 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 1179, 29 June 2026 |
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Welcome to this year's 26th issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
Here, at DistroWatch, we talk about hundreds of different distributions and what each one offers. Many people enjoy trying out different distributions and comparing their capabilities, but it can be challenging to move seamlessly between the various flavours. In our Questions and Answers column this week we share tips on installing multiple distributions. Do you have any tried and true distro-hopping tips? Let us know what works for you in the comments section. We begin this week with a look at PCLinuxOS, a conservative rolling release distribution. PCLinuxOS grew out of the Mandrake Linux family, but it is independently developed and has gradually adopted different tools and package management utilities. PCLinuxOS has an unusual release model, both constantly moving, but experimenting slowly. In this week's Opinion Poll we ask our readers about their preferred release cycle - do you like rolling, semi-rolling, fixed, or long-term support releases? Our News column this week reports on the Xfce desktop testing a new Wayland compositor and link to a FreeBSD "ask me anything" presentation which will happen this week. Then we share the releases of the past week and list the torrents we are seeding. Finally, we say a grateful thanks to the kind readers who sent us donations this month. We wish you all a terrific week and happy reading!
This week's DistroWatch Weekly is presented by TUXEDO Computers.
Content:
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| Feature Story (By Jesse Smith) |
PCLinuxOS 2026.05
It has been a while since I last took the PCLinuxOS distribution for a test drive. The PCLinuxOS project grew out of the Mandrake Linux/Mandriva family and combined that family's legacy of making system administration easy with a new feature: a rolling release. PCLinuxOS was an early member of the rolling release club and it has continued to provide a relatively conservative approach to the concept over the years. Unlike most rolling releases, which are constantly adopting cutting-edge technologies, PCLinuxOS sticks to tried and true software and introduces major upgrades rarely.
The distribution is available in multiple desktop editions. The project provides ISO files for a KDE edition (3.9GB), a MATE edition (3.6GB), and the Xfce edition is 3.4GB. Each edition runs on x86_64 processors only.
I downloaded the KDE Plasma edition. Booting from this edition brings up a boot menu where we have the options of booting a live desktop, booting with no splash screen, booting in safe video mode, booting into a console environment, or copying the distribution into RAM and then booting to a desktop. Taking any of the desktop options brings up a graphical environment and then a window asking us to select our keyboard layout from a list. The window disappeared and I was left with a black screen, distracted only by a white mouse pointer.
I could move the pointer around the screen, but there was nothing else; nothing on which I could click. I also found the keyboard was unresponsive and I could not switch to a terminal. I tried booting a few times, trying the safe video mode and regular mode. Each time a window would pop-up, ask for my keyboard layout, and then leave me stranded in an empty screen.
Since the operating system was clearly able to create a graphical environment (the configuration window worked), but the Plasma session was not working properly, I decided to switch to another edition of PCLinuxOS; I downloaded the Xfce edition.
My trial with the Xfce edition began the same way. It presented me with the same boot menu and the same question about my keyboard layout. Then the Xfce 4.20 desktop loaded! A panel was placed across the top of the screen, showing an application menu and the system tray. Along the bottom of the display was a dock. Icons on the desktop offered to open the file manager and launch the system installer. The default theme is light and features a lot of blue icons.
The Xfce desktop was pleasantly quick to respond in the live session and my hardware seemed to be working well. I also really liked the default font (Open Sans Semibold) which looked great on my monitor.
PCLinuxOS 2026.05.30 -- Running the live Xfce session
(full image size: 2.5MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
Installing
The PCLinuxOS system installer is, I think, unique to the distribution. It is a graphical application which asks us to pick our preferred language, select our keyboard layout again, and then asks us to pick our timezone from a map. The next few screens deal with disk partitioning. There is an automated option which will take over available storage space and, optionally, create a swap partition. We are not told which filesystem will be used for the root partition. Manual partitioning is a bit odd. The system installer will handle assigning mount points to existing partitions. However, if we want to edit a partition the installer launches the GParted partition manager which works independently and then sends us back to the installer's mount point assignment screen.
The installer asks us where it should install the GRUB boot loader and asks if we want to download software updates during the install process. We are asked to make up a password for the root account and then we can make up a username and password for our regular user. Files are then copied to the hard drive. The installer completed in record time, taking about two minutes to perform all of its initial copying and configuration steps. Then the installer offered to restart the computer.
Early impressions
The first time I tried to boot PCLinuxOS from my disk the distribution failed, running into a kernel panic almost immediately after the boot menu. This happened again the next time and the next. This seemed odd since the live Xfce session had run without problems, but the installed version was failing and I had opted not to fetch updates during the install process. With a little experimenting I found that it was possible to boot into recovery mode (a single-user, text console environment), just not the regular desktop mode.
With a little more experimenting I found that I could successfully boot PCLinuxOS if the kernel was passed the "nomodeset" parameter. I'm not sure why this worked automatically on the thumb drive and not when booting from the local disk, but at least the distribution was up and running for me.
The distribution's login screen has an unusual layout. Instead of placing most functions, such as selecting a language and session type, around the borders of the screen, everything is placed in the middle. We can select our user from a list (shown on the left) and enter our password or select settings on the right. Something I found odd was that there are restart and shutdown options on this screen, but there is also an Actions button which, when clicked, also displays the choices of shutting down or restarting the computer. There is a Configuration button which does nothing.
The Xfce 4.20 desktop is snappy and it responds well. The desktop has no visual effects or animations to slow it down and everything reacts quickly. The application menu is presented in a classic tree format and has no search option. However, I found that running the "Run program" entry would open a window where I could type the name of a program I wanted to launch and the window would provide suggestions based on what I was typing. This helps us find programs based on their name, but not by any description or other key words.
Since I was having trouble getting PCLinuxOS to boot without changing the kernel parameters, I went looking for an easy way to adjust the boot menu. There is a tool for making changes to the boot loader, but it only changes the boot loader's location and timeout delay. It can toggle a few options relating to ACPI and SMP, but there is no option to input our own custom parameters. Since there is no option to add parameters, such as "nomodeset", through the graphical tool we need to adjust this via the command line and edit the GRUB configuration file by hand.
Hardware
When I tested PCLinuxOS in a virtual machine the distribution worked quickly and smoothly. The system booted and shutdown almost instantly, the desktop was quick to respond, and Xfce was stable. When I ran PCLinuxOS on my laptop all my hardware was detected. Audio worked, wireless networking was set up without any issues, and I could stream videos on-line smoothly. Also, Xfce was unusually quick on the physical test equipment.
The only hardware quirk I ran into was with the touchpad. It handled taps as clicks, which was appreciated, but it didn't recognize two-finger scrolling by default. Instead the touchpad recognizes edge scrolling, though this is tricky on my touchpad as it doesn't have a dedicated edge. This default can be changed in the Xfce settings panel.
The distribution takes up about 9.5GB of disk space, not including a swap partition I set aside. This is about average for a modern desktop distribution. On the other hand, PCLinuxOS was unusually light in RAM, using 490MB of memory when signed into Xfce. This is lighter than most other distributions running Xfce and about a third of the RAM used by most distributions running Plasma, GNOME, or COSMIC.
Included software
Along with the Xfce desktop, PCLinuxOS ships with a range of useful applications. I found Firefox, Thunderbird, and FileZilla in the application menu. LibreOffice is included and the GNU Image Manipulation Program is featured. The Thunar file manager is included along with a PDF viewer and an image viewer.
There are a few tools included for connecting with remote machines, including the Gigolo utility for setting up shell and file transfer connections. The AnyDesk and NitroShare utilities also help us connect with remote desktops or share files. These tools are not, in my opinion, particularly user friendly, but they worked for me.
When using Gigolo, connecting to another machine over SSH shows our local username/hostname, not the remote one. So if I'm logged in as "jesse" on server "remote", but my local machine name is "michel", then the prompt shows "jesse@michel" when I'm logged into the system called "remote". The connection works and runs commands on the remote machine, but the prompt is incorrect.
