Why PCLinuxOS?

It’s not on almost any list of Linux distros that are “beginner-friendly.” It’s not popular on Distrowatch (it’s #31 as I write this). It’s called “the Boomer distro,” so it should have no appeal at all to a kid like me at face value. There’s no anime/manga version, no Star Wars edition, no special Gaming edition, no sports edition, nothing to help me improve my chances of making the Varsity baseball team or getting a girlfriend that isn’t taller than me. Besides, the command line terrifies me, and I’m not technically inclined at all. But I can’t afford a Mac or a new PC, and the laptops they issue at school are full of intrusive spyware meant to keep us from cheating, but they also watch and listen and record stuff that is none of the school’s business.

I could do like almost every other high school kid and just use a phone or a tablet, and not bother with a traditional computer for anything but required school work. But the same things apply: They’re intrusive, monitored, hackable, and dangerous. I even had a creepy stalker using my own phone against my better interests. The sabotage was discovered when I brought the phone to the shop to get something fixed. Sorry, kids, but a phone or tablet is not a good substitute for a good desktop or laptop computer. Besides, we may as well learn how to use them because almost any place we go to work when we grow up still uses computers for darn near everything.

So I got this hand-me-down computer that had some old version of Windows on it, but to upgrade the OS would cripple the computer. It takes a billion terabytes of RAM and a dozen or more quad-core positronic processors to run Windows even at idle anymore. But there must be some way I can use that old desktop, so I searched around and discovered Linux.

Skip ahead two years now, because I could bore my readers to death with distro-hopping stuff, and you all have probably heard those stories too many times already. Suffice it to say that my requirements by this time have narrowed down to some fairly specific things, having learned from my distro-hopping and research. Only one distro meets them all. So let me share why I chose PCLinuxOS.

Independence: PCLinuxOS is not derived from some “upstream” big corporate OS, nor is it owned and distributed by a big company with a profit motive and software to make it profitable financially. No shareholders, advertisers, or corporate bosses to answer to. No added stuff to suggest “software you might like” or “gizmos and gadgets to make your life better.”

Rolling-release! I’ve heard all the warnings about trading stability for the convenience of installing the OS once and just updating regularly. Those warnings are probably applicable to big bleeding-edge distros like Arch or Debian Sid, but PCLinuxOS is a community-driven distro with volunteers who test new software before it finds its way to the repositories, and forums that I can check before updating to see if there have been any surprises. So far, none that apply to me as a Xfce user with little use for fancy software that designs cars and buildings, plots your horoscope or tells you what your dreams mean. No AI for this boy either (I’m as scared of AI as I am of the command line).

No systemd! Yes, that matters even to a user like me, who shouldn’t ordinarily care about the unseen inner workings of an operating system. But “One Ring to Rule Them All” software that intrudes into every little thing and keeps reports on it; makes changes I didn’t ask for; and regulates, governs, allocates, manages, supervises, and enforces “policies” I didn’t choose is too unnerving to allow. I might expect a voice to come over the speaker like HAL: “I’m sorry, Artim, but I can’t do that.”

Repositories at your service: There’s a special little section of the Forums where any user can request some software that isn’t in the repositories, even if it’s available as a Flatpak or AppImage. I found Betterbird (a soft fork of Thunderbird) in the repositories! That is especially awesome because Flatpaks take up a lot of space by default, and space is at a premium on my old hard-disk drive. Someone actually packaged it just for this distro! There are probably a lot more titles in there that you wouldn’t find so quickly and easily accessible in another distro.

Point-and-click simple! Cool tools I used to rely on in other distros can all be found in PCLinuxOS, including one that can make a bootable copy of your existing system: MyLiveUSB. Portability, reliability, and simplicity are all here in multiple tools to customize and simplify both the computer and its peripherals. I can play with docks and widgets and gadgets and if/when I mess up, assuming Timeshift doesn’t work as expected, I can simply go back to the last USB copy of my customized OS and reinstall it.

Community Editions: Whether you’re into KDE, MATE, LXQt, old LXDE, Xfce, or just a window manager like Openbox, there’s probably a community edition of PCLinuxOS made just for you. There’s even a Debian edition, although the reason for it escapes me.

Non-political: I don’t know how it ever became “a thing,” but some Linux distros and Free and Open Source Software (hereafter: FOSS) developers actually put it in writing on their website that if you’re not of a particular political persuasion you are requested not to use their OS or software (can I mention names? Okay, just one: ElementaryOS). No one in the PCLinuxOS community cares if you’re this or that or vote this way or that. The focus is on great software, not trying to change anyone’s mind or opinion about things and people who have little or nothing to do with software.

Users are not Guinea Pigs: Even though it’s a rolling release, there’s little to none of the beta-quality, experimental stuff in an ordinarily maintained copy of PCLinuxOS. The Unpardonable Sin of too-many “beginner-friendly” Linux distributions is that of making end-users unwitting Beta-testers! Even one of the most respected, ageless distros of the past is re-writing essential core utilities and such in Rust just because that’s the latest craze. But it’s buggy, incomplete, and experimental in spite of great promise. PCLinuxOS doesn’t go along with the latest, coolest, most bleeding-edge stuff with near-religious fervor like we have seen with crappy software like systemd and now Rust. Give it time, let it prove it’s worth, but don’t experiment on our users! It’s against the Geneva Convention and the Nuremberg trials or something to experiment on people without their fully-informed consent. PCLinuxOS doesn’t play like that.

A Bright Future: PCLinuxOS is not a “one-man distro” any more than the Linux project is a one-man kernel. Both have one project leader, and both have whole teams of people who work on various aspects of the project. While we all hope Tex lives forever and keeps up his role in PCLinuxOS, he’s hardly alone in the work behind the scenes. If the worst happens, our favorite distro will go on even with the raw, gaping hole of Tex’s absence to deal with. The community will keep the OS going and true to the vision and purpose Tex had in mind from the start: Independent, free, simple, stable, rolling, community-driven quality.