PCLinuxOS is conservative in appeal, latest and greatest in applications

PCLinuxOS is not among the highest ranked GNU/Linux distributions. At the same time, it is not something that we can simply ignore. It is alive for a significant amount of time and has acquired a reasonable position among hundreds of GNU/Linux distributions available in market. Initially, it was forked from Mandriva Linux, later has become an independent rolling distribution which offers different flavors of desktop experience ranging from full fledge KDE Plasma to resource efficient LXDE.

Gracius : Distrowatch Weekly

Latest issue of Distrowatch Weekly (Dated 10/04/2017) has published a review on PCLinuxOS. This review takes us through nukes and corners of PCLinuxOS and gives an impression that, PCLinuxOS is grant success for maintaining it's own position among other GNU/Linux distributions. It offers smooth, resource efficient experience using latest stable applications. Though it is a bit conservative in terms of aesthetic feeling, it offers latest and greatest applications to ensure that, users who trusted on the abilities of PCLinuxOS should not fall behind.

PCLinuxOS is fairly easy to set up, offers good performance and includes a wide range of software. I generally enjoyed using the Plasma 5.8 desktop and the System Settings panel makes it easy to customize the Plasma environment. I very much enjoyed working with the Control Centre as it makes tasks like setting up network shares or working with the firewall easy. In short, there is a lot about PCLinuxOS that I enjoyed.

However, I did run into several minor problems. Nothing show stopping, but a handful of "papercut" style issues that bothered me. For example, PCLinuxOS makes it easy to install VirtualBox, but not to get working VirtualBox guest modules. When running the live environment on my desktop computer I had trouble with sound and network time synchronization. A few programs were missing their documentation files and I ran into an error while setting up secure shell access. None of these items are big issues in themselves, but when combined they suggest to me that not enough people are testing the distribution and reporting issues to the developers.

You can read complete review in Distrowatch Weekly dated 10/04/2017.

PCLinuxOS MATE 2016.03 Review

The PCLinuxOS is a rolling GNU/Linux distribution, initially forked from Mandriva Linux. As different from other rolling linux distribution, PCLinuxOS focus on stability. Also, it has an unusual combination of RPM packages and synaptic package manager.

Latest issue(27/03/2016) of distrowatch weekly features a review of PCLinuxOS 2016.03 MATE, latest stable build of PCLinuxOS featuring MATE as default desktop environment. The reviewer is happy about overall experience with PCLinuxOS. However, he raises his wish to have a more modern package manager, libreoffice in repositories.

Booting from the live disc brings up a menu asking if we would like to load the MATE desktop, boot to a command line or run the distribution's system installer. Taking the desktop option brings up a graphical window where we are asked to select our keyboard's layout from a list. With our selection made, the system presents us with the MATE desktop. The desktop has a vibrant blue background and we find an application menu, task switcher and system tray at the bottom of the display. The application menu is laid out in a classic tree structure. On the desktop we find icons for browsing the file system, accessing documentation and launching the PCLinuxOS system installer. Clicking the documentation icon opens the Firefox web browser and displays a local page which explains how to use the distribution's system installer with screen shots of each step in the process.

Read complete review in distrowatch weekly.