The system ships with Grsync and Timeshift for synchronizing files across computers and making filesystem snapshots, respectively. The Ventoy tool is included to help transfer disk images onto thumb drives, and BleachBit is included to help clean up unused files.
PCLinuxOS 2026.05.30 -- Installing a Flatpak and sending a file with NitroShare
(full image size: 1.5MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
I noticed the system installer remains on the installed copy of PCLinuxOS, but it displays a message saying it refuses to run when the user clicks its icon.
The Parole media player is included and works - playing both video and audio files without any issues. The VLC media player is also included and, likewise functions well. The distribution includes codecs for playing a wide range of files. There are clients for the Spotify and Pandora services. The first time I tried to run Spotify the window remained blank and was not interactive. I tried again the following day and it opened what appears to be a web app which can be used to sign into the Spotify service. The Pandora client, Pithos, reports its service is blocked in my country and refuses to connect.
PCLinuxOS 2026.05.30 -- Running Spotify
(full image size: 2.3MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
The distribution ships with Java and the GNU core utilities. The man manual page reader is included, but there are no manual pages installed on the system. In the background we find PCLinuxOS ships with SysV init and, at the time of writing, version 6.18 of the Linux kernel.
Package management
The distribution ships with a few tools for managing software on the system. Looking through the application menu we find the DNF Package Manager and the Easy Flatpak Manager. The former is immediately available and presents us with a low-level package manager that has a nice, clean layout. The DNF front-end divides packages into tabs for items already installed and items available. There is a search box for finding specific packages and we can select items to install by clicking a box next to the package. It's a fairly straight forward experience and the DNF front-end works quickly.
While I think new users might be put off by the low-level nature of DNF Package Manager, I appreciated its simple layout and relatively quick work. It crossed my mind a few times that the Fedora project would benefit from retiring dnfdragora in favour of PCLinuxOS's approach since it fixes all the issues I had with Fedora's package graphical manager.
PCLinuxOS 2026.05.30 -- Working with RPM packages
(full image size: 2.0MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
Trying to launch Easy Flatpak first installs the application as a Flatpak. By default PCLinuxOS does not ship with any Flatpak bundles on the system, but this one is added to provide a software centre when we click its launcher. Easy Flatpak provides a nice, modern software centre interface that pulls software from the Flathub repository. I used it to fetch a few applications and it worked well.
We can also manage system packages (RPM files) with the DNF command line package manager. The command line Flatpak utility is available too. These both worked well during my trial.
I noticed while running PCLinuxOS that the distribution does not notify the user when new software updates become available. I had to check manually for new packages.
Settings Manager, Settings Editor, and Control Centre
One odd aspect of running PCLinuxOS is that it has, at least in the Xfce edition, three graphical settings tools. (I think the Plasma edition has two settings panels). The first is called Settings Manager and this is part of Xfce. The Settings Manager (sometimes labelled simply as "Settings") handles customizing the desktop environment. From this panel we can modify the desktop layout, change the screen resolution, create keyboard shortcuts, adjust mouse behaviour, and tweak the window manager behaviour. These modules are nicely put together and I found them easy to navigate.
The second tool, Settings Editor, is a lower level tool. It also deals with the behaviour of the desktop, but through lower level variables and behind-the-scenes settings. Using the Settings Editor we can toggle variables which most users should not need to touch.
PCLinuxOS 2026.05.30 -- The three settings panels
(full image size: 1.1MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
The third settings application is called Control Centre and it is also labelled as "Configure your Computer" in the application menu. This application is inherited from the distribution's original family and helps the user manage the underlying operating system. Using Control Centre we can launch modules for setting up a firewall, creating user accounts, configuring file sharing services, and change the click settings. There are also tools for managing partitions and adjusting boot loader settings.
Some of these tools work well while others don't. The user account manager was great and worked without any issues. Likewise, the boot loader tool worked and the disk partitioning tool was fine. The OpenSSH manager reported OpenSSH was not installed and asked if I wished to install the service. I clicked the button to install the OpenSSH server and immediately the control centre reported the install had failed, with no explanation. I was able to switch to a terminal and run "sudo dnf install openssh-server" to install the daemon, then the control centre module worked and helped me configure OpenSSH.
The same problem happened with Samba. The Control Centre offered to install the Samba service package and immediately failed. This package too could be manually installed from a terminal.
PCLinuxOS 2026.05.30 -- The Control Centre failing to install Samba
(full image size: 2.0MB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
The fact that some of these tools do not work without manual help and do not provide any useful error message is concerning. I suspect it means they are not being tested on fresh installs of PCLinuxOS.
Other observations
In many ways PCLinuxOS takes a classic approach to accomplishing tasks, reminiscent of its early days from two and a half decades ago. The distribution tends to use nice, big fonts, descriptive icons, and high-contrast backgrounds. Under the hood we find PCLinuxOS still uses the /bin directory instead of the modern practice of grouping programs under /usr/bin. There is no swapon command for managing swap space or swap files; we get one swap partition and we better like it! PCLinuxOS still uses SysV init (and it works, usually faster than some modern alternatives). In a lot of ways, PCLinuxOS has a familiar feel to it, reminding me of when I first got into using desktop Linux, but with updated applications.
Then there are some choices which do not seem to fit or which feel out of place. For example, despite the distribution's classic feel there are no manual pages included. The system places a terminal quick-launch button the panel, but there is no command line documentation. The system installer does not seem to support (or perhaps does not encourage) Btrfs use, but Timeshift is installed for taking snapshots of Btrfs volumes.
At times it is a weird mix of old and new, a classic style with modern applications. For instance, Gigolo and an FTP service manager are installed - classic tools from an earlier era, and these are placed alongside SysV init. On the other hand we find Spotify and a friendly front-end for Flatpak on the system too. Half the system feels like it is catering to the old guard who do not want welcome windows and flashy animations or high-level software centres. The other half is offering Flatpak, Spotify, and Pandora.
Half the time it feels like I'm using a 20 year old distribution of tried and true software with package updates applied. Other parts of the system feel modern and cater to new users. The system is incredibly lightweight and efficient, but then both editions (Plasma and Xfce) had trouble booting without changing kernel parameters and ship with some modern tools.
Conclusions
After a few days with PCLinuxOS I'm still not sure how I feel about the distribution. It does some things really well, managing to be light on resources and efficient in a lot of ways, and it mostly stays out of my way. On the other hand, I found myself missing some modern conveniences, such as the option to search for tools in the application menu and I missed having update notifications. Some elements of the distribution worked really well, including most of the configuration tools and applications. But there were occasional problems, both with local applications and cloud services.
My main concern with PCLinuxOS was with the moments where quality control appears to have let bugs slip through the cracks. Having Control Centre modules fail because they cannot install needed services, having both editions fail to boot (Plasma from the live session and Xfce once it was installed) certainly took me by surprise, especially since the Xfce edition ran smoothly from the live medium.
Ultimately, the conservative rolling approach is something which could work for me, but it isn't a style that I think would appeal to many other people. It's too varied in its style for new users, probably too conservative for many experienced or experimental users who want something cutting-edge. I like the "run what works" style and efficient desktop, I feel almost more at home with a distribution that inherits some of its style from 25 years ago. However, I suspect not many Linux users who have joined the community in the past 15 years will share that sense of familiarity and may be put off by the classic style and occasional bugs.
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Hardware used in this review
My physical test equipment for this review was an HP DY2048CA laptop with the following
specifications:
- Processor: 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-1135G7 @ 2.40GHz
- Display: Intel integrated video
- Storage: Western Digital 512GB solid state drive
- Memory: 8GB of RAM
- Wireless network device: Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX201 + BT Wireless network card
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Visitor supplied rating
PCLinuxOS has a visitor supplied average rating of: 8.1/10 from 132 review(s).
