Saturday, October 20, 2007

Revisiting "10 reasons to try PCLinuxOS"

Tuxmachines is a good website for some Linux enthusiasts (though my favorite is Distrowatch). Sometimes back I was looking for PCLinuxOS MiniMe reviews and hit http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/12897

In that page I liked the backgrounding to PCLinuxOS by the author, Gfranken. Especially his experience with Mandrake, and information on Texstar were very faithful accounts. Gfranken concluded the page with "10 reasons to try PCLinuxOS", that's what I liked the most. Those 10 reasons were so true and inspiring that I could not help stop myself from gluing my experience to them. Those reasons justify why PCLOS superseded its parent, Mandriva.

pclinuxos minime screenshot

Hope this post will inspire many wannabe users to try PCLinuxOS, a productive desktop Linux.

Top Ten reasons to install and use PCLinuxOS:

  1. It's drop dead gorgeous, and very professional looking.
    I tried PCLOS from its .92 stage. Graphically it was better than the Mandriva (and other KDE-centric distros). The default themes, panels, control center and almost everything were really good, but you could still customize that as per your fancy and get better results. PCLinuxOS developers have pushed this look-n-feel factor very high in the 2007 final version. The look of PCLinuxOS 2007 is fanciful yet very professional.

  2. The Beryl/Compiz 3D acceleration effects are terrific--much better than any other distro I've tried.
    The Beryl/Compiz effects did not work on my VIA/Intel hybrid PIV PC with 32 MB shared graphic memory. But I was so sure of its glamour that I purchased a used NVidia (128 MB) graphic card and configured it on my PC. The result was really stunning. What's more, the 3D effects were so well integrated that it worked on very less system resource. But I had some problem in configuring NVidia in Mandriva, Ubuntu and Fedora. Hats off to Tex!

  3. The repository has over 5000 packages, and updates are incredibly prompt, smooth, and easy to do. Synaptic, the GUI package manager works easily and reliably with the repository's RPM packages. Dependency issues are usually well handled. All the development programs and libraries are up to date.
    I have no complains, I always get what I need, from the repositories. I have witnessed PCLinuxOS repository enriching over the years. I am not sure whether the repository is deliberately planned for desktop users, they will never be sorry for what they are looking for. Of course, there were some downtimes in the repository servers. But they soon became up and running.

  4. An up to date KDE version (3.5.6).
    KDE is the most happening desktop environment in Linux world. Though I have always liked GNOME for its simplicity and responsiveness, I fell in love with PCLinuxOS-KDE connection. It's clean, fast and up to date. The distro never went out of its way for the eye-candy, it has always maintained the best of usability under the hood of KDE.

  5. Bugs, problems, and issues are promptly fixed.
    That's reason why PCLinuxOS 2007 is so stable. While tinkering .92 and .93a versions of PCLOS I sometimes messed up the settings, but 2007 is so tightly integrated that you will always get a healthy desktop, no matter what you do in terms of tweaks and tinkerings. Of course, you can break the system as a root user, and that's a no-excuse case, you can break your BSD desktop or Debian also.

  6. The PCLinuxOS community is positive and helpful. Documentation is excellent.
    Support is excellent.I found the PCLinuxOS forum to be very friendly. And PCLinuxOS magazines are so enlightening that I religiously read every issue of it. It has always helped me to use PCLinuxOS better and understand the OSS and Linux further. I feel very elated getting answers to my questions from PCLOS developers, sometimes from Tex, himself!

  7. It's quick and snappy.
    Very very right. The pace has been improving steadily. My PCLinuxOS 2007 desktop boots in 30 seconds. I am sure it will improve further in the next version which might come with KDE 4.

  8. Everything works.
    Well, I use every bit of it. The CLI apps, KDE apps, PCC, Synaptic and the Init setups, everything has worked fine for me. I have just one request to Tex - "Please add wordnet as a default PCLOS application. Every desktop user needs it."

