PCLinuxOS vs Ubuntu - Linux

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

by yeah well... on Friday 25th of January 2008 at 08:39

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

by on Friday 25th of January 2008 at 08:38

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.

by dwiandre@hotmail.com(andre) on Monday 7th of January 2008 at 23:10

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.

by John on Thursday 6th of December 2007 at 18:56

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 ;)

by Justin on Thursday 6th of December 2007 at 18:52

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

by Gnome for ever on Sunday 25th of November 2007 at 17:01

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.

by moujik on Sunday 4th of November 2007 at 19:49

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...

by Hector Art on Thursday 1st of November 2007 at 16:46

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.

by Mayank on Monday 22nd of October 2007 at 04:37

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

by Scotto on Thursday 18th of October 2007 at 01:34

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.

by rnojonson on Saturday 15th of September 2007 at 05:44

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.

by rnojonson on Friday 14th of September 2007 at 19:21

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.

by nikhil gouda on Friday 14th of September 2007 at 00:21

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?

by krishna chandra panda on Friday 14th of September 2007 at 00:15

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.

by Grieme Smith on Monday 3rd of September 2007 at 11:04

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

by tux_82 on Monday 6th of August 2007 at 13:22

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.

by GNois on Thursday 2nd of August 2007 at 13:43

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.

by me on Thursday 19th of July 2007 at 16:30

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.

by Curt on Sunday 15th of July 2007 at 15:31

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.

by manmath sahu on Tuesday 10th of July 2007 at 22:07

coldbluezone is right - why should linux have 100 seperate distributions? Imagine if all the developers could come together and create one single "united" distro! What an amazing distro that would be! "United we stand, divided we fall" - that’s a brilliant motto.

You who read this are probably saying "but different people would want a distro for their own specific purpose. You can’t please everybody, so you need a lot of different distros in order to please everyone’s tastes..." To anyone thinking this, I answer, Micro$oft’s OS is installed on over 90% of computers worldwide... clearly, it’s possible to create an OS that suits everyone. Also, why not make the "united" distro in different flavours, one suitable for ordinary people who currently use Micro$oft’s product, another flavour for people who need an OS that’s very very light on system resources etc etc...?

I can be contacted at LMF5000@gmail.com, if you have any comments or replies to my post.

by LMF on Friday 29th of June 2007 at 17:02

i am a new pclinuxos fan, i started with ubuntu (like everyone did). but when linus trovalds (the founder of linux) has said in gnome mail site (said to tell the people to just use kde) i just want to know wat he meant. i tried kubuntu. but kubuntu is full of bugs (its good but not great). i recommend pclinuxos 2007 (rpm packages) or simplymepis 6.5 (deb packages which uses ubuntu repositories) if ur a kde fan or want to try out kde. i understand wat linus trovalds mean. gnome is trying to be simple but it does that in expense of functionality. kde is more powerful and has more control even if u dont understand everything in the menu its good to just have it. u dont have to adjust every little bit but u can if u want to. in gnome u cant.

by xmido on Monday 18th of June 2007 at 15:09

I have used kubuntu a lot, but lots of grief.

Just started using PCLinuxOS last week. It has a few spots where Kubuntu is better (kubuntu has out of the box installed packages and better picture viewing in file manager), but PCL overall has a tighter feel. Especially K7.04 - more issues than K6.10.

D.

by dulwithe@myrealbox.com on Saturday 5th of May 2007 at 20:39

GNOME rules!!!hate u KDE and ur fucking tuxmagazine.FOSS is about options not putting news everywhere making new users unaware of GNU’s pioneer project GNOME!.KDE sux.

by praka on Thursday 3rd of May 2007 at 23:37

Using PCLOS T4 huge step in the right direction and a great candidate to replace the know aging windows xp computers without emptying your pockets on hardware updates for vista.

by kevred on Wednesday 2nd of May 2007 at 14:35

Greetings:

Great article! I have recently wrote an article on the same topic and I referenced & linked to your article there.

Thank you,

Matt of eJabs

by Matthew Jabs on Tuesday 1st of May 2007 at 07:08

This comment has been edited by an administrator
Dave> as Kaur said, try PCLOS - you won’t be disappointed. Well, you could be but I’d doubt it!

I think I may look into Mepis though!

by Seopher on Saturday 24th of February 2007 at 13:05

Dave, you could take a look at Mepis. It’s based on Ubuntu, but focused on KDE.
http://www.mepis.org/

I haven’t tried neither Mepis nor PCLOS, but they both look like really good distros and I’m planning to test them.

by Kaur on Friday 23rd of February 2007 at 13:33

I have been using Kubuntu for a while, and I’ve always been bothered by the point that the ubuntu project is mainly targeted towards Gnome-users, which imo is horrible for the customization that I need.

I’ve been looking for a distro like this that has the propriatary drivers on the disk as well as multimedia codecs, KDE, beryl, synaptic, and .rpm (sorry .deb doesn’t have as much popularity as far as i’ve seen :( ) So far this is leading to the perfect distro for people to switch to. I have always loved KDE but ubuntu’s support on KDE (i.e. kubuntu) has been stingy, it made a good OS but I’m going to try PCLinuxOS on my friends computer and see how he likes it.

Plus as an addition: The installer for _Ubuntu seems to be horribly buggy and I’ve had nothing but problems with getting it to work on my friends computers.

by dave on Friday 23rd of February 2007 at 06:30

coldbluezone, you’ve made a bad assumption in the fact that all those 300+ distros do NOT serve the same requirements. Some are firewalls, others are servers, NAS, security testing, desktop, music studio, etc, etc.

Its not that we don’t need more distros.

Its that we don’t need more distros that serve the SAME PURPOSE!

I don’t mind two or three doing the same things, because competition and collaboration of different ideas is good.

But when you have 10+ distros that are for the desktop, you wonder why would one even bother?

Choice is good...Redundancy is BAD!

by aussiebear on Tuesday 6th of February 2007 at 18:03

What we don\’t need is another Linux distribution.. There are well over 300 now. It only adds to confusion for the new comers and almost Linux switchers. Linux in itself is hidden much like DOS remained hidden under Windows. Future Linux users won\’t know or care about the OS. Lets just focus on the GUI (KDE and GNOME). More distributions mean fewer developers per distro. Divided we fall and Micro$oft wins. CBZ<

by coldbluezone on Monday 5th of February 2007 at 21:22

About the poll, I’m definitely waiting for Fedora 7 release in April. But I might actually try the new version of PCLOS too.

by Kaur on Monday 5th of February 2007 at 10:20

PCLOS is Great. It is apt-rpm oriented and has many of the Mandriva GUI tools.
So it is something that combines the benefits of Mandriva and Ubuntu, namely the GUI tools and the apt+synaptic.
Localization is where it fails compared to Ubuntu and Mandriva

by Vaso on Thursday 1st of February 2007 at 00:27