Have you used PCLinuxOS? You can leave your own review of the project on our ratings page.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
COSMIC gets a new system monitor, Xfce tests new Wayland compositor, FreeBSD developers invite questions
The developers of the COSMIC desktop have unveiled a new application, a system monitor. "A system monitor is often neglected as a run-of-the mill utility app in the desktop experience - a source of important performance data but an afterthought in UI and UX design. And that's exactly why the new COSMIC System Monitor was given the same attention to form and function that we've devoted to the rest of the DE. Users can find it in the COSMIC Store by searching for COSMIC System Monitor. It's available now in System76's Pop!_OS and other distributions." Additional information about the new application, along with screenshots, can be found in the System76 blog post.
"
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The Xfce project is moving closer to complete Wayland compatibility. Brian Tarricone has published an early snapshot of a Wayland compositor for Xfce. "The end goal of xfwl4 is to behave as closely as possible to an Xfce desktop running on an X server. Ideally a user could switch between the two without even knowing there's a difference. In reality, of course, it won't be quite that seamless, and there's still more work to be done to get as close as possible to that ideal. This is a first solid cut at it, at the very least." Additional information on the new compositor, including a link to the source code, can be found in Tarricone's post.
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Do you have questions about FreeBSD? Allan Jude, Kyle Evans, and Colin Percival (all FreeBSD experts and contributors) will be engaged in an ask-me-anything event on June 30th. "This year's BSDCan, North America's premier technical conference for the BSD operating system community, highlights major developments across FreeBSD, OpenZFS, virtualization, storage, networking, security, and modern infrastructure. We're excited to announce that Klara will host a live post-event Ask Me Anything session where we'll share what we learned at BSDCan and discuss the biggest announcements, technical updates, and FreeBSD developments relevant to production environments." Registration for the event can be performed on the Klara website.
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These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.
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| Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith) |
Tips for switching between distributions
Getting-into-hopping asks: I'm getting into distro-hopping. Any tips to make it easier to switch between distros? I don't want to have to set up everything from scratch every time.
DistroWatch answers: Welcome to the distro-hopping club! A world of options, discovery, and customizing your computing experience to suit your needs awaits!
I have a few tips to share that I've certainly found useful over the past 20+ years of testing distributions and experimenting with different combinations of operating systems. They are, in the order I've found them to be helpful:
- Test new distributions in virtual machines before you install them. Most distributions follow fairly predictable behaviour and rules, but some will do weird things or have configurations which will not suit your situation. For this reason I recommend installing any distributions you are curious about using in a virtual machine. Walk through the install process, find out what its defaults and behaviours are. Most importantly, watch to see if the distribution does anything destructive such as wiping and taking over your entire hard drive, or installing itself over another operating system without asking. Those sorts of poor designs can ruin your day if the distribution is running directly on your physical hardware. When it happens in a virtual machine, no harm is done.
- Before you start distro hopping, before you install any new distributions, make a few decisions. Figure out how many distributions you might want to install at a time and how much space each one will likely need. Then partition your hard drive to match your requirements. It is a lot easier to have a few dedicated partitions set aside with enough room to hold a distribution than it is to repartition your disk on an ad-hoc basis. You don't want to find yourself in a situation where you need to shrink one partition to make room for another new root partition for a new operating system.
- Speaking of partitions, I highly recommend setting aside space for an independent /home partition. Or at least a partition where you can store files that you will want to share between distributions. Installing multiple distributions on the same computer, or simply upgrading one distribution, becomes a much faster and easier process when you have a separate partition dedicated to holding your users' files.
Some people may warn against you sharing one /home between multiple distributions for fear of configuration files not being compatible across the different distros. This can happen, but it is rare and usually only occurs when you are using widely different versions of the same application across different distributions. If the application versions are similar, or you use different applications for each distro, then you'll be safe. Alternatively, if a conflict does happen and damages your configuration then removing the application's entry from your ~/.config directory will usually solve the issue.
- Keep backups. Make regular backups of the files in your /home directory. This is a good idea for anyone with any setup, but it is especially important when distro-hopping. You're going to be running multiple operating systems and multiple installers and multiple versions of programs. Any one of these can have unexpected behaviour, every one of these carries the potential for a mistake.
Before you install a new distribution make sure you have copies of any important files on a hard drive that is not plugged into your computer. You do not want a misbehaving system installer to grab your external drive and merge it into a new storage pool or format it by accident. Backup often, backup to multiple locations, and backup before you install a new distribution.
- Keep a reliable distribution on a DVD or thumb drive to assist in system rescue. Sometimes, no matter how practised you are, things go wrong. A system installer will overwrite your boot loader, an update will break the system, something will go sideways. In those times it is important to have a distribution on hand that you know will run well from a live medium and will make it possible to run rescue tools or quickly re-install.
I recommend having a mainstream distribution on hand that you know works and can be setup quickly. That way, if the worst happens, you can install this trusty distro and restore your important files from a backup. You will be running normally again in under half an hour.
I think that covers the main concerns and tips I have when it comes to trying out multiple distributions. Experienced distro-hoppers, please leave us your battle-tested tips in the comments.
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Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.
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| Released Last Week |
SteamOS 3.8.10
SteamOS, an Arch-based Linux distribution developed by Valve Corporation, has been updated to version 3.8.10. The new release comes with an updated base system and a large number of improvements and bug fixes: "SteamOS 3.8.10 has just been released for all users with the following changes: updated Arch system base; initial support for upcoming Steam Machine hardware; added support for waking from sleep via connected Steam Controller; substantially improved speed of future OS updates on high-speed connections; improved support for screen casting in Game Mode (e.g. OBS/Discord); fixed dropdown menus not appearing in some games; fixed excessive trackpad sensitivity on certain early Steam Deck LCD models; improved support for games that attempt to open PDF files in external viewers; fixed an issue where video output could become frozen while using Remote Play; fixed a possible session crash when using Game Recording with certain 'Maximum video height' settings; fixed an issue affecting certain titles (such as 'SpongeBob SquarePants: Titans of the Tide') where the game window could have an incorrect position; fixed closing certain titles (such as 'STAR WARS Jedi: Survivor and Starfield') resulting in a session crash...." See the release announcement for a full list of changes.
KaOS 2026.06
The KaOS project has announced the launch of KaOS 2026.06 which completes the distribution's shift to the Dinit init software. "After almost three years of preparation and close the a year of trials, building, testing and rebuilding, KaOS is proud to present to you a first stable ISO image that is fully Dinit-based. For those interested in the reason why all these changes, please read systemd and the future of KaOS. A move away from systemd as init system is completed. KaOS now uses Dinit, turnstile, seatd for the system startup, seats and services. This does not mean the system is systemd free, a much reduced systemd is still in use mainly for udev and tmpfiles (this will stay for the foreseeable future, other options for udev and tmpfiles will be evaluated). Elogind is in use, though not for system login, but purely for a functional polkit. A new display manager is also in use, greetd with tuigreet has replaced sddm. Greetd fully integrates with seatd, so is a better fit for KaOS in the new setup. You will not find Plasma or Kwin on this ISO image, instead you will find a Niri/Noctalia based system." People who would like to continue running Plasma on KaOS can still install the desktop from the distribution's repositories. Further information is available in the release announcement.
Drauger OS 7.8
The developer of Drauger OS, an Ubuntu-based distribution with optimizations designed to improve gaming performance and experience on Linux, has announced the release of a major new version, 7.8, now based on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS: "I am proud to announce the stable release of Drauger OS 7.8, codename 'Urgal'. This release comes with a number of features and changes over 7.7: Drauger OS 7.8 ships with kernel 7.0, meaning immediate support of NTSYNC and a much improved performance over Drauger OS 7.7; we've upgraded to Plasma 6.5, this comes with a number of creature comforts, including better VRR and HDR support; all Drauger OS installations now use Wayland by default; Firefox as a flatpak; following in Ubuntu's footsteps, we've switched to using sudo-rs over the traditional C-based sudo. The Edamame installer has seen a number of improvements: Quick Install now supports copying network settings with both NetworkManager and netplan; Edamame will now copy network settings from netplan from the live system to the installed system, so you shouldn't need to re-setup WiFi after installation; background optimizations to keep lower-end systems responsive...." The full release announcement is available on the project's Reddit pages.
