Testimonial 1
by alii1959
While this is my first day with PCLinuxOS on my desktops, I have a feeling it will be on both for quite a while. I have been looking for a Linux distro that would work on my wife's IBM Thinkcenter. It is an older computer into which I have put a Belkin wireless card. She was using MEPIS, Ubuntu, and Kanotix for awhile....then disaster struck. The old Sun Microsystems monitor that she was using died....and screwed up the integrated video port on the motherboard. I bought a cheap video card to get her back up and running. The other distros didn't recognize it and immediately dropped into CLI. Unfortunately, she isn't very CLI capable, and I don't feel like going through a lot to configure the system again. I began to play with distros yesterday. I tried 6 or 7, all either didn't recognize the video card or they presented problems getting the wireless to work. It was at that point that I tried your PCLinuxOS.....all I can say is WOW. Everything was configured and up and running in minutes....not hours. I subsequently replaced the MEPIS install on my desktop too. I have been Windows free for several years and have used many distros: DSL, Xandros, RHEL 5 (which I never really got running well), SIDUX, Kanotix, MEPIS, Ubuntu (and its siblings), SUSE, etc. Kanotix stayed with me the longest. It was easy to configure and was quite stable. But, they quit updating it. Having all of this experience has given me a pretty good idea about what I look for. Simplicity!!! I don't want to have to spend my time configuring the computer....I just want to use it. An occasional tweak is fine....but, why can't things just work. Enter PCLinuxOS...it just works. Much like OSX on my MacBook, it is easy to use and I was up and running quickly. I guess Apple has spoiled me. Until I found this distro I was looking at spending a great deal of money to get all Apple computers....money I don't really have. I wanted my wife to have a computer she could just use without calling me every 10 minutes to fix something or explain something. So far, this has done the trick. Thank you for all your hard work. This is the first non-Debian distro I have tried in a very long time RHEL5 left a pretty bad taste in my mouth....SUSE too. Thanks again.
Testimonial 2
Dave
I'd also like to thank the team.
I'm a refugee from Xandros .. a distro that I used from version 1 through 4. I'm not going to trash Xandros here (they are managing that quite well on their own) but I have to say I was getting a little unhappy with the performance from Xandros even before the "deal with the devil". That incident just got me off my rear end and looking "seriously" for a replacement distro .... so maybe I should thank them for that.
Xandros' claim to fame was it's "out of the box" simplicity. Frankly, you have them beaten on that one, and indeed in just about every area.
I've checked out a lot of distros ... and continue to do so because I promote the use of Linux and people's needs differ, so my assessment is based on testing a lot of very good distributions, and in my opinion this one is by far the best. I've seen a lot of distros that run fine on a live CD but not installed (that one puzzles the hell out of me to be honest), no such problems this PCLOS. I have installed this on 5 PCs now ... various ages and specs ... and it just works. For those "older" machines around, MiniMe is fantastic.
So, PCLOS is now my first choice every time. This distro has given my laptop a whole new lease on life. It's a Presario 2100CA with the a memory upgrade (1 gig) and it flies. Beryl is amazing .. considering this thing has 64meg shared video memory.
My webcam works fine .. something that I could never get to work in Xandros.
A truly great distro guys .... THANK YOU
regards to all,
Dave
Testimonial 3
by sjinsjca
Greetings forum participants and PCLinux 2007 developers:
Here's my story. I needed to migrate from XP for many reasons, including that OS's insecurity, fragility, bulk, intrusiveness, cost and approaching obsolescence. Also, I travel on business, and my employer's increasingly buttoned-down laptop policy made it likely I'd need to move my private email and personal files off that machine. Rather than cart around two laptops, I wanted to run my "personal" stuff on a virtual machine that could be put on a thumb-drive or portable USB hard disk.
So I started looking at the various distros of Linux. I'd tried Linux seven years ago and, while it was stable and powerful, I hadn't been impressed with its day-to-day usability. Lately, what I heard about Ubuntu in particular seemed promising. I read through their site thoroughly, it seemed their hearts were in the right place, and more importantly their brains seemed dedicated to making a usable, complete and stable distribution that would do what I wanted to do, and for the right price.
So I downloaded Ubuntu and installed it without trouble in a VMware virtual machine. Fine enough, but there were several problems: first, I disliked Gnome, and getting my networked printer working took a lot of work including several wrong turns. Still, figuring I'd get into the groove eventually, I forced myself to use Ubuntu by transitioning one of my three personal email accounts to it; I continued to use XP on the others. I chose Evolution for email due to its resemblance to Outlook, and Firefox was my choice for a browser.
Ultimately I found Gnome so limiting and clunky that I investigated KDE; the Ubuntu folks had promised it was easy to switch from one to the other. Hah. I hosed my poor VM rather badly trying to get KDE installed, and it took a lot of effort to get things working properly again. The printer (a high-end HP multifunction unit) never quite worked right, either. On-screen, fonts looked noticeably coarser than I was used to in Windows. And throughout, there was this odd mouse-key bounce problem that meant a rapid left-click would register as two separate clicks. Though I tried to train myself to click with slow deliberation, my normal hastiness kept biting me, with two windows popping up where one was desired, or even four if I'd rapidly double-clicked where I should have slowly single-clicked. Also, I soon tired of Evolution and decided to try Thunderbird. Thunderbird was crashy, as was Firefox. If I tried to leave Thunderbird up all the time as I had with Outlook, it would crash six or eight times during the course of the day.
