Review of PCLinuxOS 2010
To be honest, I have pretty much standardized in my own house on Opensuse for the desktop. However, for whatever reason, call it nostalgia or habit, whatever, I keep one system running PCLinuxOS.
To be honest, I was pretty cheesed at having to do another full install to update to 2010. In this day and age of supposed ‘rolling repositories” this should be a thing of the past. Even Opensuse as of 11.2 does not require full blown installs anymore, as full system upgrades are now possible in their system. Call me spoiled by Debian and Opensuse, I admit it.
I held off on upgrading for quite awhile even after the 2009 repos were shut off and I could get no more updates at all. I asked myself, ” Do I really want to stick with this community distro after I have walked away from all other community distros?”, (except for Mint, whose Debian base I simply cannot wait for).
Finally, I decided yes, I will go ahead with the upgrade. I have someone who I consider a good friend who is still very involved on that project and for her, I will give it a shot (shout out to CSolis).
I downloaded the KDE ISO, because PCLinuxOS works everything to do it’s best under KDE (even though I am not a huge fan of KDE myself) I will let it put it’s best foot forward.
I booted the CD and it booted to a command prompt. YAY ME!! ( NOT)
I logged in as root at the prompt and gave it the good old “startx” and it was off and running the way it should have.
I had backed up my important stuff (or at least I thought I did, but, that’s another story) so I gave it all the space the old install had.
2010 comes with KDE 4.4 but they have set it up to resemble the old KDE 3 as people are used to seeing it in PCLinuxOS. I honestly say I appreciate that as I always thought PCLinuxOS had the best KDE presentation around in terms of customization.
Naturally, I installed Gnome and Xfce because I much prefer Xfce over the others with Gnome a close second.
First off, I must say several apps behave much better than they did previously. The improvement of device drivers makes me overjoyed as I now have two cameras and a digital voice recorder that work very well under PCLinuxOS than in the previous install.
Wine, (as much as it pains me to use it for certain things, but that’s also another issue) seems to be performing extremely better for me in this release than the previous, both in the updated version of Wine included and the manner in which it is packaged and configured by default in PCLinuxOS.
IF I have to recommend a community distro to people, I have to keep PCLinuxOS at the top of the list of the two that I recommend. (I only put Mint as second because it is still based on Ubuntu and I don’t care what the buntu fans say, it’s good, but it’s not all that. Let me get hold of a solid working Debian based Mint and all bets are off.)
All in all, I really have to give PCLinuxOS a big thumbs up for this release. It is polished and more importantly to me, it works very well.
For what it’s worth, PCLinuxOS will stay on this machine, it has earned it.
