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.