PCLINUXOS 2019.09
Neil Bothwick revisits a forgotten friend with an eye on the good old days, but with a very modern collection of software.
With an eye on the good old days, but with a very modern collection of software, Neil Bothwick revisits a forgotten friend and discovers a gem of a distro.
This distro has been around for a long time, starting life as a fork of Mandriva, although it has been developed independently since 2007. That’s a long time for a small distro to be around without leaning on one of the major players, so how is it doing? Well, the short answer is “Very well, thank you”.
PCLINUXOS is designed primarily as a desktop system for home and small business use. Of course you can use it for server or other applications – it is Linux, after all – but other distros may be better suited to such tasks. PCLINUXOS is released in the now standard Live distro plus installer format, as popularised by Ubuntu. What many may not remember is that PCLINUXOS actually pioneered this approach; early Ubuntu releases had separate Live and install images. This makes the installation process quick and simple, as it is basically dumping the contents of the Live distro to your hard disk, with a handful of configuration questions thrown in along the way.
There are a choice of three versions to install, differing in the desktop; the choices being KDE, Xfce and MATE. The first two also have lighter alternatives, which are basically missing Libreoffice and associated software. We concentrated on the KDE version, as this has always been the desktop of choice for PCLINUXOS. Many distros that use KDE provide their own configuration and theming, as the default settings of KDE are a bit naff. PCLINUXOS is no exception, and their KDE has a comforting retro feel to it – reminiscent of the much-missed KDE 3.5, but with KDE5 goodness underneath. In fact the whole distro looks and feels a little retro, with its administration tools still showing their roots in the Mandrake Drak* programs and its window gadgets reminding me of an earlier macos look. This may sound like a criticism, but we liked it – and it is KDE after all, so you can change anything you don’t like.
The administration tools not only look like the Mandrake/mandriva tools, they work like them too, and that is a compliment. Before Ubuntu came along, Mandrake was one of the most popular distros for introducing newcomers to Linux, and deservedly so. The Control Centre is home to anything to do with setting up or administering the system, and is clearly laid out and easy to use. The range of software included is as you would expect to find on a distro aimed at desktop use: a fairly typical range of media players, editors, file management tools and so on. On the KDE version, many of these are from the KDE environs, so they integrate nicely – plus you get the usual suspects like Libreoffice and Firefox. Interestingly for a KDE system, email is handled by Thunderbird and Kmail is not installed, an understandable decision. The other desktop variants have a similar range of capabilities, but with different tools for some of the tasks. There are also a few less obvious but welcome additions, such as zulucrypt for point-and-click hard drive encryption and Nitroshare for simple file-sharing between computers running various operating systems.
Overall, PCLINUXOS works well without any post-install tweaking. The environment feels a little old-school, but in a familiar and comfortable way, rather than feeling dated. But the software itself is right up to date with very recent versions of the Linux kernel (5.2.15) and the user software – for example, KDE is at the latest release. If you are one of those (us?) who wants to always have the latest software, PCLINUXOS should keep you happy.