but I quit using it the past few months as it demands that I either accept everything (cookies, etc.) or "Manage your data" which requires that I scroll and then uncheck about 60 individual items – many in Vendor preferences.

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A GNU website that blocks a VPN – although I suppose that it could be a VPN issue.
Jump through dozens of hoops just to view.

I suppose that they could create more viewer alienation if they really tried to.

Cheers!

[davidy]

It's called "Distro Watch". Distro Review it aint. If your pc's freezing up sounds like you're doing it all wrong lmao.

[paulfsams]

I have been using linux since 2003. Mandrake was my first distro (because it was the only one I could install). Mepis opened me to the world of Debian. I have had distros freeze up in the past, but never MXLinux. I can remember in the early days of my use of linux, I would have a problem due to my lack of knowledge. I would get on a forum (all puffed up) and complain loudly, and did not want to admit I didn't know what I was doing. I still received many helpful responses. I know I have drifted off topic, but I wanted to add that in. I use a Mate Desktop instead of XFCE, but that is a personal choice for me. MxSnapshot allows me to keep a backup iso.

[Eadwine Rose]

Guys, it's been fun, but this topic's now closed.