PCLinuxOS suitable for beginners list of distros?

[Jason]

Incidentally, I received a email through the contact form on the website enthusiastically supporting PCLinuxOS and wanting it on the beginner list of distros. It's not from a member. Asking for permission to share and if I get it, I will do so in another topic.

[buster]

Not sure about putting it on the beginner's list. Tex runs it, so it is highly dependent on one person. Any of the Ubuntu updates and upgrades are upstream for family members such as Lite, Kubuntu and a lot of Mint. Pclos is an independent, with no real upstream.

Lately the popularity has sagged, into the 30s on distrowatch for the last short while. Mint, Lite,and MX are better choices in my opinion.

[Jason]

I also seem to recall that PCLinuxOS only uses synaptic for updates which personally I don't think is very beginner friendly. Less worried about the one-person thing because I think there are lots of others that contribute to it and would pick it up if he left or something happened to him. As as the case with distributions, most of it is likely open source so if there is a group of volunteers it would likely continue on.

[buster]

Well I have to disagree with you there Mr Murdoch.

XM is basically Debian with some changes, so there is far less to do with software as it changes. And that applies to many of distos as well - most of the work is done before the software gets to them in the form of debs.

The history of Plos started with Redhat, got to Mandrake, and then to Plos, which gradually cut off its roots and became independent. They might be able to adapt some Mageia software, but I doubt Fedora would be much use to them because of the distance.

I suspect they don't use Synaptic, because they don't use debs. But I seem to recall they have something that looks and functions like Synaptic, which evolved from Mandrake tools.

I think it would be difficult to fill in for Tex.

[Jason]

I suspect they don't use Synaptic, because they don't use debs. But I seem to recall they have something that looks and functions like Synaptic, which evolved from Mandrake tools.

Yes, it looks so much like Synaptic because it is Synaptic. From the About page on their website, 2nd paragraph:

"PCLinuxOS is distributed as a LiveCD/DVD/USB ISO image, and can also be installed to your computer. The LiveCD/DVD/USB mode lets you try PCLInuxOS without making any changes to your computer. If you like it, you can install the operating system to your hard drive. Locally installed versions of PCLinuxOS utilize the Advanced Packaging Tool (or APT), a package management system (originally from the Debian distribution), together with Synaptic, a GUI frontend to APT for easy software installation. PCLinuxOS has over 12,000 rpm software packages available from our software repository."

Not sure where the Mr. Murdoch came from but I'm well aware of the difference between derivative distros and the independent distros. However,  if the source code is available, others can jump in and work on it. I'd be very surprised if he was doing all the work himself I find it hard to believe he does all the packaging for 12,000 packages entirely himself. Although it may just be that it's not entirely independent, that it relies on upstream RPMs or at least SRPMs (RPM sources) and only PCLOS-specific packages are built by Texstar and/or others.

[buster]

"Not sure where the Mr. Murdoch came from"

Oh dear Jason! Shocking.

[Jason]

I've heard of Rupert Murdoch and the one from the tv show about mysteries. Just not sure what it has to do with me.

[Jason]

Here's the email I was talking about. He's a member of the forums as well and gave permission to share his email. I won't mention who it in case he'd rather lurk for now.

I just discovered this group. I don't live near Peterborough, but have
friends that do.  I've been a Linux user for 19 years, and an exclusive
(Micro$oft-free) Linux user for 11 years.

Several years ago, I did the distro-hop exercise, trying Ubuntu, Kubuntu,
SuSe, Fedora, Mint, Slackware, Mandriva, Debian, and probably a dozen others,
looking for a usable desktop distro for a new-ish Dell XPS computer.

Without fail, they all failed. Lack of hardware support was the achilles heel
for all, many giving garbled screen resolutions or colour palettes either on
live ISO boot or after installation, among other issues. I have several
friends who swear by Ubuntu, but I've never experienced a painless install
with that.

