Osugi Sakae

I switched from Gentoo to Kubuntu a month or two ago and while it was generally OK, there were several things I didn’t like about Kubuntu. I was a hardcore Gentoo user for many years and a KDE user even longer, so there are some features I just have to have. Like all of the functions for KRename, for example. Gentoo has them but I could not find any way to get all of them in Kubuntu. Long story short, yesterday I installed PCLinuxOS.

Sure, it is nice having all your hardware work out of the box, with no fooling around. Especially on this POS HP laptop that I have. (I originally planned to get my laptop from a Linux-friendly company like System 76 but other, unrelated issues prevented me from doing so. Lesson learned — my next laptop will definitely not be off-the-shelf.)

Hardware support was not the only reason I switched to Kubuntu. I also wanted to try out KDE 4.2 and it was getting too complex for me to do that in Gentoo. KDE 4.2 is kool enough but like I said, the Kubuntu people left out too many features — like konqueror audiocd flac support and those krename functions I mentioned earlier. Also, I really didn’t like what they did to Firefox; whatever it was, it made GMail almost unusable because of checkbox size issues. There were a few other minor issues. The search box in Konqueror didn’t work properly, the KDE letter size was set to 8×10 inches instead of 8.5×11. Printing from OpenOffice.org worked properly, so this was a KDE issue, not a CUPS issue.

End result, I switched yesterday to PCLinuxOS. So far, it is everything I wanted, except KDE 4 and I am willing to wait for that. A discussion of KDE 4 is something for another post so just let me say here that I liked it but missed some of the 3.5 features and stability.

PCLinuxOS is based on Mandriva (I used Mandrake for many years before switching to Gentoo) and is very smooth. They use apt-get and synaptic, which I think is a great idea. Mandriva’s rpm software was OK but why reinvent the wheel? PCLinuxOS also looks great, the menus are well done, and best of all, they include all the stuff I wanted but that Kubuntu left out.

Connecting to wireless with the build in card wasn’t as easy as under Kubuntu, but it wasn’t hard either. PCLinuxOS even set up the Nvidia card (chip?) with the proprietary drivers right out of the box. Only problem was that the resolution wasn’t properly detected, but it was close (1024×768 instead of 1440×900) and fixing it was easy.

Anyhow, it is only day two with PCLinuxOS but so far I am very happy with it. I will probably still use Gentoo the next time I build a desktop but on laptops I may well stay with PCLinuxOS. It has the software features I want, fewer annoyances, and just works.