Drauger OS 7.8 -- Running the Plasma desktop
(full image size: 1.9MB, resolution: 2560x1600 pixels)
AnduinOS 2.0.0
AnduinOS 2.0.0 has been released. AnduinOS is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution featuring a GNOME desktop customised with a variety of extensions. This major new release brings extensive under-the-hood changes while maintaining the usability and customisability of the desktop. "Today, AIURSOFT Limited is announcing the general availability of AnduinOS 2.0.0. The project is now officially maintained by AIURSOFT Limited (Hong Kong), marking its transition from a solo-maintained effort to an internationally backed ecosystem. When we started this project, like many downstream Linux distributions, we used to rely on a series of complex imperative Bash scripts to modify an existing system image. While functional, it was fragile and difficult to maintain and upgrade. For version 2.0, we took a step back and rebuilt the entire foundation from the ground up. AnduinOS 2.0 is no longer a simple "remaster". It is now assembled entirely from scratch using a clean debootstrap and chroot pipeline, driven by our custom-built, declarative packaging toolchain (aosproj and apkg). The OS core has been meticulously modularized into 56 standard .deb packages across three tiers - Hard Replacements (e.g., overriding ubuntu-desktop), Soft Overrides (e.g., apt-config) and Branding/Capability extensions." See the release announcement and the changelog for more information.
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Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
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| Torrent Corner |
Weekly Torrents
The table below provides a list of torrents DistroWatch is currently seeding. If you do not have a
bittorrent client capable of handling the linked files, we suggest installing either the Transmission or KTorrent bittorrent clients.
Archives of our previously seeded torrents may be found in our Torrent Archive. We also maintain a Torrents RSS feed for people who wish to have open source torrents delivered to them. To share your own open source torrents of Linux and BSD projects, please visit our Upload Torrents page.
Torrent Corner statistics:
- Total torrents seeded: 3,455
- Total data uploaded: 50.1TB
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| Opinion Poll (by Jesse Smith) |
Favourite release cycle?
There are several different approach Linux distributions can take when it comes to releasing new versions. Broadly speaking, these approaches can be split into two groups: rolling releases and fixed releases. However, both camps can offer a lot of variety in terms of pace. There are fast rolling releases and slow ones, rapid fixed releases and long-term support ones. Let us know which release cycle style is your favourite.
You can see the results of our previous poll on installing software from the Arch User Repository in our previous edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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What is your favourite release cycle?
| Rapid rolling release: | 251 (17%) |
| Slow rolling release: | 246 (16%) |
| Semi-rolling release: | 141 (9%) |
| Short fix releases (Fedora): | 105 (7%) |
| Long-term releases (Debian/RHEL): | 672 (45%) |
| Other: | 20 (1%) |
| No preference: | 74 (5%) |
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|
| Website News (by Jesse Smith) |
Donations and Sponsors
Each month we receive support and kindness from our readers in the form of donations. These donations help us keep the web server running, pay contributors, and keep infrastructure like our torrent seed box running. We'd like to thank our generous readers and acknowledge how much their contributions mean to us.
This month we're grateful for the $245 in contributions from the following kind souls:
| Donor |
Amount |
|---|
| Bruno D | $50 |
| J S | $50 |
| Sam C | $20 |
| Michael R | $28 |
| John T | $18 |
| Anthony B | $14 |
| Používateľ Krz Str vám | $8 |
| Joshua B | $7 |
| Taikedz | $5 |
| Chung T | $5 |
| Brian59 | $5 |
| Joe Football | $5 |
| AbondonShiP | $5 |
| David R | $5 |
| Robert S | $5 |
| Sammy | $5 |
| J.D. L | $2 |
| PB C | $2 |
| Stephen M | $1 |
| William E | $1 |
| Kal D | $1 |
| aRubes | $1 |
| Colton D | $1 |
| Lars N | $1 |
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DistroWatch database summary
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This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 6 July 2026. Past articles and reviews can be found through our Weekly Archive and Article Search pages. To contact the authors please send e-mail to:
- Jesse Smith (feedback, questions and suggestions: distribution reviews/submissions, questions and answers, tips and tricks)
- Ladislav Bodnar (feedback, questions, donations, comments)
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1 • PCLOS (by R-HTORAS on 2026-06-29 08:41:37 GMT from Greece)
PClinuxOS is good in a sense it uses sysVinit and NO elogind. I am not sure about their package signing techniques though and i was against DNF when they introduced it.
There is also a PCLinuxOS Debian edition which also deserves a review. It's main problem is it makes use of Elogind. Apart this i find it better than most Debian derivatives excluding antix. It is better than MXlinux imho so please guys give it a go.
2 • PCLinuxOS and releases (by Brad on 2026-06-29 11:07:43 GMT from United States)
I voted "no preference" on release types, because I've used rolling and fixed, and find advantages and disadvantages to each. I’m currently using MX Linux, which bills itself as "Semi Rolling". I find it comfortable for now.
Moving on to PCLinuxOS, I'm going to make an observation and ask a question of the community. I have been attempting, without success, to boot a live version of KDE and XFCE for well over a year now, encountering the same issue as Jesse described early on with the KDE edition, a black screen, but with no pointer, and no way to switch to another terminal session.
These issues have happened consistently for both the KDE and XFCE versions; I note that Jesse was finally able to get the XFCE live session working, but I also note his phrasing: "Then the Xfce 4.20 desktop loaded!" It's as if he wasn't convinced the live session would load.
I *really* want to like (and use) this OS, because it seems to be a great alternative to Debian-based or Arch-based distros. My inability to get a live session going is a real deal-killer.
This brings me to my question - have others experienced the same/similar issues with PCLinuxOS live sessions? Thanks!
3 • Has never worked reliably for me (by No-PCLOS on 2026-06-29 12:17:37 GMT from Canada)
Like Jesse, I've tried PCLOS randomly over the years, and unfortunately I've never had it be stable. I'm always surprised that it's still around as I've never found it to be usable long-term.
I do have a preference for Debian based distros, but I did use Mandrake back in the day and did like it, but PCLOS just never quite measures up for me.
4 • PCLinuxOS (by César on 2026-06-29 12:33:45 GMT from Chile)
Hi!
I use PCLOS years ago and is a good distro, everything works and are stable, nice look, but now...i tried install but only problems, nothing to do with the "ancient" distro, even install the hp scanner is a trouble, the translation to spanish is almost "0".
Saludos desde Santiago de Chile.
5 • PCLinuxOS and Mageia (by OldTimer2 on 2026-06-29 12:58:36 GMT from United Kingdom)
It is interesting to watch projects like PCLinuxOS and the Mageia project over the decades.
I use to love Mandrake Linux (spent money on it, proper) and then spent a lot of time with PCLinuxOS, it was nice and predictable but as I seem to recall (it was probably about 10+ years ago) at the time browsers were being fixed and released almost every other week, but they didn't keep up, so I moved. I am sure things have changed but there are plus and minuses to being on a conservative distro. Or a speedy one for that matter
Conversely, flipping into the latest Ubuntu might be occasionally stressful with the almost 6 monthly changes.
Although if I had one of the more modern laptops that would be the first distro to try and Canonical do work at an amazing pace and do a lot of innovation (eg. I'd like to get a Snapdragon laptop as there are bargains to be had but whenever I search for the status something like this comes up "Snapdragon X X1-26-100 processor is currently problematic and considered a work in progress" (yes, that is what Brave tells me) but if anything runs on them it would be an Ubuntu test release like Ubuntu Concept, still be nice to have most things working out of the box, I don't want to go back to the mid 1990s again!).