The crowning glory, though, came when I read about the wonders of Beryl. Lo, I found it was installed as standard in Ubuntu! So I tried turning it on, and ...oh, such a mess. It brought my Ubuntu down with almost an audible crash of cymbals. Eventually I got it working again, but Ubuntu (or, with its KDE installation, was it now Kubuntu?) seemed (even) more fragile than before. Hm, maybe updating things in Synaptic would fix that? ...Nope, and now Synaptic complained of irreconcilable dependency conflicts. How do you fix that?
Oh, and by the way, during my months of playing with Ubuntu, my sons expressed interest in trying Linux on their old castoff Sony laptops, previously loaded with Windows 98 and ME, respectively. They'd moved to Mac laptops several years ago, and those Macs have performed flawlessly for them, with not a single virus or malware problem (vs. my having to wipe and reload their Windows laptops every few months due to contagions that had made it past their costly virus checkers). So the old laptops were sitting around doing not much. Ideal playpens for Linux curiosity.
Alas, Ubuntu would not work on these machines at all. When I attempted to install from a LiveCD, the kernel would load, some drivers and stuff would churn and grind, then everything would freeze. No joy. Maybe Xubuntu would work? Say, why not spend hours downloading and burning various flavors of an OS just to accommodate two very common laptops? To heck with it. Back to the closet went those laptops.
At about this time, a correspondent recommended PCLinuxOS 2007. Not being a Linux fanboy, I hadn't heard of it, but some googling suggested it was well-regarded. Okay, then:
- It installed quickly and without issue into my VM. So far so good.
- It recognized my printer! In fact, installing the printer was way less trouble than it had been in XP. No drivers to download, no CD to stuff into the bay, nothing to configure. It. Just. Worked.
- Wireless, wired ethernet, ditto. Sound, ditto. Everything. Just. Worked.
- No more mouse double-bounce!
- I like the look and feel. Fonts, in particular, looked better than in Ubuntu. I've made very few tweaks to the system's standard configuration: the application-tray icons are now set to a smaller size, and I selected the Quartz window-decoration theme with its Extra Slim option to help conserve precious pixels. That's it.
- It had just about everything I wanted in the way of application software. (I'm still looking for an easy and universally-compatible print-to-pdf capability like PDF995 for XP, though.)
- Thunderbird doesn't crash nearly as often as it had under Ubuntu.
- And I've yet to have a Firefox crash.
- And, like Ubuntu, it has Beryl installed. But it's greyed-out, with a notation that my "hardware" (the VMware virtual machine, which simulates a plain-vanilla PC) doesn't support the necessary 3D graphics routines. What a concept: detect the user's hardware and lock out incompatible features to protect the system!
So I went cold-turkey altogether, switching my other two email accounts over to Thunderbird on PCLinuxOS 2007.
And much later I'm here to tell you: No regrets.
In fact, eventually I figured I had nothing to lose but a couple more hours' frustration if I tried installing PCLinuxOS 2007 on my boys' two Sony laptops. And [cue the dramatic music]: It. Just. Worked. Again!
In each case, I emerged (after perhaps twenty minutes of watching the automated installer do all the work) with a spankin' fresh laptop sporting all the latest applications, running video without problem, on wired or wireless networks, with sound, and all the rest of the best goodies. The video card works fine; the antique Netgear PCMCIA 802.11b cards work fine; the mice and touchpads work fine.
Some googling suggests my success with the two Sony laptops is because Ubuntu is hard-core into the open-source religion and lets not a single byte of proprietary code pollute its distros. If that policy means (for example) that a particular video chipset is unsupported because the only available driver is proprietary, then you will have to decide whether to install the proprietary driver or not. PCLinuxOS 2007, on the other hand, seems to be built to work, and work seamlessly and automatically..
Impressive stuff. Recommended. In particular, if you are researching various distros before taking the plunge, you can stop here with confidence.
Reply
by the Correspondent
Awesome review. PCLOS is a definite sleeper distro, but I think our little secret is slipping out. It's been number one on distrowatch.com for a couple of weeks now. There is a server variant of it that was developed by a separate group that works wonderfully for common server tasks such as file storage, print server, email server, firewall, and a host of other tasks.
Like you with the old Sony laptops, I revived a dozen castaway Dells that were 5+ years old at my daughters school, setting up a computer lab with those machines for the kids to use for both school related activities and even gaming for their free time. I set the entire thing up for -$0-. The school administrator was thrilled, and after about a week came a request from him to set up PCLOS as a dual boot on his laptop. And I must admit that even I was surprised at both how easy the setup was, and how well it worked from the get-go.
I also revived an ancient 10 yr old Toshiba Protege laptop that had been gathering dust in my closet, with my daughter now using it just as much as she does her 2 yr old XP desktop.
I'm a Systems Admin for a Fortune 500 company, and an MCSE. I've always viewed Linux as a 'hobby' type OS, but had firmly been a "Microsoft guy". My brand new Vista Ultimate laptop now spends 80% of its time booted into PCLOS, and when I don't have it actually booted into PCLOS, a VM running it usually is.
PCLOS is, in my opinion, a real alternative to Vista or XP because it is both easy to install and maintain for the beginner, and offers a high level of 'tweakability' for the advanced user.
Glad you like it, and I'm glad I was able to turn you on to it. I get a high level of satisfaction knowing that a simple recommendation like that can be so useful to someone.