 One of the things that I think we in the Linux community are guilty of as far as content creators go And I'll include myself in this category as well as we focus too much on the brand new Linux distributions We give the new distributions a lot of coverage a lot of love and print and media on video But the older distributions some of the older distributions that have been around for decades We really don't give much attention to we give them very little if any coverage And one of the distributions that I think is vastly underserved in this regard is PC Linux OS PC Linux OS has been around for nearly 20 years At one point it was one of the most popular desktop Linux distributions on the planet And it's you know, it's fallen out a favor now One of the things about it is I never see anybody in real life using PC Linux OS It's probably been more than a decade since I just came across anybody that said hey I was running PC Linux OS and you never see it out in the wild at least I don't I've never I've never met a real person in real life That was running PC Linux OS and even online I've only come across maybe three or four people that were running PC Linux OS One of them was a maintainer of PC Linux OS. So I'm not sure if that counts another one Is a youtuber and also a journalist tech journalist Linux journalist Matt Hartley who therefore a time had a YouTube channel I remember him he was using PC Linux OS and he promoted it pretty heavily and I always thought that was kind of strange because Matt Hartley was like the only person that I saw using PC Linux OS I never could understand it because I've actually taken a look at PC Linux OS a couple of times on camera It's been a while several years since the last time I took a look at it But I always thought it was a really well put together distribution So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take a look at the latest version of PC Linux OS PC Linux OS by the way is a rolling release distribution the last ISO they put out. It's a couple of months old So not terribly old and but I'll probably have to update after I do it installation They do offer three different main desktop editions. They offer KDE Plasma XFCE and Mate I've chosen to go with KDE Plasma because I think that's their flagship edition I think that was the first one in the downloads list Typically, that's what I do with these kinds of distribution installations and first look You know what if they don't say what their flagship edition is typically I assume it's the one at the top of the list when you go to downloads So let me switch over to my desktop here, and I've created this virtual machine I'm giving this virtual machine six gigs of RAM and two threads of my 24 thread CPU and Right away trying to boot into the live environment. I get an error It says fail to start the X server which is of course the graphical server right your display server It says it's likely that it's not set up correctly. Would you like to view the X server output to diagnose the problem? sure, I guess I could but What I'm probably I'm gonna have to do What I've done is I want to head and spun up a different virtual machine instead of using VRT manager I have a spun up a virtual box here So let's go ahead and see a virtual box as any issues with the X server Probably a video driver issue I could have played around with VRT manager and tried to find a driver that worked, but it's been a while since I've installed a Linux virtual machine inside virtual box and of course the graphical server is working. Otherwise, we wouldn't have this window here So keyboard layout by default. It's set to US keyboard, which is correct for me So I'm just gonna click next here and we're in our live environment. Of course, this is KDE Plasma I'm gonna run through a quick installation and one interesting thing about PC Linux OS is so many Linux distributions Use the calamaris installer and of course a boon to and all the a boon to flavors and a boon to spins They use the ubiquity installer. Those are the two big installer programs on Linux I guess fedora has the anaconda installer But no pretty much it's just fedora that uses that thing and a couple of other RPM based distros and they're based off of fedora, but PC Linux OS has its own unique installer So this is not calamaris. It's not ubiquity. It's its own thing and we've come to the partitioning It's chosen the virtual drive and this virtual machine There's only one and so there's nothing else to choose use free space or use custom disk partitioning Yeah, let's use free space. Do I need to pick a file system type? We have extend two three and four XFS swap windows other, but you can't really click them So I'm just gonna go with next. I'm just gonna go with whatever the defaults are here. It says all data will be wiped I'm pretty sure the default file system. They use its extend for though and you can see it says it's installing PC Linux OS while that's installing I will mention a little bit about the history of PC Linux OS. I mentioned it's about 20 years old It started around 2000 as really just some customizations to an already existing distribution Which was Mandrake Mandrake was probably the most popular desktop Linux distribution around the year 2000 and PC Linux OS started kind of as basically a set of improvements upon Mandrake for a couple of years That's all it was. It was just some patches to Mandrake and then eventually around 2003 it became its own Linux distribution and why the name PC Linux OS? That's not a great name, right? Well, the guy that created it originally he had a website PC Linux online I also think there was a PC Linux magazine as well So when he created the distribution PC Linux OS was the name and again, that was about 2003 and for a couple of years PC Linux OS kind of like its parent Mandrake was a very popular desktop Linux distribution and then in late 2004 Ubuntu released its first release and by 2006 to 2008 Ubuntu was by far the dominant player as far as desktop Linux and you saw the very quick decline in Mandrake and PC Linux OS Mandrake eventually died It was forked into Mandrake and then into open Mandrake You also have modern implementations kind of a descendants of it like Magia still around PC Linux OS though Different kind of beast. It's not really a fork necessarily of Mandrake PC Linux OS One of the unique things about it is package management, although it's a RPM based distro It actually uses the apt package manager your standard apt package manager that you're used to using on Debian and