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As you may be aware, Walmart sells PC’s with Linux as the operating system through their online store. The specific distro is called gOS, or Good OS. When I first heard of this, I didn’t think much of it, expecting that they would just use one of the many fine Linux distributions available. Then I ran across a mention by Cybernet that made mention of how Mac-like it was. Having spent some time drooling over various Macs on assorted store shelves, I suddenly intrigued. Mac cool without the Mac price tag? I like that idea!

I downloaded the live DVD from the website, and ran it on my PC. But before I get into my personal experience with it, let me just throw a couple of technical specs at you. gOS is supposed to be able to run very well on a system with the following minimum hardware requirements:

• 700 MHz x86 processor
• 384 MB of system memory (RAM)
• 8 GB of disk space
• Graphics card capable of 1024×768 resolution
• Sound card
• A network or Internet connection

Given that I am running a 2.4Ghz dual-core Athlon, with way more memory than is strictly required, I should have been good. It also bears noting that live CD or DVD distibutions will always run slowly, just because they run off of the media, not your hard drive. Unfortunately, the live DVD did not work well for me. In fact it ran so poorly that I was out of there, and back to my regular Mandriva inside of 20 minutes.

gOS took the expected time to load, but after that, everything else was sub standard. The animations were jerky, apps were way to slow to load, even for a live distro. If I had a system that I didn’t mind trashing, I would do a proper install to hard drive, just to see if that is the problem. But if my experience is any indicator, I don’t see too many people adopting gOS based on the live DVD experience.

I wish I could tell you more about it, but the overall experience was so frustrating that I couldn’t stand to stay there long enough to actually test anything. Sorry ’bout that… if anybody has done an install of gOS, please feel free to let us know of your experience in the comments.