Submitted by “PCLinuxOS is a great distro for individuals who favor rolling updates, performance, and a dedicated community. If you’re a first-time Linux user or if you favor aesthetics over technological prowess, better choices are available.”
“PCLinuxOS is a great distro for individuals who favor rolling updates, performance, and a dedicated community. If you’re a first-time Linux user or if you favor aesthetics over technological prowess, better choices are available.”
I agree with the reviewer on the lack of unified apps and aesthetics across PClinuxOs but the distro makes up for that in other ways (Best Kde distro :-), out of box support for variety of media codecs, Proprietary drivers for my ATI video card ,quick updates for my fav apps and a superb remastering tool)
Edited 2011-02-18 07:04 UTC
The only thing I can really argue is “best KDE Distro,” but that’s purely subjective. And it’s not something I could have argued several months back… many of the KDE-supporting distros have really improved their KDE4 integration, and while PCLOS wasn’t the first to upgrade, they were the first to get a lot of things right. They purposely held onto KDE3 until they felt that KDE4 was damn well ready, and it paid off.
What I will say about PCLOS’ own specific implementation of KDE is that it is easily the most unique, full of tweaks to make you forget you’re using KDE4, and think you’re actually using KDE3. That’s not a bad thing, either: KDE3 was very nice, and PCLOS’ tweaks seem to keep what made it so great while adding new KDE4 features and improvements (ie. the KDE settings menus, new window management features inspired by Windows 7, etc.).
I have a 64-bit machine though, and unfortunately there is no native 64-bit version of this distro, so it was not an option for the system I’m on. I’m almost tempted to install it temporarily anyway to play around with it for a little while; I’ll be distro hopping soon anyway, since Debian Squeeze makes it such a pain in the ass to install nVidia drivers (following the instructions on their site, I always end up with a totally f***ed and unusable system with a flashing cursor/display, no usable command prompt).
ArchLinux has 64bit binaries and is my personal favourite KDE4-compatible distro.
I say “compatible” because it doesn’t ship with a KDE desktop from ISO – you install it from the repositories. However if you’ve had any exposure to Arch this should all be fairly obvious to you.
If you want a KDE4-out-of-the-box distro, then Chakra is based upon Arch: http://chakra-project.org/
I’ve tried to like Arch, and I do, but I always run into problems when actually trying to use it. The single system configuration file is great, and pacman in theory is excellent (dependency checking, etc.), it’s rolling-release, and it gives you a minimum, blazing-fast base to build off of… it’s got so many positive points, but what usually snags me is its packaging system… I just can’t get used to it.
I’ve looked into Chakra, but it was a while back… I might consider it again since it’s probably more mature by now. I admit though, the early testing releases I tried a while back were quite impressive for their stage of development. I can’t even remember what my problems were with it, *if* I even had any (I didn’t actually install it, ran it as a live distro, so my experience with it is relatively limited). Thanks for the suggestion.
I still remember how i held on to my KDE3 installation of PCLOS.It was so good.I believe PCLOS switched to KDE4 when KDE 4.3 came out and i started using KDE from 4.4.I used Arch long back and it needs too much tinkering.
Edited 2011-02-19 00:42 UTC
That sounds about right to me because IMO, it wasn’t until 4.3 when KDE4 really started getting usable. And boom, all of a sudden, PCLOS had it and it was a great implementation compared to many other distros of the time. I wasn’t quite as happy with some other major distros’ implementations until 4.4 or 4.5.
“If you’re a first-time Linux user [..] better choices are available.”
What are you talking about? PCLOS has a few drawbacks, alright, but it’s one of the most beginner-friendly distros out there, and if there’s anything they get right, it is catering to first-time Linux users. It’s not so long ago that Ubuntu really started to catch up on that front.