Sometimes while I review distros I come across some cool distros that many persons don’t know about. PCLinuxOS is one of them. A user-friendly, stable, and quite cool in features and app selection are the things that made me love this distro.
PCLinuxOS comes only in a 64-bit version, so the old PC might not be able to run it. I think nowadays 64-bit thing is quite normal as technologies are advancing. Without wasting much time, I would like to proceed to the review of the distro.
As told you earlier, PCLinuxOS comes only in the 64-bit version. There are 2 different DE available which you can freely choose i.e. KDE and Mate. I am going to use KDE variant as it is just 300MB larger and of course looks much better. There are a lot of servers also available to download, choose anyone you like. I used the USA server.
ISO with Mate desktop is 1.2GB while KDE is 1.5GB. Choose what you like. My PC specifications are like 2GB RAM, Intel i3 dual-core processor, and AMD graphics card. This is to indicate that you can choose KDE variant if you got my specifications or higher as KDE performed great on my system.
System and Stability
The first thing that we all search for a distro to have is a rock-solid stable system. PCLinuxOS is a very stable system. I tried copying files, playing songs, watching movies on the system and all worked great. Running 6 apps together didn’t crash my system nor installing new packages. The overall system is really stable as I experienced the last 2 days.
The system uses rpm packages which are no hard to find and install. The system also supports APT commands which are great to manage apps via terminal. There are also 3 themes pre-installed which you can customize.
Preinstalled Software
There are a nice set of pre-installed apps. I think this is the 1st distro I encountered till now which has a really good selection of apps pre-installed. Do you want to play media files? VLC is there. The online streaming of music, Spotify got your back. Kdenlive is there to edit videos and LibreOffice to handle documents. Bleachbit to clean junk while Virtualbox to try a new distro. Chrome to surf the internet and Thunderbird to read emails.
In short, the app selection is really good. It’s hard to say that you will find anything bloatware here. However, if you dislike anything, the Synaptic package manager is there too.
System Control
There is a control center to get your hands on system control. I think this is cool because the control center seems to ease your control related work. There are vast options that you can freely roam after installation.
I would like to mention that settings are separate from the control center. Many people will think control center is a Setting but it is not. Both are different.
This is a great way to keep complex tools out of settings and ease out many tasks. The best feature according to me in the whole distro.
Installation and Setup
As with almost every Linux distro, you can also live boot in this distro and customize options you would like and try to use before installation.
The installer of liveCD is also great. It also you to resize, choose and delete the partition easily. However, if you don’t like it, Gparted is also there preinstalled to help you. So, doing partition related work is a lot easier.
Bugs
There were almost no bugs, however, while changing themes on random my system went black and didn’t recover until I rebooted it. This happened only the first time. I was able to do all my work normally.
Download PCLinuxOS
Conclusion
PCLinuxOS is one of those distros which people really don’t know much. I felt that it is not getting that name which it deserves. A rock-solid system, a nice selection of apps, a lot of customizations, and small in size and fast.
This is what any user will want from an OS.Try it, I think it won’t disappoint you. You got my words. Also tell me in the comments, how you like the distro and your other worthy suggestions.
-No systemd.
-Rolling release (always up-to-date)
-It is rpm based, but you can also install apps by apt-get command and by synaptic manager.
-There are some GUIs inherited from Mandrake/Mandriva which was very famous as an easy-to-use distro before Ubuntu.
Dave’s from the future I guess.
https://i.imgur.com/laifr2f.png
It happened during the migration process. So It is stupid that the previous host did not export the correct comments datetime.
Who won the USA 2020 presidential election? I just gotta know.
Comments date are all messed up after the migration. Previous host messed it up, did not export correct datetime. So yeah it is funny but it is not possible to correct hundreds of comments manually.
Now regarding the presidential election 2020, well, I don’t know who won but I know did not. LOL
Great article just installed PClinuxOS in my VM so far loving it better then Mint 19. however struggling with floating windows. Thanks.
I have been using PCLinuxOS since the very beginning. Now that is uses a rolling release plan, I simply update it when new packages arrive and it stays current.
You are correct about it being stable and no-nonsense. I only use it and Puppy Linux for all my needs!
That’s great!
There was a time about 12 years ago when PCLOS was the No. 1 distro on DistroWatch. It lost the “hot” label to other distros, but it’s still around and still as good as it ever was.
It’s worth noting that the XFCE variant of PCLinuxOS is now officially supported by the devs as well, giving you three choices plus the “community” editions in Trinity and LXDE. It’s still 100 percent community funded and supported and 100 percent free of systemd.
I used PClinuxOS in the past thinking of using it as alternative to ubuntu for idea to bring older systems back to life as I did with my thinkpad t520.
Being stable is amazing since its a rolling distro. There website produces the pclinuxos magazine pdf which has great guides etc.
Back maybe in 2016 I tested it and for some reason firefox addons, plugins would not install. Which is essentially why I did not use it long I will be testing the lastest on my old HP quad core desktop. Maybe even the Mate DM on my t500 to see how KDE runs. Apparently KDE uses less resources than it did. One app I like is Avidemux which is a vary basic video editor and woks well on windows. For a year or so Debian based systems had dependency issues. I can install it in Ubuntu 18.04 now.
New users get confused about what software is on each distrbution which I said there is not difference I get the deer in headlights look.
I used to be a Linux Mint guy, but have mostly switched to PCLinuxOS. I am able to customize just the
I love to run Linux. The only trouble I had during the install was that Broadcom ethernet was blacklisted,
because of the wifi driver. I have no need of wifi on this computer, so I ran “apt-get remove broadcom-wl-blacklist”
and everything is running OK. Just need to find out how to disable screen resizing.