PCLinuxOS: the walking dead

Recently I was looking for a replacement for a "desktop" Linux distribution (my working Linux distribution is Debian for now) and decided to try PCLinuxOS. I had used it before several years ago but dropped it after a couple of updates caused serious problems requiring complete re-installations to fix. The latest attempt did not go much better. A problem caused by partitioning occurred during installation that I had seen and fixed before but it had many several years ago so in order to make sure I did it correctly with their distribution I posted a question on the forum. The official response was not only openly hostile it made no attempt to fix the problem so I dropped it and went looking elsewhere.

Or to paraphrase, why bother with those bozos?

I dunno... PCLOS is pretty decent once you get it updated and all. I sure don't recall gigabytes of updates, but it's been a while since I last installed it fresh. Sure, they need to provide more up to date install media, and the community can be a little... cult-ish? But it's a worthwhile distro, one that often sees updated packages before even Arch (generally Firefox, and recently gparted). It's a nice blend of a stable base (KDE4) and up to date apps from my experience. I can't recall an update ever borking anything at all. Obviously YMMV, but there are certainly worse distros out there.

Never said anything about gigabytes of updates so I have no idea what that is about.

Not a little cult-ish, HOSTILE and for absolutely no reason other than they clearly enjoyed being a-holes. The irony of them calling it "their friendly forum" is not lost on me.

Yeah and there are most certainly much better supported ones out there so why bother with it at all unless you like verbal abuse of course.

I've heard lots of both good and bad about PCLinuxOS over the years. It seems to be a relatively solid distro, originally based off Mandrake if I remember correctly, which is well liked by it users. But it does seem to be fairly hostile to newcomers, especially in it's forums. It's a distribution very much like Mepis: very popular with it's users but out of the mainstream. Though I've never heard anyone complain about the Mepis forums.

And speaking of out of the mainstream distributions, I'll get to the real point of my post. :)

Since my submission about it got rejected for the queue, this seems an appropriate discussion to mention that Slackware is now at 14.2 Beta 2 (see the Slackware changelog at ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-current/ChangeLog.txt on Feb 3rd), so a new Slackware should be out sometime in the next few months.

I have a different perspective on PCLinuxOS.

I have found that the distribution is easy to install, easy to use and the support guys are generally friendly.