PCLinuxOS 2019.09

Neil Bothwick revisits a forgotten friend with an eye on the good old days, but with a very modern collection of software.

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This distro has been around for a long time, starting life as a fork of Mandriva, although it has been developed independently since 2007. That’s a long time for a small distro to be around without leaning on one of the major players, so how is it doing? Well, the short answer is “Very well, thank you”.

PCLinuxOS is designed primarily as a desktop system for home and small business use. Of course you can use it for server or other applications – it is Linux, after all – but other distros may be better suited to such tasks. PCLinuxOS is released in the now standard Live distro plus installer format, as popularised by Ubuntu. What many may not remember is that PCLinuxOS actually pioneered this approach; early Ubuntu releases had separate Live and install images. This makes the installation process quick and simple, as it is basically dumping the contents of the Live distro to your hard disk, with a handful of configuration questions thrown in along the way.

There are a choice of three versions to install, differing in the desktop; the choices being KDE, Xfce and MATE. The first two also have lighter alternatives, which are basically missing