Posted on Monday 29th of January 2007 at 13:48 in Linux

PCLinuxOS vs Ubuntu

Ubuntu has long been the poster child of the "come from Windows to Linux" movement but it seems that things may be changing, the community is warming to PCLinuxOS and there seems to be sufficient information to support the notion that these two heavyweights are evenly supported.

A vote
A popular haunt of mine - TuxMachines.org has been running a vote on your favourite early 2007 distro and at the time of writing there have been just under 1,000 votes cast by readers and three clear contenders.

Ubuntu
This plucky Gnome distro has been throwing it's weight around in recent times and weighs in at 25% of the votes. I believe they're measuring Kubuntu and all other flavours as one which will obviously help things. Famously popular is this distro.

PCLinuxOS
Impressively enough PCLOS also has 25% of the vote, proving what a popular distro it really is becoming. With a strong and supportive community behind it and some very strong Betas of the 2007 edition, this really could be a big year for it.

Other contenders
openSUSE comes in third with 17% which is little surprise, but what is shocking is how far back Mandriva and Gentoo are comparatively. I assumed these two were reasonably popular but it would appear that Ubuntu and PCLOS are the two biggest players in the Linux desktop wars.

Check it out
Have a look at the vote here and see how things shift but I think this vote has highlighted that we may have a two horse race on our hands this year. It won't be a matter of winning or losing because any new user to Linux is a win (provided they stay). Vista has landed and it won't be too long before people consider their operating system needs - if they're coming to Linux it looks like most people will recommend Ubuntu or PCLOS.

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Comments

Showing most recent 20 of 33 comments [View all comments]

Well it is fined tuned in every area ESPECIALLY Audio. Don’t believe me? Install Xmms and PCLinuxOS hook your PC up to LARGE speakers and play your favorite tunes.. the sound is far better than any distro I have ever tried and even better than Windows which was shocking to me since Linux audio usually is subpar compared to Mac or Windows.

^^^
I’ve noticed this as well - I do not know what the folks at PCLinuxOS tuned, but whatever it was; they really found a good clear ’bassy’ sound. (which is usually crackly and lacking on other distros) In general I love PcLinuxOS for all things ’multi-media’ I think it is better in this regard than any other distro out there right now, Flash is WAY faster on PCLOS than it is on any other distro (i’ve tried almost all of the major and popular underground ones) even on PIII machines PCLOS is able to give a smooth fullscreen flash experience on older video cards.

However.. even though PCLOS is a good "desktop" for "fun" it is not the most stable distro ever made.. in fact it is rather flaky... Every once in a while programs, especially Firefox for some reason, will just crash. - Open office is perhaps the slowest on this distro than any other, yes I know I can change it - but I am speaking on defaults..... - a few other stability issues as well...

If you’re looking to have a an ’out of the box’ ’speedy’ experience go for PCLOS, no need to search for codecs or any of that since they are installed default... - But again if you are looking for rock solid stability... Go for Arch, Debian Slack or even Ubuntu - compared to PCLOS Ubuntu is a stable monster.

Just a lot slower :P

yeah well...

i tried using some version of linux, (dont remember which it was was) some 2 yrs ago and i was really impressed with the ease at which i got things done and the fact that all my devices just work without me having to install drivers. What really turned me off tho’ was the lack of support and the unavailability of the type apps i got accustomed to. I went back to the micro of soft. Lately i was driven to search for a stable and good OS cuz my windowed pc was virused. I decided to try PClinuxOS 2007 (after doing some research on the net). I didn’t had to install any anti-virus/spyware, registry/system cleaners, defrag or firewall programs. Everything just work without the fuss. This wasn’t the experience i had with Windows of any version, you had to install a lot of stuff before it becomes useful. PCLOS just work. Linux must be doing something good for it to be compared with a giant like MICROSOFT. If Bill Gates had linux he would have ruled the world. You linux haters watch out. It’s getting better.

dwiandre@hotmail.com(andre)

I will stick with Kubuntu for now. I run Feisty on an HP with no headaches. It’s all Debian underneath.

^^^
PCLinuxOS is not based on Debian it is based on Mandriva/Mandrake and uses RPM’s as a default packaging system - it uses Synaptic as well but it’s repository is not as neat, or massive as either Ubuntu or Debian unfortunately.

However I still prefer PCLinuxOS on my ’fun’ box - Ubuntu.. is slow let’s admit that right now.

John

I tried both and I really have warmed up to PCLinuxOS as a ’fun’ Linux for serious stuff I use ArchLinux.

Why am I so attracted to PCLinuxOS? - Well it is fined tuned in every area ESPECIALLY Audio. Don’t believe me? Install Xmms and PCLinuxOS hook your PC up to LARGE speakers and play your favorite tunes.. the sound is far better than any distro I have ever tried and even better than Windows which was shocking to me since Linux audio usually is subpar compared to Mac or Windows.

Great job guys..

Ubuntu take some notes from PCLinuxOS on multi-media.

PCLinuxOS take some notes from Ubuntu on naming ;)

Justin

hate Kde
Only for this reaspn, ubuntu is and will remain my OS.
PcLinuxOS hate it for its name

Gnome for ever

there are standard 64-bit issues in Kubuntu 10.7, but more over UUID!
It’s a nonsense, that messes up lots of dual boot desktops on install or update. So you’ll be laughing - I’ve just wiped out Gibbon and installed PCLinuxOS as an alternative to Fedora7.

moujik

Have used both and both are great. However, in the end I chose Ubuntu. There’s a lot more info for it out there and a lot more apps (that are easily installed). If you just want to read email and internet, then PCLINUXOS is probably better. If you need it for the whole family, I think Ubuntu is better (more apps, more support). MY BEST ADVICE: Try them both! Or have them both! Hey they are free you know...

