PCLinuxOS is an admirable Linux distribution in many ways, with a regular (and extremely informative) e-magazine, a devoted userbase and a committed developer all coming together under one banner. Texstar and the PCLinuxOS community recently celebrated their 10th birthday and it was with great anticipation that I downloaded the ISO and went about exploring the fabled distribution the last few weeks.
Note: The PCLinuxOS home page is one of the few Linux sites that is intermittently inaccessible in China. If you encounter a 403 forbidden error page, updated torrents for PCLinuxOS are available at Linux Tracker.
Disclaimer
I freely admit that I've never been a PCLinuxOS user. I dimly recall running an early release of PCLinuxOS on my portable in 2006 and for one reason or the other, was unimpressed and opted for Mandriva instead. Over the years, I've settled comfortably with either openSUSE, Fedora or Lubuntu on my machines despite glowing PCLOS reviews from veteran Linux users .
For this article, I opted to run PCLinuxOS via LiveUSB and through a virtual machine in VirtualBox. As a non-power user, I focused on user experience, stability on different types of hardware (desktop, laptop and netbook) and default desktop features.
PCLOS was tested on the following:
PCLinuxOS LXDE LiveUSB
- Lenovo Ideapad Z360 (Core i3, 6GB RAM, Nvidia Optimus 1GB)
- Toshiba NB520 (Atom, 4GB RAM)
- ASUS BM6630 workstation (Core i5, 4GB RAM)
- ASUS EEEPC 1000H (Atom, 2GB RAM)
PCLinuxOS KDE
- VirtualBox - Lenovo Ideapad Z360
PCLOS LXDE on a LiveUSB
I was tempted to try the MATE release of PCLOS, but opted for LXDE instead since I wanted to see if PCLinuxOS would perform better than Fedora 18 Xfce on my EEEPC 1000H. After running Unetbootin to create a LiveUSB, I booted to PCLinuxOS LXDE.
User experience notes:
1. Unlike distributions designed to run on a LiveCD or LiveUSB, PCLOS requires users to select the keyboard layout before loading the desktop which is great because this means PCLOS doesn't assume everyone uses an English keyboard. Unfortunately, some users might think this is just a slight improvement from the old days when Mandriva and other Mandriva-based distributions required users to configure the time, date, and keyboard before loading the desktop environment. It's not a huge nuisance but English-speaking users accustomed to Knoppix or Puppy Linux will find the brief setup inconvenient.
2. PCLOS LiveUSB boot up speed is unremarkable even on the ASUS BM6630 Core i5 system and has no leg up against Lubuntu and Knoppix.
3. PCLinuxOS LXDE is comparable to Lubuntu with the added benefit that PCLinuxOS already includes restricted packages such as codecs and drivers. Lubuntu's installation process is significantly lengthened by having to install the packages separately. Multimedia support is also more consistent compared to installing the restricted packages on an openSUSE machine.
4. One of the great advantages of PCLOS is that it uses the same network manager regardless of your desktop environment. This means that despite running an LXDE release, PCLOS still brings up the familiar Network Control Center Mageia and Mandriva users are familiar with. I know it's a dated observation but I'm very happy that wireless cards and wireless FN keys are supported so well now. Running rfkill or iwconfig is unnecessary even on machines with a Ralink card. I do wish they would eventually change the appearance of the Network Control Center though - it's sporting the same look from a few years back.
4. Like most modern LXDE Linux distributions, PCLOS LXDE looks great on a huge 1920x1200 monitor and in displays larger than 13.3" However, PCLOS LXDE is somewhat cluttered on the humble screen size of the Toshiba NB520 and EEEPC1000H. Removing and customizing the top and bottom panels is easy of course but having used other lightweight LXDE releases, I was surprised that the default desktop had two Panels, two paging controls, and several other Panel add-ons by default.
5. Powering down PCLinuxOS is fast, but all my machines stopped at the init message and the power button had to be pressed manually. I've experienced this before with other LiveUSBs and some LiveCDs so it isn't unusual.
6. PCLOS LXDE is significantly more loaded than either a Fedora LXDE 18 spin or the last two releases of Lubuntu. In fact, I would go as far to say it has more preloaded utilities than both of the distros combined. Texstar includes some very unique PCLOS configuration utilities in addition to some interesting application selections. The configuration menu alone has more items than a default Lubuntu install. Some of the highlights that caught my eye are:
- GTK Theme Switch 2
- PCLOS Localization Manager
- LXDE Restore MBR
- LXDPMS for toggling Energy Star power saving modules
- Multimedia Keys for assigning specific functions on a keyboard
- Touchpad Toggle v0.32
- NTFS Configuration Tool (a utility I haven't seen preinstalled for a long time now)
- Icon Browser
- Lexmark, Epson and HP Print managers
In short, although PCLOS LXDE uses a lightweight desktop environment, the list of included utilities and PCLOS-only applications (e.g. PCLOS FLV/MP4 player) are worth a separate article on its own. Some of the selections are useful in a way that most users have never thought of. Others are dubious additions such as UMPlayer, DeaDBeef and MyMencoder. Two good utilities I've never seen included in a distribution are found in the File Tools menu of PCLOS LXDE: shred_GUI (for permanently deleting files) and Unison (for syncing files).
As a fan of lightweight distributions, I have mixed feelings about PCLOS LXDE. On the one hand, users have a whole library of utilities for configuring the LXDE desktop, a desktop environment that isn't all that friendly to new users who don't know what packages to install to customize their system. On the other, Synaptic Package Manager makes adding applications to the frugal list of primary applications easy. Most of the utilities are actually very useful especially on a laptop - but I'm not sure if I'll ever use them considering I've never had to on other distributions. Moreover, having several modules and configuration managers sort of defeats the concept of being lightweight especially if the user is more interested in getting work done than customizing Openbox or GTK.
Continued in PCLinuxOS KDE MiniMe and LXDE 2013.10 Review Part 2
0 comments:
Post a Comment