Five New Testimonials

I very seldom use the forum except to ask questions. OK, that's what it's there for, but there are times when I've felt I've had such a good deal over the last few years from this OS and the forum that I don't give enough in return. Not quite sure what it is I could give, given the demands in my time anyway, but maybe I could, from time to time, add something stunningly funny, stupefyingly original, mind-bending etc. to the Sandbox. Or something.

Anyhow, having said that, I'm really here today to say I've recently learned a very interesting lesson. One of my stepsons, (25, doing an Oxford DPhil and knows generally what he's talking about) who uses another well-known distro, told me he'd always got the impression (don't know where from) that PCLinuxOS was a bit clunky and old-fashioned. It made me think. I've been using it now for about five years, and I had to stop and ask myself was I still using it after all that time simply because I was still using it? Or because I thought it was the best? I decided to try out a few others. I didn't leave PCLinuxOS, but I did give half a dozen other top distros, and a couple not in the top ten, a try - even to the extent of installing them.

It was a fairly depressing and disappointing experience. I struggled and became really frustrated at some point with all of them - either in the install or in using them, or both. The hardware didn't work or the wireless was horribly difficult to configure; things which were supposed to work just didn't; or using the repositories was unbelievably complicated. Something screwed up at some point in each one and I became really disillusioned - anyone coming from Windows to Linux for the first time with one of these would have either to twist his/her brain painfully around in order to get it up and running satisfactorily - or give up and return to Redmond.

In the end, I downloaded the latest PCLinuxOS KDE 2012.8. I thought I'd just see, out of interest, how that compared. Now, I don't really like KDE. It has never done it for me. This one, however, blew me away. It installed flawlessly, updated flawlessly and installed all my extra programs flawlessly. And quickly. The wireless, like everything else, worked out of the box. And it runs like the clappers - it seems that a lot of the bloat, bells and whistles have been relegated to the optional department. Great! On top of that, it looks beautiful. I'm really knocked out with it.

How you guys do it, I don't know, but you've put together something here which leaves the competition, as I've experienced it, standing and you have my admiration and thanks. Brilliant. Here's to another five years.

from catlord17

Yesterday I traveled to Orlando, Florida, 2 hours drive away, to try to fix my friend's parents computer. After 10 years of (very light) duty, Windows XP gave up the ghost. Honestly, I don't know how it lasted that long, but again … very light duty.

I got there, popped in the 2012.8 KDE DVD and … no dice. It wouldn't read. I was also getting a message that SMART was throwing errors on the hard disk.

Fortunately, I had foreseen this possibility, had downloaded PCLinuxOS LXDE, and burned a CD also. The CD booted. I guess there is a different lens for DVDs, and it was dirty.

As luck would have it, they had salvaged a second IDE hard disk from another family computer, and I was able to swap out the bad one in about 10 minutes. With those two adjustments made, only the unknown video mode error was causing an issue. Hitting spacebar got it autodetected, but still had to do that every boot.

I had some issues with the partitioner wanting me to reboot over and over again when I tried using custom partitions (whatever happened to only rebooting after install?), but "Erase and use the whole disk" made short work of that.

Then, we spent the rest of the day configuring and installing. I had to uninstall several programs and install several more in order to make it less confusing for the users. Once I had it working, they were impressed with how nice and clean it was, and how fast.

There's no more Windows in that household anymore.... and they're perfectly happy with it that way, after seeing how nice PCLinuxOS LXDE is.

Thanks, team. They'd have had to go without a computer at all otherwise. Now they'll probably get another 2-4 more years out of that computer before it will need to be replaced. And to be honest, it gives me a special thrill whenever I can kill a windows install and replace it with PCLinuxOS.

Oh, and having experience with the sudden drop in support calls from installing PCLinuxOS..... thank you for that too.

from cozzykim

Wahaaay,

After years of trying to convince SWMBO (She Who Must Be Obeyed) that her Dell Inspiron 1525 would always be a PITA with Vista installed, I persuaded her to shell out for a new hard drive when the old 160GB drive was getting filled up.

So, one 500GB Medion Drive 'n' Go later:

1) Swapped new drive for old in the Medion caddy, installed Vista (just to give her the confidence of a fall back) on a 60GB partition

2) Downloaded and installed PCLinuxOS 2012.08 with default partition sizes.

3) Plug in the old drive in its USB caddy and transfer everything from Vista Documents folders.

4) Set up Thunderbird email accounts (she was already using T'Bird) and import address books.

5) Sit back and wait for questions/complaints. She: "how do I …" Me: "there's an app for that."

