Why PCLinuxOS?

There is a recurring reason around Internet this days triggered by Windows Vista. We have quite a reasonable computer PIV Dual Core with 1Gb RAM and 3D graphic card, a computer with the power of some supercomputers of not that many years ago, and still this is almost the minimum hardware required for Windows Vista. I'm not going to replace my "supercomputer" just to put Vista and have it running like if it was my old Pentium II.

Therefore, as many are doing, I decided to have a look at the current state of Linux. A couple of years ago I tried but I didn't like too much what I saw, it was still quite behind Windows, but this time I had a good surprise!

I googled a bit and found the versions that run out of a CD without the need for installing. I wanted to try this just in case I didn't like Linux as installing in the HD means reconfiguring the boot sector, partitioning, etc which is quite cumbersome and dangerous if you do not do a proper backup of your whole computer.

From the live versions I read quite a bit about Ubuntu and PCLinuxOS so I download and burned to CD both, which I tried on my old Pentium II 300MHz with 512Mb and in my laptop Dual Core with 1Gb of RAM.

Ubuntu: I didn't like too much the initial aspect of Ubuntu, that brown is a bit horrible, it doesn't look unprofessional, but obviously that can be solved changing the theme. The problem with Ubuntu is that it didn't make the WIFI connection on my laptop to work from start, it complained about having to run drivers not supported and I didn't manage to make the connection to work within 2 minutes. That was critical for me. If with Ubuntu I don't manage to make WIFI to run in two minutes then probably I'm going to have a lot of other problems that will take a lot of my previous time to solve. Ubuntu scored bad for me.

PCLinuxOS: When I tried PCLinuxOS on my Laptop I got the WIFI connection working in less than 30 seconds! Even before the Desktop loaded as the configuration is done automatically during the very brief setup of the live cd. That was amazing for me specially compared to the previous experience with Ubuntu so I decided to try more this PCLinuxOS.

When the Desktop loaded, it was neat and very professional looking. It was very easy to customize, change the screen resolution, fonts, etc. It comes with a lot of applications installed in the live cd, like Open Office with all the equivalents to MS Office (word, excel, powepoint, etc), firefox, multimedia applications, etc... quite complete for only a standard (compressed) CD.

Making PCLinuxOS to view the rest of my home network (from computers running microsoft) was reasonably easy with something called "smb4k" under "PC" (like "Start" in MS)->Internet->File Transfer. I put a shortcut to smb4k in the desktop and I have easy access to the home network. There are other mechanism, but that was the first that I found in a couple of minutes.

Then to make the PCLinuxOS box visible to the rest of the network it seemed a bit more complicated. It is necessary to configure Samba, not too complex, but I had to google a bit to learn how Samba works and how is configured. I had heard of Samba before, but I didn't know what it was for exactly.

Once I had access to my network from PCLinuxOS, I took the Office documents created by MS in my windows boxes and opened with Open Office. I was pleasantly surprised. They looked almost identical, the functions are very similar, the look of everything is very professional (by the way, I reduced the standard system font from 12pt to 8pt which is more reasonable for me because I want to be able to see us much info on the screen in a single shot as possible). It was very natural to work with Open Office, even many shortcuts are the same than in MS Office, for example to insert a row in Excel you do Alt+I and select row from the menu, something that I do very often en Excel and that I can do exactly the same in Open Office Calc.

Some may criticize that PCLinuxOS and even Open Office it is copying MS, but the truth is that this kind of similitudes makes very easy the transition from the MS world to the Linux world and that is very welcomed. I do not want to start learning how to use my office tools again, I want just to get rid of Microsoft and continue working in a nice and easy Linux environment like is PCLinuxOS and Open Office.

Resume
Ubuntu defrauded me with WIFI and was enough reason to drop it, I was greatly surprised by PCLinuxOS in all aspects and I decided to go for it. It seems as if I could do my every day work in PCLinuxOS!

Next step is to install it to HD!