I suppose in the end, like everything, it comes down to personal taste. I have distro hopped far too much since the 1990s and finally settled on SparkyLinux. It is predictable, very light weight not too flashy and works, works and works,
But in the end, personal choice is the thing, and in Linux we must be thankful that we have such an abundance of it.
6 • Release Cycles (by Jupiter on 2026-06-29 13:16:01 GMT from United States)
Personally I've found that Debian Stable was a bit to slow for me, so I used the testing branch in my time with it. I've also tried CachyOS (Arch) in my time and have found that, though whilst the latest and greatest in software is nice, nonetheless the lack of proper testing and my own lack of personal time left a bit of risk that I couldn't exactly accept, so what to do?
Well, I went over to Solus, and there we have our updates once a week (Instead of everyday such as Arch) with us still getting new software pretty early, but there is a more proper line of testing which makes things much more stable yet still new, which works quite well! There is a way to balance the two approaches, and this one seems to work quite well in my time.
7 • PCLinuxOS (by kc1di on 2026-06-29 13:26:26 GMT from United States)
I have used PCLinuxOS over the years since the demise of Mandrake. It's always been a good solid OS for me. I've never encountered any of the install problems Jesse ran into. I must say that it's gone down hill a bit in my opinion since it's trying to covert to DNF and has a new DNF package manager. But all in all it's been pretty good here. Though I know longer use it on a day to day basis, that is now because it's not good, but because I'm leery of a basically one man development team. Tex is the Head developer and if he goes I not sure it would survive.
8 • distro hopping (by txm0523 on 2026-06-29 14:45:40 GMT from United States)
I used to be a distro hopper. Finally settled into one Linux distro ( MX Linux ), I do like to try new distros, but I got tired of burning DVDs and then end up tossing them out to the trash. What works for me is I have a USB thumb drive that's dedicated to downloaded ISOs of different distros. I use Ventoy on that USB drive to manage them. On that USB drive I can drop just about any linux distro to it, reboot computer to USB drive, choose from the provided menu of which distro I want to play with and off I go. I find myself less impressed with what is currently being released, meaning, distros that that change from SysV to SystemD, X11 to Wayland and so on. It's a good way to see what's new and if it works on your system.
9 • distro hopping (by vmclark on 2026-06-29 15:54:02 GMT from United States)
ubuntu distro only. No hopping ever again
10 • PCLinuxOS and Release cycles (Poll) (by tomas on 2026-06-29 16:02:21 GMT from Czechia)
I know the time for a review is limited so I am sorry Jesse did not test the Mate version of PCLinuxOS.
Recently I have installed it without any issue.
In the end I was not quite satisfied with the distribution itself, not figured out why.
For me, the poll is a little bit complicated because it is hard to tell to which group the distros I am running do belong.
Certainly Arch based are rapid rolling, so is OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and for me also Tumbleweed-Slowroll though by name it would be slow rolling.
I have already encountered problems with delayed updates of Arch so (too) rapid is a little problematic (does that apply to other rolling distros or is it only Arch specific?).
Linux Mint is labeled as fixed but because of its upgrade possibilities between editions I would classify it as semi-rolling (although with this category I did not have any luck - if there were ISOs to download they did not work or the system installed was buggy).
I have installed some distros on more than one PC only to find later that the installations differ in spite of my trying to configure them the same.
From this point of view I prefer slow-rolling distros, not because of their stability but because of the amount of data and frequency of downloads of the rapid ones (not sure if running them :-).
11 • PCLinuxOS (by David on 2026-06-29 16:28:22 GMT from United Kingdom)
I came to this distro 5 years ago as a refugee from CentOS and I've had few problems. It doesn't like my 20-year-old scanner, but neither do some other distros. The recent transition to dnf has gone well. It's interesting that Jesse prefers the front end to Dragora (which was created by Mageia, not Fedora), since the program was written by a developer who found Dragora unsatisfactory. It's also notable that all configuration can be done without using the CLI — how unlike the dreadful dpkg-reconfigure commands on Debian-based systems! One feature that Jesse missed the the tool for creating a custom installation medium. That works like the official one but installs a replica of your system as it was when the tool was created. Incidentally, it's not true to say that Tex is the only developer, although the team is small.
12 • PCLinuxOS and TexStar (by Slappy McGee on 2026-06-29 17:23:31 GMT from United States)
@7 I too wonder about TexStar's current and future influence on that distro. That is not the reason I do not have PCLinuxOS, which is more about just not liking it and also having on and off issues with it not present on other distros.
As mentioned by another user here, TexStar is not the only dev. I have to admit that there's a "feel" to the community and the distro itself that just is not right for me, not comfortable while so very many others are just that. Of the three main machines I use for Linux, not one of them is happy with efforts to install and run PCLinuxOS: Two Acers about 3 years apart in age, and a one year old Dell.
No systemD is the attraction for that distro, and that is a good thing for some users.
13 • Release cycles, PCLOS (by Robert on 2026-06-29 19:39:21 GMT from United States)
I generally prefer faster release cycles, but there are other more important considerations.
Like does it work? Does it offer one of my preferred desktops? Is the configuration both sane and flexible?
Well, mostly more important. LTS gets too old an crusty to be acceptable for a desktop distro, but any major update cycle of 1 year or less is fine.
If I have to work to get a distro running, or obviously it doesn't work at all, that's no good. If I have to change too much to get the distro working as I want, I might as well stick to Arch and configure it from scratch anyway. And of course, if the distro makes changing things too difficult that's no good either.
On PCLOS, I used it for a while in the mid-2000s. It was the first distro I actually used while I figured out LFS. At the time it was pretty solid, as far as 2000's Linux went. No major issues then, but obviously that was 20 years ago.
14 • PCLinuxOS (by AndyVGR on 2026-06-29 19:56:54 GMT from United States)
The name PCLinuxOS has always sounded weird to me, does anyone else think that or just me?
15 • @10 - PCLinuxOS MATE (by Brad on 2026-06-29 20:53:17 GMT from United States)
Thanks for the feedback - that's the only live version that I haven't tried yet, but I haven't liked MATE in the past - perhaps I'll try it this holiday weekend!
16 • Long-term releases (Debian/RHEL) (by sloth on 2026-06-29 21:33:22 GMT from United States)
2 years for a new release is even crazy IMO, it should be 3-5 years but it's fine this way, they know better.
17 • newcomers to LInux (by TYM on 2026-06-30 01:03:28 GMT from United States)
I feel that although it is common knowledge to Linux users the existence of '"Live sessions" should always be pointed out to newcomers. Most distros include one nowadays and is the simplest way to " test drive " a distribution without installing it, just download the ISO and use a burner program to put it on a removable drive,like a usb, then when you boot from it, one of the options usually asks you if you want to test it first. if you have plenty of ram the distribution should run pretty smoothly as this method typically loads all system files to ram. this is a good way to get a look at the distro and check to see that it supports all your hardware, like wifi ,sound ,ect. nothing you do here will be permanent.
18 • 5 years is too short (by tompost on 2026-06-30 01:09:58 GMT from United States)
5 years is too short. Ubuntu & Red Hat lead the way. Mint (& MX) is fine for many, including me personally, but would be more satisfactory and possibly eliminate some installs of Ubuntu if Mint offered longer support period.
19 • PCLinuxOS (by Devlin7 on 2026-06-30 01:27:20 GMT from New Zealand)
Shame about the negative review for PClinuxOS. System-D free linux needs a system-d free "beginner friendly" linux champion like Mint is to system-d. I guess this could be MX Linux? I'm an Alpine user but I cycle through the other system-d free distros regularly to see what is going on. This testing usually results in the same reason I don't move from Alpine ... a distro with slow release cycles, limited software repos or poor hardware support/stability.
20 • @19, SystemD-free (by Tasio on 2026-06-30 02:24:22 GMT from Philippines)
Use the "Search" function on this page. Look for distros based on Void. There are at least a dozen. Then look for distros based on Devuan. At least another dozen. If you can't find something there, you're beyond pleasing.