Then I tried PCLinuxOS. (Which won DistroWatch Distro of the Year in 2007)
The installation was the slickest I have ever seen. The hardware recognition
and support: comprehensive, and pretty much flawless. On-the-fly disk
re-partitioning to dual-boot a Windows system and play nice: flawless.

I have installed PCLinuxOS on many (15+) computers for friends (mostly
dual-boot on existing Windows machines), and at least 6 computers for myself.
All have thanked me, none has asked to "go back". The only problem I ever had
was with an ACER netbook.

The official ISOs are KDE Plasma or Mate, but Lxde, Lxqt, Xfce, Trinity
desktops are available thru repository packages or community releases.
PCLinuxOS is a systemd-free fork of Mandriva. I have no affiliation, just a
very happy user for over a decade who makes occasional donations.

PCLinuxOS has a vibrant support community, an excellent monthly magazine,
excellent up-to-date software repositories, and in my not-so-humble opinion,
is the single best Beginner-Desktop-Windows Refugee distro available.
https://www.pclinuxos.com/
I believe it is worthy of your consideration.

[fox]

I won't argue one way or the other for PCLinuxOS as a recommendation for beginners since I've never used it. I also don't want to invalidate this person's experience, but I will note that Dell specifically supports Ubuntu on the xps. That's what I use on my own xps 13, and everything works well. However, my 2015 has a Broadcom wifi, and the driver for it isn't installed with a standard Ubuntu installation because of proprietary restrictions. One can get that driver from Dell's website, or by connecting the xps to ethernet and grabbing it from the Ubuntu repositories, or by temporarily connecting it to wifi with an external dongle and downloading it that way. I will agree that beginners would have trouble doing this, but if you have a Broadcom wifi, you're going to have the same issue with a lot of distros.

[Jason]

I installed PCLinuxOS, the 2018.6 KDE version, the most recent when I post this. I decided to update it before I review it. After installing about 300+ updates (understandable), I had a couple of issues which I think might be show stoppers for beginners. When I rebooted (which required me actually resetting the VM), the problems disappeared.

The first was an odd error message on trying to use the file manager that showed up in every folder. A screenshot of the error is shown in the attachment below.

The second was the inability to log out or shutdown the machine. When I clicked it, it would do the countdown (or you could click on the button) for log out or shutdown but it wouldn't actually shutdown.

Both these issues are very bad in my opinion. Other than that it does have a great installer (reminds me of Mandrake/Mandriva) and some excellent software choices for pretty much everything.

[buster]

Could you get full screen with your vm?

[Jason]

Not by default. But I haven't tried install the Guest Additions yet. Note that I'm using Virtualbox not VMware but the additions are like the vmware tools.


Update: Tried installing the guest additions - appeared to go okay (no error messages) although it built the kernel modules too fast, I thought. Rebooted and X crashed. Haven't had that happen in many years. No graphical interface now. Oops.

It definitely doesn't play nice as a guest.

I'll try installing it on my laptop this weekend just in case the other errors were related to running in a VM.

[fox]

I installed PCLinuxOS, the 2018.6 KDE version, the most recent when I post this. I decided to update it before I review it. After installing about 300+ updates (understandable), I had a couple of issues which I think might be show stoppers for beginners. When I rebooted (which required me actually resetting the VM), the problems disappeared.
....
Both these issues are very bad in my opinion. ....

But you installed this in a virtual machine. Maybe these errors wouldn't have happened had it been installed on bare metal.

[buster]

"But you installed this in a virtual machine. Maybe these errors wouldn't have happened had it been installed on bare metal."

I agree Mike. You are very probably correct. But the vm install is so simple and quick. And you may go thru the whole setup of a 'real' install, and it may still not work. That would be most annoying.

And who has hard drive available? Not this cowboy.

[Jason]

But you installed this in a virtual machine. Maybe these errors wouldn't have happened had it been installed on bare metal.

You probably didn't see the update to my message just before yours that basically noted this.