11. Submitted by Mike, free-bees.co.uk, Monday 23rd October 2006

In response to #10:

The powering on is done automatically the instant you plug the USB stick in - mount simply adds one of the partitions in to the filesystem. To re-mount an ejected USB stick - you would have to take the USB stick and put it back in again.

12. Submitted by Anonymous, Tuesday 24th October 2006

I have installed Simply Mepis, kubuntu, Open Suse, kororaa, Sabayon, Novell Suse 10.1, Freespire and Mandriva and so far thay have not lured me away from PCLINUXOS. I am running it on several laptops and desktops and all with different video cards and wlan cards. I was a lover of Kanotix before and though I have a passion for the Debian based distros I was pulled away by superior hardware recognition that PcLINUXOS has over even the famous Kanotix. Laptop hardware seems to be a strong suit here as well.

I do however feel the need to force my self to get my $60 Novell Suse running on at least on pc or feel completely cheated.

13. Submitted by TheMAN, Tuesday 24th October 2006

I find your review a little confused. From what you wrote it would seem your a Linux Novice, yet the tone of your article is that of a Linux Hacker. I personally use PCLinuxOS and didn't have any trouble with installing it or partitioning on any systems. I actually found that it has one of the most simple to use installation of those I have seen. It is a LiveCD so you boot into a functional system to start with, then you can choose to install it and configure the partitions. It has never asked me to reboot during partioning.

Your comments about the installer being overly simple is in my feeling misplaced. That is exactly what this distribution is intended to be. Simple! A distro for people looking to get out of the oppressive Microsoft Hoard. You should take the time to review it as such.

Your issues with software choices seem overly critical. If you remember that this is FREE SOFTWARE that is setup the way the author thinks is most usable. In this case Tex as he is affectionately called chose to use Konqueror over Firefox. My thoughts are for two reasons one he wants the feel to be as much like windows as he can, and two it is a live CD which means space is limited, the base Linux + KDE is over 200 MB, OpenOffice is over 200 MB, you have less than 300 MB left to pack in all the other features. You have to make trade offs. KDE includes a browser that is integrated like IE is in Windows. Adding extra space for something so easy to get doesn't make a lot of sense. Plus Konqueror has a built-in spell-checker and other features I like.

As with many distros codecs are a bit of an issue. What Tex doesn't do is outright copy and directly violate copyrights of codecs like W32, and Quicktime. But he does more than many including Ubuntu when it comes to including software that includes a large amount of codecs to start with. Both Xine, and ffmpeg can play the majority of files available. Realplayer is a quick click away in Synaptic. Speaking of Synaptic, if you don't like Synaptic, exactly what package manager do you like?

I found your article to be overly negative for no good reason. Nitpicking apps doesn't make sense, it is like saying Ubuntu needs to use KDE instead of Gnome. If you have a preference for an application you should write: PCLinuxOS uses Konqueror as the default web browser, my preference is Firefox, which is a quick click away in the easy to use Synaptic Package Manager.

If Open Source is to flourish we all need to start being constructive instead of negative. Every distribution has issues, all have a long way to go before being a real threat to the Windows Desktop. Vista is about to be released, and nobody has come up with a campaign as compelling as Firefox to replace the next generation of desktops.

14. Submitted by Mike, free-bees.co.uk, Tuesday 24th October 2006

In response to #13:

Well, let me address your points one by one. Firstly, I still believe that the installer is too simple. I am not asking for something overly complicated - I would be content with a single screen that provides buttons that open dialogs allowing you to change keyboard, resolution, etc. In fact, it was mentioned earlier that any changes made in LiveCD mode are copied over to the installation - therefore, a simple message informing you of this in the installation, along with a button opening the PCLinuxOS Control Center, would probably be enough. After all, even the most basic user would want their computer to use the correct keymap.

As for the web browsers, I simply said that I didn't agree with the choice - that is just my opinion, and that Firefox is also installed by default so that users have the choice. As such, you second point ("Adding extra space for something so easy to get doesn't make a lot of sense") doesn't really hold water. Also, making Firefox the default would satisfy more Windows users, seeing as many new GNU/Linux users are likely to have tried Firefox, but not Konqueror.

As for the media playing, I was pleased with the fact that ffmpeg was included - as mentioned, it means that it can play significantly more media files than many other distributions. I also mentioned that additional codecs are available via Synaptic, as is the ability to play DVDs.

Synaptic is an excellent piece of software - it's a package manager I use frequently. As I said, it is one of the best bits of PCLinuxOS. I said that the only slight downside was that it isn't necessarily the easiest tool to use - an alternative might be the Add/Remove Applications featured in Ubuntu.

As for nitpicking - the only application choice I disagreed with was Konqueror as the default web browser, and I also said that Firefox was still included, which was good enough for me. I have no complaints over the other package choices, just that they perhaps could have been labelled a little better to make their purpose clearer.

Personally, I think my article was relatively positive - after all, I called it the most user friendly distribution yet reviewed. The reason for all the negatives was that I hope the article gets read, and that the negatives disappear by the next time I try PCLinuxOS. In that way, I hope that PCLinuxOS can improve, which is less likely to happen if we all keep quiet about what we like and don't like. Also, I hope that this article helps users make a choice about what distribution they want to use - although the only way to be certain about which one you'd like is to try it out yourself!

15. Submitted by Anonymous, Monday 8th January 2007

Ilove PCLinuxOS 0.93a it just works exactly how I want it to.It is not irritating to try to configure and it has every tool I need.
IAN