Testimonial: A PCLinuxOS Journey

by Terrick Wright (newklear)

I first stumbled upon PClinuxOS after much trial and tribulation with other Linux Distributions, such as Ubuntu (which is incidentally our National Linux Distribution paved by Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical here in South Africa), Puppy Linux and then PCLinuxOS, which I found here at Distro Watch (www.distrowatch.com).

I installed 2009 LXDE as my first introduction to PCLinuxOS, and "Wow, oh wow," it was amazing :)

From the moment that I booted off of the download ISO turned into Live-CD, the experience was actually so much fun! I could not wait for the next step to come along. By that I mean, everything was so straight forward and simple. PCLinuxOS sure does keep to its principle of Simplicity with awesome functionality.

When I was initially downloading the ISO, I took the time to read through the forum link that was on the main PCLinuxOS page, and noted that the best practice for install was to do a system update through a package manager called Synaptic (Woweee, I know of Synaptic. Who doesn't, right?).

Right after the update, which was 170'ish odd megabytes, I installed a few games (doesn't everyone do that?), and I was really impressed with the available games. I was so happy to even see a build of the infamous and legendary game, Sid Meier's Civilization. After installing a few games (Solitaire just had to be one of them), Abiword extensions (what an amazing word processor) and Anjuta2 (IDE replacement for Visual Studio on Microsoft), I had a full complete Desktop Replacement of Windows XP Professional and Windows 7. There are just so many packaged programs that are available in the Synaptic Package Manager that I dare not say how much. (It's a well kept secret that there are 30,000+ programs available).

First person I showed PCLinuxOS to was my grandmother, who is racing to her Century. I sat her down in front of PCLinuxOS 2009 LXDE, and showed her where the PCLinuxOS Start Menu was (just the same as the START button in Windows). She clicked, clicked again, and was A and away. Very simple. The first games she played were the lovely card games you get, and she managed to browse through hundreds of various card games. My grandmother was my first PCLinuxOS convert. It's not only a wonderful topic starter to mention "my grandmother uses Linux," but also to know just how trusting people are of Grannies. My grandmother did all the converting in my household to be honest. We now run two desktop PC's and two laptops, all running various flavors of PCLinuxOS. I will definitely produce a few CD's with PCLinuxOS for the next time she hosts Book Club. Since then, we have made no less than 11 CD copies for others to use.

Most people worry about support if something happens to go wrong, I was actually overwhelmed on how well set up and readable the PCLinuxOS forums were. Browsing through the various sections was very easy.

There is a wonderful control panel called PCC (PCLinuxOS Control Center), which is yet again so simple and straight forward to use. PCLinuxOS is once again Simplicity.

I also have to mention, and what totally sealed the deal, was that all of a sudden, with the new 2010 PCLOS Kernel release, our Huawei ETS 2258 Modem operated without any udev rules, or anything such whatsoever. Was just a matter of dialing up! This was the first Linux distribution that took the time to read our posts and implement them in new updates. You cannot begin to imagine how that makes me feel as a user. Thank you so much Texstar.

Have we looked back or regretted anything? Nope, none at all. We were even able to get a printer and a network card (NIC) that did not work before to run flawlessly. Running PCLinuxOS over the past few months has only brought joy and happiness in our family. In life, it is the teeny-tiny special things that bring joy and satisfaction to our hearts. Thank you to the developers and contributors to PCLOS, all of us sure do make a special family.

I believe credit due to everyone that has made such a wonderful, life-altering OS. Give yourselves a pat on the back. Job well done.