Ubuntu That's what they're using to interface with their RPM packaging Coming back to the installer the next portion of the installation is setting the bootloader What bootloader to use we have the options of grub2 with a graphical menu grub2 with a text menu I'll do the default grub2 with the graphical menu. What device should grub be installed to there's only one device in this virtual machine The one disk so there's nothing to choose from there And then the next section is the delay before booting the default image It looks like it's set to 10 by default. I'll leave that then I'm gonna click next then the next screen We have defaults. I'm not sure what they're doing here a pin. Okay. These looks like settings for the boot. So I'm just going to leave everything as default. I don't want to play with any of that It says bootloader installation in progress. Okay, so it's installing grub for us And it looks like the installation has completed. It says please click finish and then shut down the computer Remove the USB flash drive and then reboot. So that's what I'm going to do now And I've rebooted the machine and you can see we have our grub menu here And now we've got to set a few more things for the installation to be complete because during the installer portion remember we didn't set things like a time zone locale things like that So what is my time zone? It is correctly guessed that I am in the central time zone in the U.S Not a lot of installation programs in Linux get this right So I'm kind of impressed that their custom installer did correctly guess where I'm at And then we come to date clock time zone settings. What's the best time? My options are 141 or 1941 which is set to UTC time Obviously, nobody wants to use UTC time. I want local time, which is the default, of course Then we have NTP server, which we don't need to play with that And then we need to set our root password. Now, this is important You do not have sudo on PC Linux OS. They are anti sudo for security reasons Being an old distribution back especially 15, 20 years ago There was a real debate in the Linux community about sudo or no sudo And for a long time you had Debian which refused to use sudo by default And then Ubuntu became very popular Ubuntu shipped sudo by default And eventually pretty much everybody has just adopted sudo But PC Linux OS is still one of those rare distributions They don't install sudo out of the box You're going to have to switch over to the root user to do anything as root So set a root password, a strong and secure root password And then create your normal user, my user is going to be named DT This login name will be DT Let's create a strong and complicated password for this DT user And then click next Then it comes to localhost and the local domain Just give him a username, give him a password And the first thing I want to do of course is fix the display resolution So if I do display, display configuration here inside KDE Plasma Let's go ahead and set the resolution to 1920 by 1080, hit apply Then keep changes Now since this ISO was a little more than two months old The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to open a terminal And zoom in here and let's run an update So to use the apt package manager typically to do an update You run the command sudo apt update and then the command sudo apt upgrade Remember we do not have sudo We have to switch over to the root user So do an su, give the root password And now just do an apt update and and apt upgrade And I expect there to be a number of packages That have an update here in the last two to three months So this may take a minute It says 334 packages need to be updated And it took about 10 minutes or so for those 334 packages to update So let's go ahead and do a reboot And I've rebooted, I'm back in the desktop and there is an error here If I move my head The taskbar widget has crashed I'm assuming that massive update Here's one of the issues with rolling releases And sometimes you take these massive updates Especially when you download an older ISO Don't be surprised if some things are a little crazy I could probably figure out what that error is Because it does tell me some information here It gives me an error message Something about plasma workspace triangle mouse filter is not installed But I'm not worried about that That is a minor little thing that really shouldn't affect The video at all I'm just going to do a quick first look, an overview here And one of the things is This menu system is very plain Is that menu system supposed to look like that? Let's see, can I edit this? Configure applications menu Show applications as names only Names and descriptions Descriptions only Show icons on the root level of the menu Yeah, let's try that Let's hit apply Yeah It's kind of a little strange Just having text, no icons It's a very plain KDE Plasma menu Which PC Linux OS has never been heavily customized And modified It's rather plain vanilla KDE Plasma For the most part So quickly going through some of what is installed out of the box If I go to the menu system Under archiving we have ARC Which is KDE's archive manager So this would be for zip, unzip And all of those archived formats Also under archiving you have GR sync Which is a graphical front end to R sync You also have timeshift Which is for taking snapshots of the system So if I enter my root password It's a snapshot device not available So we'd have to create a snapshot And really inside a virtual machine I probably shouldn't be doing this Because I don't have a lot of space in this virtual machine But yeah it's going to ask for a drive And we could set up times for Take daily snapshots Weekly snapshots Or whatever it happens to be We can tell it exactly how to take the snapshots Whether it needs to do R sync Or butterfs Or whatever it happens to be I'm trying to close that without setting that up In the menu system we have a configuration category And we have configure your computer So let's go ahead and enter our root password So this is the PC Linux OS control center And you can see we have install and remove software If I click on that it opens the synaptic package manager Synaptic is a GUI front end to the apt package manager One of my favorite graphical package managers By the way, synaptic Most Debian users are familiar With the synaptic package manager So if you were a Debian user And you were switching over to PC Linux OS You'd be just fine with package management Both the GUI versions And of course at the command line as well We also