Review: PCLinuxOS KDE 2012.08

The netbook where I have PCLinuxOS is already upgraded to the latest version and is working good. However, to test what’s new in this release, I downloaded the ISO separately – just to try it out. The present ISO is a little bit on the heavier side, nearly double of the last release, 1.3 GB! I did a liveboot on my Asus EeePC 1101HA with 1.3 GHz dual core Intel Atom processor and 1 GB DDR3 RAM. Not really great specs but PCLinuxOS 2012.02, now upgraded to 2012.08, runs smoothly on the machine. The appearance hasn’t changed significantly from the last edition with minor facelifts here and there. Overall, there’s no drastic change to shock the users. Linux kernel is updated to 3.2.18.2bfs and KDE is 4.8.3. I guess you can install KDE 4.8.5 or 4.9 (final version to be released) in PCLinuxOS as well. NVIDIA and ATI support is out-of-the-box and it works well with common graphic cards.

Applications
A major change in this version to provide the users more complete out-of-the-box experience and that also explains the increase in ISO size! You name an app and it is here in PCLinuxOS 2012.08. Unlike the Feb’12 release, where you had to download LibreOffice suite, this time LibreOffice is out-of-the-box. Internet section is possibly the richest I’ve seen in any Linux OS with Firefox 14, Konqueror, Dropbox, FileZilla FTP client, K-get download manager, desktop sharing, bit-torrent, Thunderbird 14, Xchat, and Skype by default in the ISO along with other regular KDE apps. I think it is more than enough for a regular user. Flash support is by default and Youtube, Hulu, Dailymotion, etc. flash videos works well in Firefox. I did live streaming of some Indian TV channels and everything worked fine without any hiccups.

From PCLinuxOS 2012.8

Multimedia section is very good with VLC, Television viewer, Webcam app Kamerka, DVD slideshow maker, Clementine music player, Audio format converter, etc. I would have loved to see Amarok but Clementine too is really good. Graphics has GIMP 2.8, Gwenview, Flick photo sharing app, Photo management programs, apps to manage raw images from DSLR cams and convert them into jpg or png files, etc. As a topping, the developers have provided virtualbox as well! Virtualbox provided in the installation ISO is 4.1.18 which is not the latest one but once you use it, it will prompt to download the latest rpm package 4.1.20.