Pear Linux doesn’t have a good track record. One reviewer called version 3 ‘a nest of bugs’. When I tried version 5, the live session worked reasonably well, but the installation wouldn’t boot because the configuration files in initrd were faulty: services were being started in the wrong order.

In version 6, the live session gave me a blank screen. I went to tty1 and typed ‘dmesg’, only to get ‘d,esg’: a French keyboard driver! Luckily I knew that I needed ‘d;esg’ and I found the expected message: udev-fallback-graphics had failed, a problem that’s been in and out of Ubuntu since Natty. I gave the command ‘sudo killall Xorg’ and got to the live session: with a request to log in. After a few guesses I went back to tty1 and set a new password. After I’d logged in with it, the screen went black again. This time the problem was ‘non-acceptable hardlink creation was attempted by dconf-service’. I could have tried to install, but I decided that I wasn’t going to let this rubbish mess with my hard drive, so that was that.

The developer describes this version on the web site as ‘The most advanced desktop OS that i never made.’ Well, yes.