21 • PCLinuxOS (by frc_kde on 2026-06-30 02:28:05 GMT from Brazil)
I have done 4 new installations of PCLinuxOS (all with KDE Darkstar 2025.09 ISO), back in September, November, December 2025, and January 2026, in 2 different partitions — while keeping my previous installation (from August 2021), in a 3rd partition.
Jesse didn't talk about "KDE Darkstar" ISO, which has now 3,0 GiB, while "KDE" ISO has 3,9 GiB.
>> or copying the distribution into RAM and then booting to a desktop
This "Copy to RAM" (the latest, at the bottom) was the option I have used, all the times. — Other options did not work for me, and I didn't try them again.
>> and then a window asking us to select our keyboard layout from a list. The window disappeared and I was left with a black screen, distracted only by a white mouse pointer.
In my first attempts to boot, I changed the keyboard layout, but on the next screen there was no text at all, and I couldn't load the Live session. — Since then, I haven't touched it again, and urged to press "Ok" before it disappears, so as not to waste time — and in this way I was also able, later, to load Live sessions with ISOs 2024-10, 2025-07, and 2025-08, to examine them.
And, yes, I can confirm most of the issues and problems reported by Jesse. But, well, I have been using PCLinuxOS since 2019, and it works for me — even if it is not my daily driver for most of the time (I have been using mostly Arch with KDE, for years, and now mostly Artix with KDE. OpenRC, and XLibre). The fact is that I can deal with PCLinuxOS among other 8 distros, with little effort.
My focus was not on these problems, but on the new features PCLinuxOS had been experimenting with during the 12 to 15 months leading up to the fire at the building housing its servers, back in 23 June 2025.
PCLinuxOS had a new Installer since 2023, but I didn't pay attention to it, because I had been just upgrading my installation from 2021.
Also, PCLinuxOS It didn't switch from Plasma 5 to Plasma 6 via regular upgrades, like any other rolling-release distro. Instead, it created a “kde6” section in its repositories — alongside the “kde5”, “mate”, “xfce4”, “kernel”, etc. sections — Each user decided to upgrade, when he wanted do upgrade. Meanwhile, maintainers and users reported and discussed eventual problems and solutions, case by case.
So, there was no "mass migration", no "release date", and no reviews on the web, so far as Google could reach, or Wayback Machine could save.
My installation, running Plasma 5, continued to receive all other updates and kept working perfectly until six months after the "kde5" section of the repositories had been emptied. In the meantime, I tried out 4 new installations (with DNF), then upgraded my old installation (with apt-rpm / Synaptic), and it continues to work perfectly. Of course, I deleted the new installations.
I tried to note down everything I could recall about this *sui generis* transition — an upgrade outside the regular updates of a rolling-release distro — because I really couldn't find any records of this process anywhere:
https://byteria.blogspot.com/2025/12/pclinuxos-darkstar-plasma6-sysvinit-dnf5.html
22 • PCLOS (by Mike Sonic on 2026-06-30 03:59:03 GMT from United States)
This is one of the three permanent distros I use on one of my laptops. I have used it for almost 15 years. I use it for its Mate DE and RPM. It is supposed to a rolling distro and I did not do any re-install in over 5 years until I moved it to a newer laptop. No problems doing a reinstall in Dec 2025. The change to DNF did create some hickups but I think it was a learning curve for me. It boots in 35 seconds from the time of pressing the button and shuts down almost immediately. It just works for me.
On three other computers, I have MX (semi-rolling?) Plasma, LMDE Cinnamon, and trying out a Fedora Atomic derivative with Cosmic. All my computers are Dell with integrated graphics, nothing special, but I can´t recall the last time I installed a distro to try out and had a problem, it must have been a minor not ready for prime time distro.
I think on Sunday night I will do the installation of the same distro Jessie reviews and see what happens when I install it on a Dell i5 with 8 gigs of ram.
23 • systemD begginer (by rhtoraS on 2026-06-30 11:00:47 GMT from Greece)
Hey linux mint is not that user friendly as most people claim. Because you expect things the "windows-way" and then you get dissapointed.
The most user friendly distribution in the real linux a.k.a nonsystemD one way of working is Antix and this happen to be elogind free too. I could add Refracta a devuan derivative which works out of the box and new users i suggested them this one were very happy.
Last but not least i have to mention Salix which is easy enough for the new user but elogind is present everywhere.
MX linux is not systemD free for sure but i can assure everyone that this could be a way to leave behind forever what tends to be the end for linux ...systemD. This happens because although systemD is present there is a sysV version which is better.
Imho use Void there is no better distribution people won't regret it. Easier than arch, easy enough for the people thinking outside the box and has everything someone needs to get started and stay there.
24 • sysd (by R-HTORAS on 2026-06-30 11:01:53 GMT from Greece)
Hey linux mint is not that user friendly as most people claim. Because you expect things the "windows-way" and then you get dissapointed.
The most user friendly distribution in the real linux a.k.a nonsystemD one way of working is Antix and this happen to be elogind free too. I could add Refracta a devuan derivative which works out of the box and new users i suggested them this one were very happy.
Last but not least i have to mention Salix which is easy enough for the new user but elogind is present everywhere.
MX linux is not systemD free for sure but i can assure everyone that this could be a way to leave behind forever what tends to be the end for linux ...systemD. This happens because although systemD is present there is a sysV version which is better.
Imho use Void there is no better distribution people won't regret it. Easier than arch, easy enough for the people thinking outside the box and has everything someone needs to get started and stay there.
25 • Ventoy included in linux os iso (by Ted H in Minnesota on 2026-06-30 12:02:56 GMT from United States)
I hear PCLOS includes Ventoy included in its iso.
How come other linux OSs don't also include it?
Does any other linux OS include it in their iso?
Ted H in Minnesota
26 • @19, PCLOS, and non-systemD (by El Pingo on 2026-06-30 12:41:39 GMT from United States)
"This testing usually results in the same reason I don't move from Alpine ... a distro with slow release cycles, limited software repos or poor hardware support/stability." You make it seem like it's a desert out there for those thirsting for non-sytemD distros. It isn't. Here's one suggestion (And there can be quite a few.): Download Peppermint OS Devuan. It's a 5 minute install with Calamares and a choice of sysvinit, openRC or runit, based on Devuan excalibur which tracks Debian trixie. Those five minutes and a few keystokes get you a nice looking XFCE desktop. With the Welcome App you can install browsers, enable flatpak, and even gnome-software, along with some configurations. Debian stable too old for you? sudo mousepad /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nonfree.sources and change from excalibur to freia. Save and dist-upgrade. Now you're on the equivalent of Debian forky. Stability and large repos and no systemD. What's not to like? I have it on a VM just to try. It's not what I use as my daily because frankly, I don't really give much of a hoot about systemD or no systemD.
27 • Distro-hopping? (by Bob McConnell on 2026-06-30 13:39:48 GMT from United States)
No way. I have better things to do than try to wade through all the setup options on every new package that comes down the pike. I have been using XFCE on Slackware almost exclusively for the past 33 years. It's only 'almost' because the firewall is OPNsense which runs on FreeBSD and I haven't finished testing Slackware-ARM on a RaspberryPi, so those are still running Raspbian. (I'm not at all happy with their new can of worms.) However, I am considering switching over to a BSD system as my standard, as more and more of the Linux world is abandoning the best practices honed by the UNIX community over decades of experience in favor of flashy hacks designed by marketing geeks simply to differentiate themselves from the competition.
28 • Review (by My review of cachyos on 2026-06-30 13:47:57 GMT from France)
cachyos:
This distro should have another name, I’d call it either- TrashyOS- for the snobs and elitism that reeks here and the constant belittling and treating people like trash and scum who ask for help and questions and if it doesn’t fit into the ever changing toxicity of its “eternal leader”- who stylizes himself that way just like North Korea, then you’re in for a nightmare of hell.