  9. It's very easy to install... and...
    Partitioning, Installation, Network Setup and User Administration, everything is simple, plain and fast. PCLinuxOS 2007 installs on my system in just 10 minutes from the time I popped up the disk. Need I say more!

  10. It doesn't require the largess and financial backing of a millionaire to keep it going.
    Watched the movie Godfather? Remember the dialogues? PCLinuxOS is the Michael of Godfather, it's way ahead the desktop war (Ubuntu, Mandriva, Fedora, Suse…) for its powerful personality that's a best combination of stability, usability and performance. Except that there are no Canonical-like patronage and Redmond-like corporate support.

11 comments:

nikhil said...

Nice posts. But I am very much interested in PCLinuxOS 2008 roadmap. Would you post an article on it?

shawn said...

well no roadmaps to next release...instead of rolling out a new version every six months or so like many distros it tests the new version thoroughly before release and makes it available...so fewer bug fixes..and stable versions..it rolls out beta versions many times before final to thoroghly test before final release...try pclinuxos forums in support pclinuxos.com for more details

manmath sahu said...

Shawn,
Thanks for posting such a nice reply. Let the people know the goal of PCLinuxOS to give the community a usable, stable and high performance desktop; not just frequent releases and updates.
Thanks.

Anonymous said...

PCLinuxOS, the distribution that "Just Works" that would be my motto for them. manmath said it right, and they have accomplished just that goal. I have tried many distro's and there are bunch of good ones out there. But out of all this distribution is the "Big Daddy of all Desktop Linux" home or office. I was a avid SuSE user from 9.0-10.0 thought it was "the Distro" until i decided to give PCLinuxOS a try.Hands down, in my opinion
the stability and performance can't be beat. The friendly usability is a definite plus for new Linux users.
I would recommend this distribution to any Linux user new or seasoned.

manmath sahu said...

netmaskx90, thanks for those lovable words. it would be very nice if you make a list of have's and not's for pclinuxos, so that we will report our request to texstar. i am going to request textstar to incorporate full ntfs rw support in pclinuxos (of course, it's there is repository, but it's better to have it as a default install). plus i will also request him to add wordnet as a default pclos apps.

as you had some time with suse, hope you can suggest some great addition (or removals) for pclinuxos in the next big release that may come under the skin of kde4.

best wishes.

Anonymous said...

O.K. off the top of my head I can't think of anything really important but give me time and I will. As for some personal things I would like to see is a definite hplip update alongside printdrake for better HP printer/scanner support. Full ntfs-rw support incorporated on install as mentioned by manmath. I would also like to see ettercap in the repositories. I'm sure people will ask why, well,,,,, why Wireshark, Kismet, Snort, etc? For the same reason. Just nice to have in the repository pool.
and as for anything else none at the moment but more to follow for sure

manmath sahu said...

netmaskx90, thanks for the wise suggestion.

Anonymous said...

the one thing i dont like maybe bcoz of lack of a big developer team and commercial support is lack of packages.see even package requests are not fulfilled list actually runs to 26 pages.compare with other distros number of packages available.being no.1 distro on distrowatch and having little more than 7000 doesnt make it great!
other than that good distro

manmath sahu said...

Jaws,

Thanks for your observation. But is not 7000 already a big number? I think pclinuxos repository has more than enough if you count applications per task. Proliferating the number will, in my opinion, make the scene chaotic. I don't know you might have a better reason.

Also, PCLinuxOS is for home desktop users. And the number of packages in repository is already too big for it. Well, for other purposes the package-hungry people should switch debian or compile packages themselves.

Thanks for posting comment on this blog. I appreciate your views. May be in future you will see a vast number of packages in pclinuxos repository.

Happy PCLinuxOS computing!

Anonymous said...

as a desktop distro pclinuxos is much more stable than ubuntu.

HRH King Arthure Pendragone said...

Why do pople lie like this-it cantboot up i 30 seconds ok maybe minute. Windos is worse.

Try 3secs running14 things at once in real-time-same time-3 secs
you cant do 2 . Amiga

How about this