Testimonial: Arriving To PCLinuxOS By Accident

by rvndmnmt

I guess I should begin with intro.

Hi. My name is Larry and I'm an alcho … er … wrong meeting.

I've been part of the Linux community since about '97. Back then, Xwindows were new. Amongst a whole lot of other goodies that people take for granted now. I kind of gravitated away from Linux back in '04, because it made no sense to have such a wonderful operating system with a wonderful GUI that required a lot of time at the command line to interface with. In short, Linux was an interesting toy. I could surf the net with it, maybe even listen to a few MP3's. There was a definite performance advantage over Windows 95/98/SE. But actual usability, short of a server, was a little harder to attain. I couldn't see the OS going any place in the state that it was in.

Well. I recently tried to get a job in the IT field. This is something I have been doing for some time, but found out that paper and letters behind the name seem to count for a lot in these days. I went back to school and have/had a few classes in Linux. I figured that with my previous exposure, it would be a cinch. I also figured that not much has changed. Boy, was I wrong.

Back when I got into Linux, the main things going were RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake, Debian, and Slackware to name a few. I had experience in every one of those flavors, including Slackware on a masochistic trip into madness.

I mean seriously, the CLI is a powerful tool, but with as powerful as computers are these days, a GUI wasn't as much as a performance hit as it was, lets say, in 98. And Linux, while functional, wasn't totally functional as an operating system.

Ubuntu was my first descent back into this madness. Nothing wrong with that OS. Actually very usable. I loaded it onto my sisters computer (read zero computer experience), and she uses it to this day two years later. I used to use it a lot myself, until 10.04. I still use it on my PS3 (interesting, but not recommended). But, I have tried out other flavors as well. Fedora was a requirement for school, however I don't like SELinux and configuration is a pain when you have to configure the OS through /etc/pam.d/ to even access the root account in graphical mode. Not that SELinux is complicated, I just get a little leery when the NSA writes security software is all. That, and it reminds me to much of User Access Control in Windows Vista/7.

For the record Microsoft really overdid themselves with 7, even though it is just a slimmed down version of Vista.

So it comes into now. I ran into PCLinuxOS by accident. I was actually pretty pleased with the result. Currently, I have it operating on a 1.8GHz Pentium 4 and a 2000 AMD XP-M at work. I also have it running on my Core2Duo for school (no hardware virtualization allowed on the CPU, and it performs as good or better in X32 mode than X64 mode). I also have it set up in dual boot mode on my latest build (Phenom2 6 core, 8 gig of ram, Crossfired ATI video cards, ect). About the only thing it cant do is play the games I need Windows for. About the only thing I could ask for is a 64bit version of PCLinuxOS. But I guess that is going to be a while.

Anyways, just thought I would say hi. And a sincere thanks to the developers of PCLinuxOS, since it has most of what I would ever want in a Linux OS.