Another name for this would be what I have seen many others say- “CatchyOS”, because there’s a big catch to using this- in addition to the TrashyOS moniker and attitude of its leader, the “CatchyOS” has stolen code from numerous other distorts and no one else gets credit except for, you guessed it, the “eternal leader”. The “CatchyOS” part also has its dear leader threaten anyone who has any other thoughts or opinions that don’t fall in line. Proof has been shown where the “eternal leader” inserts spyware into his distro to track others by their IP address and dox and swat anyone he wants.The “eternal leader” is also just like North Korean authoritarianism, watermarking files, banning anyone from the forums and the whole website for little or no reason as well.The last “CatchyOS” part is the eternal leader is in favor of age verification and has as usual, threatened, doxed and swatted anyone who has had a differing opinion on that.
This is not a Linux distro of any kind that should be promoted, this is 100% a cult full of toxicity and hatred.
29 • Release cycles (by Gary M on 2026-06-30 14:26:46 GMT from United States)
For me, I chose long-term release. I use Linux Mint, and I do not need anything similar to windows’ bi-polar instability and back and forth craziness to say the least. I need a stable release that lets me get done what I need to do on my computer and not have to worry about crashes, freezes, etc.
30 • rolling/stable/long cycle releases etc.. (by Rabbi Muhammad Saint Buddha on 2026-06-30 14:46:32 GMT from United States)
The distro hopping comes into play for me, as I think through a poll like that. Heck, a five year release cycle does sound stable and nice, especially knowing they offer security updates along the way and don't just vanish for 60 months.
The rolling model is where I most often end up because it seems like the most sensible schema with regard to keeping things up to date, even though there's that breakage risk from time to time. I still do rollers most often.
The hopping, though. That is a factor on all this because I admit to never having stuck with a long release cycle through more than one cycle.. if that, come to think of it.
31 • slitaz forked (by We all float down on 2026-06-30 14:53:15 GMT from The Netherlands)
@28 something like that ("deletion of governance discussion threads on the official forum, retroactive modifications to public messages without consent") also taking place in forum.slitaz.org right now, after return of their "eternal leader". New fork: https://eslapion.org/
32 • Rewiew (by Grandpa JIm on 2026-06-30 15:29:55 GMT from United States)
I downloaded PCLinuxOS and put it on a Usb stick. I experienced no problems booting it on my amd computer. I was presented with the keyboard selection screen. I selected OK and it continued to the Plasma (6.7.1) desktop. I clicked on Install me and there is an option to enable/disable a swap partition and the ability to set the size. I rebooted after installation and tried the dnf package manager and it checks for updates when you start the program. I was able to install and remove applications. I tried the Configure your Computer and was able to install the openssh-server and configure it. The Grub Editor in the Configuration category allowed me to change the grub command line. Also the man pages are included in my installation. Maybe Jesse got a work in progress release from May but this one works fine.
33 • Ventoy (by Mike Sonic on 2026-06-30 17:46:35 GMT from United States)
@25, Ventoy is included in PCLINUXOS, get a large capacity USB to tryout many live distros.
34 • Ventoy (by Biff on 2026-06-30 19:13:03 GMT from United States)
@25 why do you need it _in_ the ISO. Install Ventoy on a USB stick and copy the ISOs to the stick and boot from them. You can also use a USB SSD.
35 • PCLinuxOS (by Dadnut1 on 2026-06-30 21:04:14 GMT from United States)
I'm a happy user of PCLinux for the past 7 years or so. I've had small glitches that cleared up on the next update (or the one after that). The distro just keeps on rollin' for me. It has been, for me, the most stable of all the rolling releases.
For PCLinux (and ALL other rolling releases!) it is important to read the forum posts about updates. I don't recommend updating an important package as soon as it may appear. Wait a few days and, if it's safe, then do the update. If you are not willing to read your distro's forum posts before updating, then a rolling release is the wrong choice for you.
My other two rolling releases, Solus and Manjaro, have been stable for the past year and a half. And, yes, I always read the forum posts before applying an update.
All 3 of my rolling releases have recently reported black-screen troubles when upgrading to the latest KDE versions. The fixes that worked for me was replacing my NVidia graphics card with an AMD card (because the proprietary NVidia drivers suddenly dropped support for some older graphics cards) and replacing the 6.18 LTS kernel with 7.0. The black screen problem seems to be caused by a hard-to-trace interaction between KDE, SDDM, the kernel, and/or the NVidia drivers. I know that KDE is in the process of discontinuing SDDM and is developing its own sign-in app, perhaps because of all the black-screen reports.
---
@Jesse: "I noticed while running PCLinuxOS that the distribution does not notify the user when new software updates become available. I had to check manually for new packages."
My installation (using KDE) always shows available updates immediately. It's important to know that the PCLinux development team has created and is in the process of modifying the DNF package manager and the notification pop-up over the last month. Jesse, you picked an unfortunate time to review the distro.
"The fact that some of these tools do not work without manual help and do not provide any useful error message is concerning. I suspect it means they are not being tested on fresh installs of PCLinuxOS."
The development team is small and relies on forum reports. If you post a problem there, the team will do their best to fix it.
---
Another important point about PCLinuxOS is that, on the forum, you can request a package that's not in the repository. Many times the new package pops up in the repo within a day or two. There are other times when seldom-used software gets ignored and you need to wake up the team to let them know that the package is in need of being brought up-to-date.
36 • Booting live PCLOS (by David on 2026-06-30 21:08:36 GMT from United States)
I had the same problem after selecting the keyboard booting -- or, more accurately, NOT booting -- into the live PCLOS session. Then, rebooting the installer, I chose the second of several options, and it booted into the live session without a problem.
Unfortunately, the tags on that second of several options were not readable, as space was limited. Thus, I have no idea what those options offer. All I know is that the second one worked.
37 • Linux Mint review (by Kimmy J. on 2026-07-01 08:38:17 GMT from United States)
I keep trying to post a review on Linux Mint’s page, but it just shows after I try to submit it that it just appends my review by putting line break code in it, so I’ll just post it here:
I’ve had nothing but friendly, polite people around willing to help me if I have any questions or problems with anything. The community is active and the developer (or developers) listens to community feedback and takes a role in communicating with the community and is polite and friendly too. Linux Mint has been pretty stable, has lots of packages in the software center, basically it covers all grounds of day-to-day use without worrying about crashes, breakages and overall degradation of performance over time. There are lots of themes you can choose from and download even more too. They really make sure this is good right out of the box with a good amount of software without being bloated.
The only thing I do not like and have heard people mention before is how the UI is minimalistic and has flat design compared to how it looked in the past. And I personally do not like minimalism and flat design- it feels so alien, cold, sterile and it tbh, is boring and robotic, like anyone could throw out a design of minimalism and flat design who has no experience, and it’ll be treated as the bees knees. But when things take time to craft, put together and how it looks, that’s looked down upon- and what I mean by that is the craft of skeuomorphism is looked down upon and that just makes me shake my head. I do hope Linux Mint does get out of the trend of the hipster trend of flat design and minimalism because definitely that’s not what most people want, including me. We want more connection with reality lately, and not the cold and sterile post-COVID world we live in. I want to easily change any and all icons used in the system- including the system tray which is impossible to do currently.
If Linux Mint rejects the hipster trend of minimalism and flat design and goes back to actually being more user UI choice friendly, being able to replace any icons- including in the system tray and makes their minimalism and flat design stuff able to be 100% removed (without removing the whole desktop environment or parts of it that’ll cause it to break) and replace it with whatever else the user wants and make what the user chooses the default choice on their device, then I’ll rate it higher.
7/10
38 • @37 • Linux Mint review (by El Pingo on 2026-07-01 09:35:21 GMT from Philippines)
"If Linux Mint rejects the hipster trend of minimalism and flat design and goes back to actually being more user UI choice friendly, being able to replace any icons- including in the system tray and makes their minimalism and flat design stuff able to be 100% removed (without removing the whole desktop environment or parts of it that’ll cause it to break) and replace it with whatever else the user wants and make what the user chooses the default choice on their device, then I’ll rate it higher."
https://cinnamon-spices.linuxmint.com/themes
Enjoy!
