PCLinuxOS

Reader supplied reviews for PCLinuxOS Average rating 8.2 from 125 review(s) Please select a rating in the range of 1-10. Please write at least a few sentences about the distribution while limiting your review to 4080 characters. What are your thoughts on PCLinuxOS? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- apt2025.092024.102023.072022.122021.112020.10152019.122018.062017.112016.032014.122013.102012.082011.092010.122009.220070.920.91 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: 2025.09 Rating: 8 Date: 2025-10-20 Votes: 0 I was running through distrowatch and i saw back this old distro i used 10-15 years back. What a memories. What times. One of best distros i remember. I dont remember how they where called back then but it had like 6 desktops and organised for different functions. Music, Internet, Office, Games etc etc.That was game changer option. When this option stopped working on KDE 5 i unfortunately stopped using PCLINUXOS, passed to Linux Mint. Im happy with my current distro but still im little nostalgic by how my old desktop used to look like. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 2025.07 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-09-02 Votes: 18 PCLinuxOS is a solid distribution that has so much going for it, from being one of the only distributions which says no to not just systemd but elogind as well to its "stable rolling" release cycle (in the same vein as Void Linux). It's one which I think deserves more attention in the Linux community. Despite recent circumstances, PCLinuxOS is going stronger than ever before with Wayland support (through the greetd display manager) and talks about freshening the package management with DNF5 instead of APT-RPM. PCLinuxOS has something for everybody, from those who are just now coming to Linux to those who have used Linux for 30 years, very much like Mint except that it's free from systemd and uses the RPM packaging format which is even better for end users in my opinion. PCLinuxOS has a welcoming community of both old-guard Mandrake/Mandriva refugees and newcomers of all types. If you want something, all you have to do is make a request in the "Package Requests" section of the forum and within a few days you will 9 times out of 10 see it in the repositories. It's that kind of relationship between the developers and community that makes PCLinuxOS special. Even if something isn't available, you can easily just use flatpaks and the 2025.07 edition even comes with a graphical flatpak manager to make it easier than ever. I typically install the KDE Darkstar Edition. The only bug in the new edition is that you may encounter "flatpak: error while loading shared libraries: libgpgme.so.11: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory" in the console but this can easily be fixed by running the command "apt-get install -f lib64gpgme45". As usual, it just works. It comes with Plasma 6, but there are still MATE, XFCE, and other unofficial editions. Give it a try, you won't regret it! Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 2011.09 Rating: 9 Date: 2025-07-24 Votes: 14 The version is irrelevant because it's rolling-release, so I'm fully up-to-date. It is simply the first 64-bit release when I made that jump. I have upgraded weekly ever since unless the forum indicated people were having problems with an upgrade in which case I'd wait another week for the problem to be resolved. I make my own remaster before upgrading (automated, of course) so I can recover if anything ever breaks, which is very rare. That also means I can always transfer my highly-customised version to new hardware when the time comes, so I've kept the same 'installation' going on multiple machines over time. That is one advantage of PCLinuxOS - remastering. Doubtless, it's not unique, but it's available. Stability is another. Rolling Release is often criticised for being unstable, but PCLinuxOS demonstrates that's not necessarily true. The Lead Developer, Texstar, is a forum regular so picks up problems quickly and is quick to respond, offering help, and sometimes asking for it too. This has created a community of users who together contribute to its success and unlike others where the forum is an add on and development decisions are taken elsewhere, the forum really is at the heart of development, which is probably why it was the first thing to be replaced after the house where the servers were kept caught fire. In fact, the distro's home page, by contrast, is still at this time a bare page with a few links and no decoration at all. Shortcomings? Well, of course, there are a few, but most of these will be personal to the user. It might not support an application you use a lot, especially if that application needs Systemd to run. In that case, it's not for you - use something that is. On my hardware Zoom usually crashes it, so I have to use something else for that, but that's my combination of GPU, driver (I need the notorious nouveau to keep using that fine but old fanless card) and something in the configuration or system. The lack of a full set of 32-bit libraries can cause problems with odd use cases - I have to use a 32-bit VM to access my printer, but it's simple enough to launch that when I want to print and it works well. These are niggles but I can overcome them. No system will be perfect. Enough works well for me to stick with it for now, as I have since I was told about it in 2005 and first installed it in January 2006. 9 out of 10 is good enough for me. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 125 reader reviews of PCLinuxOS...