Testimonial: Loving the Beta

by Mark Miles (BubbaBlues)

I've been a PCLinuxOS lover for close to two years now. When I tried it the first time with the incredibly stable and simple KDE 3.5, I was in hog heaven. I absolutely loved it far better than any other distro I'd tried. Almost all of the rest were using that hideous KDE 4, which was just unusable for me. I do a lot of music and video burning and trans-coding, but I also like tweaking and changing looks of things (themes, icons, etc.). Anyway, KDE4 just didn't work, but 3.5 was literally flawless.

Then one day the devs made the dreaded announcement that PCLinuxOS is switching to KDE 4.something!! "OMG how can they do this?" I exclaimed with a few colorful adjectives not repeatable here. Well, I eventually came to understand that 3.5 is no longer supported and the change had to come, like it or not. Being the laid back patient man that I am (not), I made the comment that KDE 4 is and always will be nothing but a huge bumbling mess, or something to that effect.

Well here I am running 2010.1, the first beta release and LOVING it! I've been running it through the mill too, opening several apps at a time, transcoding, burning, changing themes, moving things around on the main panel, and I haven't managed to break it. And it's fast — real fast. The response time for many apps is less than a second, when before the same thing would take three or four seconds. Tex and the dev crew have kept up their standard of excellence with this ultra fine distro, and it isn't even the final release yet.

Now I can say that this one isn't perfect, though close. The only glitch that has showed up for me is the device notification window, which has some behavioral problems occasionally, and only slightly then. I'm sure there are other little things that would eventually show up, but like I said, this is the first beta release. I have no doubt whatsoever that the final release of PCLOS will be nothing short of perfection. Thank you Texstar and the rest for your hard work and standard of excellence that make us love our computers. Now I'm going to go eat a nice dish of crow.