39 • Mint (by Friar Tux on 2026-07-01 15:26:12 GMT from Canada)
@37 (Kimmy) I agree 100%. Especially about the ugly dark grey "minimalist" themes. Some of the themes in the Cinnamon Spices Theme page are quite nice but if you really want some life, try the Semabe theme by sewbej at pling.com./cinnamon themes. I think you'll like those. I have made my own themes using darkomarko42's Cristal theme as a base. It takes a bit of learning but it turns out nice.
40 • Why I want Ventoy included in an OS's iso file (by Ted H in Minnesota on 2026-07-01 23:07:42 GMT from United States)
@34 Biff
Thank you for your input to my Ventoy query.
Yes, I know about installing Ventoy on a stick drive. When I looked into doing that I found it is a bit more complicated than what I know what to do. I'd also heard that it worked best installing it from Windows which I don't use and don't have anymore. A knowledgeable friend did install it on a stick drive for me from Windows and it worked for a while but isn't booting for me now.
That is why I want Ventoy included in an OS's iso. I still want to know what other Linux distros might do that. So if anyone knows of other distros besides PCLOS that include it, I'd appreciate it if you would report that.
Thanks,
Ted H in Minnesota
41 • @40 • Why I want Ventoy included in an OS's iso file (by El Pingo on 2026-07-02 01:09:49 GMT from United States)
Ted H, the problem is that even if Ventoy is included in a live ISO, you'd still need to install it to a USB stick to use it, no different from downloading it to your own OS. In Linux you can't just double-click an .exe file, but it's not that difficult. I'm running Ubuntu, so I can download the linux.tar.gz file, right-click on it and choose "extract" or "extract here". I can insert the USB stick, open the folder I just extracted, move the mouse pointer to "Ventoygui.x86_64" and double-click on that. Now I have a nice GUI app just like in Windows. Some other distros like Linuxmint should work the same. If not, there are instructions on the website, and there are many YouTube how-tos available.
https://www.ventoy.net/en/download.html
https://www.ventoy.net/en/doc_linux_gui.html
Good luck!
42 • Review of old iso of PCLinuxOS (by Bobbie Sellers on 2026-07-03 01:34:14 GMT from United States)
I dunno why Jesse Smith whose reviews I value very highly on other distributions decided
to use older iso files in this review.
Like the iso he chose to review some do not work well with the first choice on a live
media boot.
However I have been using PCLinuxOS since 2014 when Mageia would not boot
on my hardware to currently, with a brief spell with Mageia when it would boot on my
hardware. I used it for a while then PCLinuxOS coders learned to deal with UEFI
and I went right back to its use. I am downloading the current KDE full release
still for a little while, pclinuxos64-kde-2026.06.30.iso which I do not particularly hope
to use since I do my updates on a regular basis.
I did not care for DNF when it first showed up but it has become much more useful
in the last 6 months. It has had frequent updates. Someone says that they
are not using the latest version of KDE's Plasma 6 and tightly holding on to
Plasma 5. I liked it very much myself but eventually there well be no security updates
for Plasma 5.
I see from announcements that Plasma 6.8 will no longer support X-11 so I will
very likely abandon it. But it is a fine bunch of updates that are confounding my
usual choices in the Configuration of KDE's Plasma.
As you may guess I started with Mandriva Linux in 2006 after Commodore
Business machines failed and the Amiga was no longer a viable choice.
PCLinuxOS is a good choice for those of us who reject systemd for its
insecurity. KDE's Plasma can simulate most of the other Desktop Environments
Being old fashioned I prefer the plain Menu which lets me see what I am doing.
I am still 88 this month but plan on using PCLinuxOS until I am 90 at least with a
little luck. I have two laptops with KDE fully updated as of yesterday and
a third older but powerful machine in laptop form which I hope a re-install
may get running usefully again.
Since Jesse does not have the time to keep up with the PCLinux Forum
It is no surprise that he was unaware of the changes going on. The Forum
is one of the best feature of the distribution. <https://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/>
and current iso with a document about DNF can be found at:
<https://mirror.math.princeton.edu/pub/pclinuxos/iso/> as well as other
of the several repositories throughout the world.
Good luck with whichever distribution of Linux you choose to use.
bliss- Dell 7730- PCLinuxOS 2026.06 Linux 6.18.37- Plasma 6.7.2
bliss- Dell 7730- PCLinuxOS 2026.06 Linux 6.18.37- Plasma 6.7.2
43 • PCLinuxOSboot (by engamark on 2026-07-03 11:02:30 GMT from Sweden)
PCLinuxOS KDE-edition, I have not yet tried Xfce. KDE looks reasonable usable to me, dispite I dont like modern.
it seems the keyboard choice dialog has a timeout, after 30 seconds, it changes into a plasma-working screen for some seconds, then the dialog returns but with a different screen resolution, but then a selection gives only the cursor on a black screen. The first shown dialog works correctly.
An old computer, PentiumDualCore(4GB RAM), on USBliveboot, takes one-and-a-half minute from bootmenu until the keyboard dialog, you could leave it and come back and only be aware of the second dialog.
Then it seems to work mostly, except "sleep", it never goes to sleep.
I installed Grub, on the system partition, not on the MBR, use Grub4DOS for boot-OS-selection: That did not work, show "incompatible executable format". Boot is possible on the Grub-meny of Ubuntu Unity which is installed on adjacent partition in the same way(Grub). KDE har an option to reinstall Grub on MBR or partition of choice, but does not work(crash).
PowerOff by systemmeny doesnot work, the physical.buttons work(KDEsettings no remedy).
This computer may be unsuitable for KDE, shouldnotbe RAM it shows only about 1GB RAM used.
Re MINT , themes does not help för all design element, ex. the monocrome and difficult to see system icons. I use theme Chicago95.
ADD. This PCLinuxOS ISO was downloaded 30thJune2026, should be sufficiently recent.
44 • @41 El Pingo Thanks for your explanation re Ventoy (by Ted H in Minnesota on 2026-07-03 11:04:45 GMT from United States)
@41 El Pingo
Thanks for your explanation re Ventoy included in an iso file.
I thought, and still wonder why, Ventoy as included in an OS couldn't just be copied over to a stick drive and subsequently run from there. (?)
Thanks for the URLs to check out.
Have a fine 250th 4th of July!
Ted H in Minnesota
45 • kernel.org kernel repos down (by luc13n on 2026-07-03 13:40:02 GMT from Canada)
I have notice since 2026-07-02 you can not download any kernels or patches. Is anyone having the same problems.
46 • @38 (by Kim B. on 2026-07-03 14:03:40 GMT from United States)
Yeah, I think that person knows they can change themes, but they can’t remove some icons and themes because it’ll remove the whole desktop environment, breaking the whole system. It should not be impossible to change such ugly icons and want to remove them completely and have whichever theme and icons in place they want chosen as default.
I use Cinnamon on Linux Mint, and I cannot uninstall the Mint-Y icons without it wanting to remove the whole Cinnamon desktop environment. I’d say the same for KDE for example, you’re forced to have the ugly flat and minimalistic breeze theme as default and if you want to remove that, nope, it’ll remove and break the whole desktop environment. I HATE things hard-coded like that.
47 • @46, Linuxmint theming (by ElPingo on 2026-07-03 14:45:32 GMT from United States)
"Yeah, I think that person knows they can change themes, but they can’t remove some icons and themes because it’ll remove the whole desktop environment, breaking the whole system. It should not be impossible to change such ugly icons and want to remove them completely and have whichever theme and icons in place they want chosen as default."
You mean like this?:
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/01/make-linux-mint-look-like-windows-7
Number of Comments: 47
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