Posted on Saturday 18th of November 2006 at 04:17 in Linux

PCLinuxOS - perfect halfway house

It's been quite the dilemma over recent months as to which Linux distro is the best choice for users moving away from XP (or "windoze" as it's affectionately labelled by some in the community). Instinctively the majority of users looked to Ubuntu and the user-friendliness of the gnome environment but it was brought to my attention that there's another major player in this exchange, a plucky little distro called PCLinuxOS, and here are my thoughts on it.

Introduction
I've never hidden my distaste for Vista which was marred by an entirely underwhelming Release Candidate and unforgivable resource usage and while I'm almost certain that I'll end up on it eventually I'm determined to look at the alternatives. I've had my plays with Ubuntu (having dappled with Breezy, Dapper and Edgy) with varying levels of success but some readers of this website passed on good words about PCLinuxOS (referred to hereafter as PCL) so I decided to give it a try.

First Steps - Virtual Machine Madness
As with all things like this it's important to test the water before jumping in - more than anything else I find myself blessed with an overpowering apathy that makes me want to avoid burning a CD and restarting. So a brief mounting of the ISO in Daemon Tools later and I'm running the LiveCD - initial impressions were so good that it got installed immediately and I shall explain why.

Why it HAD to be installed
The first thing that struck me was how handsome this KDE distro was, clearly coming with Beryl/Compiz enabled straight out the box (as it were) - which will mean very little to (K)Ubuntu who can install it quickly - but for an XP migrant this would be a big first impression. Let me clarify slightly, I'm looking at this distro as an alternative to a native XP user (as I am one of those, hands down I've been on Windows since 3.1). So looking incredibly handsome as standard (see image to the right) is a big plus straight off. Notice the alpha-transparencies on all the window edges, nice. There are other touches too that meant I needed to look at it closer:

Halt! Vista theft
This really made me chuckle when I first noticed it - the maximise/minimise/close icons on the windows are clearly stolen from Vista. While it makes me laugh it also makes me glad, this offers a nice similarity between Windows and is actually the most logical way of handling the events.

It's small touches like this that make it such a viable alternative to XP, there's been such an intention to detail here in the user interface that it should be intuitive for both native Linux users and those leaving the Microsoft nest for the first time

Other Touches
There are some other nice touches, such as having a "My Computer" icon on the desktop to offer a sense of familiarity to migrating windows users. Also, I find having the taskbar at the bottom directly after install aids this feeling - especially having a very Microsoft similar logo as the start-button. This means that if you put someone as computer illiterate as my mum (not saying all mothers are hopeless but mine, specifically is often lost in XP so I fear in Ubuntu she would never be seen again) in front of PCLinuxOS, she would instinctively go for either the "Personal Documents", "My Computer" or start menus, all of which are (more or less) where you would expect to find them in XP.

So this is just XP by another name?
Absolutely not, there's plenty of Linux goodness here. You obviously have the terminal but also apt (and the marvellous Synaptic Software Manager). It's loaded with useful apps (see here) and has basically everything you would come to expect from using Ubuntu (well, everything I've come to expect anyway).

Check back soon, shortly after writing this I am going to delete my Vista partition and put this fabulous distro in it's place and hope that my computer doesn't die - it doesn't like Dual Booting much.

 

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