On the PCLOS 2012.08 KDE release

Katherine Noyes wrote her opinion about the new release of PCLinuxOS here.  When I read it, I did not pay a lot of attention mainly because of one reason: I had installed PCLinuxOS 2011.6 in both my desktop and experimental laptop and I was very satisfied with its performance.  Therefore, I thought, is it really necessary to bother downloading the PCLOS 2012.08 .iso, burning it to a DVD, and installing it if my computers are doing OK? After all, as a PCLOS newbie, I did not want to break a system that was working as expected.

However, I gave in and started the upgrade.

Scary tsunami wallpaper on my PCLOS 2012.08 desktop

 

Now, I must say that this is by far the most pleasant upgrade I've ever performed since I migrated to Linux: I simply replaced the root partition and left the home partition intact.  I've done that before with Mandriva and Mageia, but since the results I obtained were not always optimal, I prefer to do a clean install with those systems.

PCLinuxOS was different, though.  The process lasted less than 10 minutes.  The beautified log in avatars greeted me when I rebooted the computers and the new PCLOS did not mess up with my user settings; everything stayed there.  This upgrade included LibreOffice, too, so the OS was ready to go.

The best part was that the new kernel picked up certain functions that were not recognized by the previous release.  Kudos to the PCLOS developers!