lunes, 18 de julio de 2011

I owe you an apology, PCLinuxOS

Two years ago, when I first entered this vast world that Linux is, I came to realize that there was a distribution that was mentioned over and over: PCLinuxOS. I became curious and followed some old posts in multiple threads. To be honest, being a total newbie, I felt sort of intimidated by the vocal followers of this distro and my aversion grew stronger when I visited the forum and was greeted by the rules. Boy, did I ever read something harsh!
Even so, I downloaded the Live CD and tested it. I was disappointed because there was not an office suite with it, so I never considered installing it.

However, the more I learned about Linux (without pretending to be an expert), the more the rules in the PCLOS forum made sense. Later, I discovered they had not made them, but were quoted from a source.

I started visiting the Sandbox (that's the PCLOS forum equivalent of Mandriva's community chat or Mageia's Wizard Lair) and I must admit that everytime I visited, I got a very good laugh thanks to their sense of humor.

Oh, yes, I also downloaded the last PCLinuxOS KDE release and installed it for testing. I discovered that its installation is as simple and efficient as Mandriva/Mageia's, but a lot faster. I also noticed that my disappointment because of the lack of an office suite was a misperception: there is a way to download the current Libre Office suite. And multimedia works out of the box, too. In my installation, there were only two points that I disliked: there is no way to change the language from default English to Spanish and the Kwin effects refused to work. With the minimal experience I have accumulated in these two years, I visited the PCLOS forum and quickly got a thread that explained how to change the language to Spanish. I followed the steps and it worked (90% I'd say, because Dolphin still shows some menus in English and applets stayed speaking the language of Shakespeare as well). I did not work with the other problem, but I'm sure they must have a thread to tackle that issue. While I was using it, this last release of PCLOS was reliable and stable. It's a solid distribution; no wonder why it is relatively popular in the DistroWatch charts.

Besides, I have to admit that the image that I had originally formed of this Linux community, the distribution, and its developer has been changing from negative to positive, to the point of considering using PCLinuxOS in one of my systems.

I would definitely recommend this distribution today, provided that the person installing it has an inquisitive mind and is not afraid of reading...S/he must have an acceptable command of English, too :-)

From all of this, my biggest conclusion is that I, because of my lack of experience with Linux, acted unfairly. However, as Ezra Pound said of Walt Whitman, "I am old enough now to make friends". Yes, PCLinuxOS... I owe you an apology.

3 comentarios:

  1. Way to go! Besides, according to the Mepis Forums, Texstar is a great fellow!

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  2. Wonderful - it takes a special type of person to admit to being, well, not wrong, but incorrect because of some misinformation.

    I have been using PCLOS for about 7 months now and have found it to be the most stable distro I have tried (and I've tried a lot :-) ) and now use it daily, as does my husband, who was very reluctant to even try linux again because of some hit and miss times in the past, but when I pestered him to try PCLOS he loved it and within a month he'd wiped Windows off both his PCs and now uses PCLOS exclusively (if my husband likes it, it must have something going for it ha-ha)

    And you were very accurate about the forum as well - the regulars are a hoot AND very helpful when needed

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  3. @Megatotoro,
    Thanks. By the way, I've come to that same conclusion about Texstar myself from what I have read in the forums.

    @anónimo,
    Thank you for reading and commenting. I guess your comment was the final push I needed to keep PCLOS in one of my systems.

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