PCLinuxOS: An Accidental Discovery

by Peter Benecz (sixthwheel)

I've been using some form of Linux distro for the past few months now with a few problems, and just stumbled upon PCLinuxOS by accident. A happy accident, if I say so myself.

The problems I had were really minor, compared to the problems with Windows, which I've been using since Win95. So I was really happy to discover Linux in general. However, I could not find one distro that worked with everything that I needed. The one distro that came close was Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic). Then I upgraded to 10.04 (Lucid Lynx), and I couldn't get my Skype webcam working, after much searching.

Then I tried Mint, which was great. Except that after coming out of hibernation, I would have to reboot because the system froze. While searching for a solution, I came upon a thread in the Mint forums. Someone mentioned that a rolling release OS had less bugs and problems. So I did a search for Linux rolling releases. I read through most of the reviews, and PCLinuxOS caught my eye.

It looked like everything a new Linux user could want. I downloaded the Gnome version, (that's what I'm used to), and played with the live CD for a while. Then, I installed it next to Mint, and I screwed up the partitioning and deleted Mint. (Yes I should have used Gparted to prep it for a dual boot install). No biggie, since I have everything important backed up to an external drive. (I learned to do that a long time ago, re installing Windows a million and one times).

So far I'm really happy with it, and would like to thank the developers for a great job. I also downloaded the KDE 4 package, and have been playing with that for a while. Everything looks and works very well, and I think my search for a distro that works for me is finally over. I really like the idea of a rolling distro, instead of a new release every 6 months, whether it's buggy or not. (I never really understood that philosophy to tell you the truth). However I digress, since this is not a post to bash other distro's or Windows.

I'm just real happy with it, and hope to be using it for a long time to come. Thank you.