Hector Art

Well all i can add is for starter or people who dont need much stability ,for them pclinuxos is good option as it brings the feel of windows with it, which has sadly become a parameter to judge how good or user friendly a linux distro is.
I have been using ubuntu from the time of warthy, and so far i have had very few issues regarding stability or softwares resources.Infact currently i m using gutsy which i have reached by simply upgrading from warthy to all the way till gutsy.
This itself speaks about stability and user-friendliness of ubuntu.

Mayank

Last I checked, redundancy is great so when/if your hard drives fails you can still recover your data :).

Scotto

Felt compelled to comment a little further on PCLinuxOS vs Ubuntu. PCLinuxOS is snappier, seems faster than Ubuntu, don’t know why. I like that there is one distro for all, not one 32-bit and another 64-bit. I’ve had to wrestle with command line scripts to get 32-bit plugins to work on 64-bit Firefox in Ubuntu. Not very attractive for a newbie.The web resources for PCLinucOS are more complete and more useful than the ones provided in Ubuntu. You have to ask the question, does a well moneyed organization always produce the best software? Look at Microsoft, now Ubuntu’s Canonical. I think PCLinuxOS has done a good job putting together a package perhaps a little sweeter than Ubuntu. This is hard, I’ve been a Ubuntu fanboy for a while.

rnojonson

Well, I put in the PCLinuxOS live CD and after being greeted by the really cool artwork, a screen ask me for my DSL username and password, I was so unprepared. But after I got pass that, the rest was KDE with a couple of extra config tools. Kubuntu recognized my DSL connection "automatically" by the way.
I think PCLinuxOS is also selling itself with some hype. Trying to pass itself off as an easier jump from MS Windows while trying to sell newbies on Linux stuff (root user, command line, etc). Like cars, the functions the same regardless of the price and of course there are extras. I will stick with Kubuntu for now. I run Feisty on an HP with no headaches. It’s all Debian underneath.

Let developer fight on the system internals. For me PCLinuxOS is the best. I had some problems with Ubuntu. But I never ever found anything wrong with PC. I can do my regular chores quite well. My vote goes for PCLinuxOS 2007.

nikhil gouda

PCLinuxOS 2007 is definitely better than Feisty. PCLinuxOS recognized all my HP Desktop devices, but Feisty could not. Moreover, you can start doing all the works - office, design, multimedia, without any problem. Even you don’t need any extra things except libdvdcs and win32codecs, i installed them offline.

But for Feisty, you have to be online to resolve those multimedia issues.
My vote goes for PCLinuxOS - it’s stable, usable, fast and beautiful. Need I say more?

krishna chandra panda

I like Fux linux. Yeah, that is a new distro and I am the sole user. Here everybody is singing songs for PCLinux OS. There is another forum where they are abusing it left and right. Come on, if you like it use it. It is only good because it recognises your hardware in the first place. REst comes later. Why people are tomtoming hundreds of distros and their clones? One man say this is good other say that is good. Webpages after webpages are filled with this crap. It is all crazy.

Grieme Smith

Re read all the goods and bads of distro’s tried a dozen distro’s,what about out of box support not yet PCLOS,tried mepis good yes little appealing,but i get back to ubuntu most of the time after testing other distro.let me figure:
ubuntu and variants : fantastic,huge support,though lacks multimedia can be downloaded,gutsy will ship one complete package for multimedia.
Mepis cool:defies open source philosphy.still lacks some apps.tv tuner.no roadmap.
fedora,gentoo,opensuse,etc: these are dvd’s some are not shipped with codecs hard to find for not configured internet pc(not detected Nic cards),non
internet connected pc,SUSE damn slow,gentoo too geeky stuff (same gnome, of ubuntu-Portage what kind of package mgmt that too CLI based),mandrake
isnt free,Fedora good i heard but DVD’s too hard to download and test.
Linspire,Xandros isnt free.
Again there is problem with dependencies with every distro,sound issues,network issues,mp3 and wincodecs,display issues,etc etc.
conclusion:
Out of box:mepis,mint(ubuntu+codecs nothing great,useless tweaking into nice ubuntu box).
Stable perfect desktop:Ubuntu Though needs some tweaking and codecs etc.
Fact remains Choice is Yours.Open source Rocks.Freedo for everyone.

U can get me here: tux_82@yahoo.com

tux_82

Kubuntu inky worked on my laptop after some moderate modification. I was suprised when PCLinuxOS worked perfectly. I am still going with Kubuntu though, I think that it had better support.

GNois

Funny how they call all of these distro’s.

Honestly, It’s based on "_" which is based on "_" which is based on Debian.

Where is the real distro in all of this? Try Debian. Add a few graphics, a modded script and call it a distro. As far as I am concerned, If it doesn’t create it’s own systems around the kernel, it’s hardly a work of art. Maybe an improvement in some cases, but
hardly worth creating a web page for.

For the past three weeks I’ve downloaded, installed and used the top 14 distros. The one that really stands out is PCLinuxOS. We all want to get online and PCL makes it easy. No terminal commands to input with ndiswrapper to load a wireless driver. Ubuntu came in second for me but never did get my Trendnet wireless adapters to work but my D-Link PCI wireless worked immediately. A lot less command writing with PCL than the others. I’d say PCL is the closest to Windows. It works and works VERY well. I’m sticking with it.

Curt

PCLinuxOS is better if you want out of box multimedia support. Ubuntu is better if you want more stability. After all the GNOME and KDE things are superficial. You can add KDE to Ubunto and GNOME to PCLinuxOS.
I love PCLinuxOS because it detected/configured all my multimedia devices automatically and I could work on Video DVDs right away. May be do little tweak and Ubuntu will also give the same support.

manmath sahu

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