Posted on Friday 23rd of March 2007 at 14:09 in Linux

Practical review of PCLinuxOS 2007 beta 2 (using new standards)

I felt it was time to give my favourite distro (PCLOS) a more thorough review in the light of my decision to change how I review distros. I felt that something as promising as PCLOS 2007 beta 2 deserved the first slot.

So here I am, sitting home on a Friday night suffering with a serious man-cold with PCLinuxOS 2007 beta 2 running in a VMware session because I'm still yet to sort out a notebook to run these on properly. Never mind, the process remains the same. I install the distro and do the review from the Linux environment (amongst other things) to help establish how easy it would be for a Windows user to get to grips with how things work.

1. Get a video and play it

Let's get started then. First things first I ran GFTP to connect to the FTP server I run in my home to serve the house with media files securely. This was nice and simple (true I could have just used the NTFS R/W driver to access shared files) and downloaded an episode of Family guy to my desktop. I double clicked on the file and amazingly, it just played. What I find most amazing about this is how difficult it can be to get your codecs and stuff all sorted in XP - downloading Nimo Lite or something and then finding you have clashes - no such thing in PCLOS. Load the video and it just plays (as you can see in the screenshot to the right). The video played without issue and the sound worked fine too. So PCLOS makes playing video files easier than XP, it really does.

2. Internet browsing etc

Another major aspect for "normal" use is the ability to browse the internet properly. Seeing as step 1 required home-networking it's not a big surprise that PCLOS picked up my ADSL connection without any difficulty. Firefox comes installed as standard so once you have the Internet everything just works - I hopped over to Youtube and watched a video or two (or three or four). So PCLOS has no issues with obtaining an Internet connection and allowing normal usage.

3. writing the review on the system

That's really what this new review style comes down to - I need to be able to interact with the machine as I would my XP system (minus the gaming of course) and the most complicated aspects of normal use are (typically) playing videos - which PCLOS2007 breezed through better than XP... Which I found surprising if I'm honest because it's popular belief that Linux makes things difficult. If this is supposed to be difficult I don't think anyone told the chaps at PCLOS.

So what is normal use? Watching videos, listening to music and playing around on the Internet - all of these are made painfully simple by this distro. This review was written, edited and published within the PCLOS2007 system. It's hard to make things difficult when you have OpenOffice and the GIMP at your disposal for editing content and images. So what do I have to say?

Conclusions on this review

You can read my previous "A picture heavy review of PCLOS" for lots of pretty pictures about this increasingly popular distro but this is the review that actually matters. How do I think XP users would cope with PCLOS2007? Well it is only the beta2 release but I'm astonished how easy it made media files... I even tried another couple of videos after I wrote the main bit of the review and it copied far better than a fresh install of XP would... Out of the box it has oodles of software, instant media support and no problems picking up your current network. I find it hard to see any problems for XP users because of how obvious the developers have made it for those of us who are overly used to the Windows environment.

The icons are similar, the menus are similar and intuitive and the stuff that could cause problems simply "work". I fail to see any complications in using PCLOS2007 as a full time operating system (when fully released obviously. Gaming is an entirely different argument but I've said it before and I'll say it again - PCLOS is a very good release and I can't wait to give the full release a proper review. As far as I'm concerned, this is going to be the distro to beat in 2007. Mind you, we'll see what Ubuntu has to say about that...

PCLinuxOS 2007 beta2 is an impressive release, I can't wait for the full version because even this was a joy to use.

 

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