Trilight Zone

[trihub]

Article by Steve Lake
Source: http://www.raiden.net/

One of the distros I have the pleasure of working with quite often is PcLinuxOS. It was the very first distribution we reviewed, and it's still one of our top recommended distributions. Not long back I took a look at the 2009.1 release, which was the first full release of PcLinuxOS (PCLOS) in nearly 2 years.

At first I somewhat panned the release, saying it wasn't enough for what had been an exorbitant amount of time between major releases. But even though it had been a long time, and the release was somewhat middling in its quality and performance, I still gave it a thumbs up, and looked forward to the next release, which I expected to be better.

And you know what? It is. But it's not because PCLOS made a major new release. Hence this mini-review instead of a full sized one. Most of what you found in 2009.1 is still there, and not much has changed, application wise anyways.

The biggest change in that area is version numbers. It doesn't have Firefox 3.5 yet, as the release came out before 3.5 was available, but it does have a good quality copy of 3.0.11 using a rather neat 2.0 style theme. I like that, since I'm partial to the older theme for firefox, since I see the new one as rather clunky and difficult to work with.

There's still no sign of a natively installed Open Office 3, but that doesn't mean it's not there. You just have to dive into the repository in order to get it. The system is still using KDE 3.5.10, Linux Kernel 2.6.26.8, and Xorg 1.4, however it appears that the PCLOS team has fixed up some other things and made them run better.

Installation is still a breeze, and overall the system runs faster, and feels better than before. It also seems to play nicer with my hardware. I don't have numbers or anything concrete like that to go with my statements, but rather what I remember of my previous experience with 2009.1 and my current experience with 2009.2.

The installed system worked great. Everything loaded and worked out of the box, which doesn't say much given how old my test system is (if it ain't supported by now, I've got issues). But at the same time I've still seen distros that messed up their hardware detection, even on something as old as mine.

Overall though, I like the new version. They appear to have fixed all my previous gripes and have once again made it to the top of my recommended list. Congrats to the PCLOS team, and keep up the good work, because I like where you're going with your distro.

And on a slight side note, I appreciate that they're keeping the KDE 3.5.x interface, as KDE4 isn't quite finished enough yet, although 4.3 has made some monumental improvements. So for those who like stability and reliability, using 3.5 is a good choice.