She likes it, "I like the fonts and layouts, I like the window decorations, I like x, I like y".

It obviously helps that she was using Thunderbird and Google Chrome before.

Success

P.S. The internal mic is not working/showing up as a distinct device in kmix or alsamixer, but I'll have a look at that when she's not around.

I'm anticipating a much less labor/time intensive IT support role from now on.

From the point of view of a new user, the latest PCLinuxOS is one slick piece of work. Thanks are due for all the hard work to everyone who makes this possible.

from geraldw321

Hello there, I'm geraldw. I'm new to PCLinuxOS, but not new to Linux. I've run other distros in the past, but never stayed with them. But this distro is great. I love the Full Monty version.

I put it on my new Acer v-771G 9875 laptop, which has a core i7 3610QM processor @2.3ghz, a Samsung 830 ssd @256gig, a Hitachi 750 gig storage drive, Pioneer dvd burner, nVidia GT650m video card ... on and on.

PCLinuxOS installed fine. I’ve been running it for a month with only a few minor issues (trying to get optimus working) and an occasional freeze, but other than that, it’s a rocking system.

The group here has helped with info I found here (and replies to a couple of questions), to configure things to my liking and address my issues. I hope PCLinuxOS is here to stay. Many thanks to the team for putting together an excellent system.

From ibi

PCLinuxOS is awesome! It's given me an extremely stable, lean OS to work, play, and learn on.

The tl;dr version:

In June 2011, exasperated during my one-millionth reboot of a Windows OS, I decided there had to be something better out there. I knew Mac OSs were praised as highly stable, but Mac hardware is expensive. I had also heard of "Linux," a computer-geek OS that you operated by furiously typing green text onto a black screen, like Samuel L. Jackson in Jurassic Park.

When my Windows reboot was finally finished, I opened my browser and did a Linux search. I saw pics of some Linux OSs that actually had desktop environments! Whatever happened to that imposing terminal? Well, after about an hour researching Linux, I decided it just might be doable.

My local library had a "Linux for Dummies" book that came with an old Fedora CD. I installed that Fedora distro on one of my junk PCs, and worked my way through the book. It turned out that Linux, with a GUI, was similar enough to Windows to navigate easily. And, best of all for a cheapskate like me, Linux was free! I was excited.

That Fedora distro was very old, and since my first distro installation went so smoothly, I became obsessed with trying all those distros out there. (You know how it is at the beginning.) And there were a lot of distros out there - more distros than I had Windows reboots under my belt.

So I spent a few days burning and installing LiveCDs. Unfortunately, I had issues with a lot of distros. Some of them wouldn't install on my PCs that lacked "pae" support. Others wouldn't recognize the wireless cards in my laptops. I was not so excited anymore.

I eventually came upon PCLinuxOS, which was near the top of the Distrowatch list. I was hooked! PCLinuxOS installation was a breeze. No issues with "pae" support. PCLinuxOS recognized the wireless cards in two of my three laptops. PCLinuxOS was similar enough to a Windows environment as to make it just plain easy for a noob like me.

In my opinion, that's one of the real beauties of PCLinuxOS. It just works straight away, giving the user, if so inclined, time to explore what's really under the Linux hood. And I was so inclined.

My great experience with PCLinuxOS made me want to learn everything I could about Linux - the command line and all those cool things I read about in the forums - ssh, scp, setting up NFS and Samba servers. All of it.

So, in recent months, I've been working my way through William Shotts' excellent book, "The Linux Command Line." I also recently purchased Soyinka's "Linux Administration: A Beginner's Guide." Also excellent. I now have three desktops and three laptops (all PCLinuxOS) networked via NFS. I'm ssh-ing from one PC to another and exchanging files via Filezilla - not because I have to, just because I can. Next on the list: set up a Samba server so I can network my two remaining Windows PCs also.

I have PCLinuxOS to thank for all this. It's given me a new hobby and driven me to learn all I can about systems administration. Want proof of what a geek I'm becoming? Well, I'm composing this (rather long now, sorry) post on vim, whose terminal layout is just awesome, because I created my own colorscheme and "vimmed" my .vimrc file. Why? So that the terminal looks really cool as I learn to program Python! (Plus, I can now pull off a pretty decent Samuel L. Jackson impression -- the hypersonic typing, the beautiful green text flowing effortlessly across the terminal screen, the cigarette ashes falling onto the keyboard.)

Thank you, PCLinuxOS team! I hope I eventually reach the point where I can contribute to the project in a substantive way.