have a sharing subcategory Where we can configure FTP That's your file transfer protocol That's for sending files remotely You know, to remote servers You often have to do that with web servers And you also have configure web server as an option Networking services here So you can configure your ethernet hardware So we have sound graphics mouse keyboard The usual suspects here for your hardware settings And then we have system settings Where you manage things like date and time And locale We have network sharing So we can configure our window shares So that would be samba shares So I've never actually used samba I don't have any windows computers But that's typically a windows file sharing protocol Then you have your NFS shares Which is much more standard For those of us using Linux You have your local disk information Security So this would be setting up your firewall And then boot I probably wouldn't play with some of this stuff Unless you really knew what you were doing Also under the configuration category Let's open the info center Because I do want to see what versions of the software is installed As far as plasma We're on 5.27.2 KDE frameworks 5.101.0 Cute version 5.15.6 And the kernel is 6.0.12 And you know, I could have checked some of that In the terminal And I do want to check some things In the terminal For example, you name dash Or you guys know Will also give you the kernel One thing I want to do is Aware is systemd Because systemd Is not or hasn't been the init system In pc linux os They're kind of anti systemd They never plan to move to systemd Now When I do a where is We have binaries for systemd Systemd Does other stuff Other than the init system Like there's networking stuff involved With systemd And a whole bunch You know systemd is a suite of applications So the fact that systemd is installed Doesn't necessarily mean That that's their init system For example, if I do a systemctl status Systemctl is not installed The command is not found So they're still using the old sysv init So that's always been their init system And they have no plans To move to anything else Now if I do a apt list dash dash installed Says that option is not understood So that is not an option Or their version of apt If I do man apt There's not a man page for apt either So I was going to get a package count Of how many packages were installed on the system But that is strange That they don't have that flag for apt And the fact that they don't have a man page For apt is a little weird If I do apt dash dash help Will at least give me Yeah, it does give me a list of flags and options But looking at the flags and options You can see there's not one for already installed Let's go ahead and close out the terminal I'm going to go back to the menu system here Under editors we have k right One of the standard text editors for KDE We have file tools So we have things like bleach bit Which helps clean up the system Get rid of like old cache files And things like that Dolphin of course is KDE's file manager Rather pretty and fully featured file manager I quite like dolphin If I was a KDE user I would really love dolphin The really dolphin is one of the best programs on KDE And also I actually quite like their terminal Console with a K is not bad Like if I wouldn't swap it out You know if it was already installed on the system Some other stuff that's installed File light, G parted Which probably they should not have After the installation That should probably just be a live USB kind of thing And then after the installation Probably doesn't need to be on the system Because users really don't need to be Playing with a partition manager You could actually hose your system If you didn't know what you were doing Ventoy is also installed out of the box That is interesting We also have All Riot Solitaire for some games Under graphics, Gwynvue The image viewer K color chooser, Krita Scan light for our scanning utility And spectacle of course Is the screenshot utility And one of the best screenshot utilities Actually KDE's spectacle Under the internet category We're going to see some interesting stuff here So Firefox is the default browser Nothing to see there But some other things that you wouldn't expect Most Linux distributions to ship by default Any desk Zoom Megasync NitroShare Right, these are programs that you Most Linux distributions are not going to ship Most of these because they're proprietary software And you're like you're not going to have this Pre-installed and something like Debian for example They never do that Or even things like Ubuntu and Fedora They probably wouldn't ship something like Zoom Out of the box But PC Linux OS is a little more liberal As far as free versus proprietary software We also have an office category With the latest LibreOffice LibreOffice 7.3 Let's go ahead and open the word processor So this would be LibreOffice Rider If it launches I got the splash screen That was very weird Let me try LibreOffice Calc Which is the spreadsheet program Okay, that comes up I wonder why Rider didn't come up Let me try that again Just to make sure LibreOffice Rider Yeah, now it comes up Yeah, that was weird Maybe it was just the very first time I run it You know, sometimes that happens Especially after a new installation The very first time you try something Whatever reason it doesn't run But then the next time you try it I don't know That's why a lot of times I tell people Especially when you install a Linux distribution And after installation If things don't seem quite right Reboot the system A lot of times a reboot Will fix a lot of your issues Under the software center category We have our LibreOffice manager Which is interesting And of course, synaptic package manager We also have the virtual box manager As well, virtual box guest additions Are also available here We also have a sound category Where we have the K-Wave sound editor I don't know that program Let me go to help about K-Wave You can edit many sorts of audio files Including multi-track files And it is a part of the KDE suite of applications So KDE has a ton of applications That are a part of the official KDE project Many of them go under the radar And that's one that has escaped me For a long time Again, that's as far as I know Of the first time I've heard of K-Wave We have Pithos Which I believe is a front-end to Pandora Let me cancel that Why I couldn't play the audio anyway For copyright reasons We also have Spotify installed as well Which is a proprietary application Again, we've got some proprietary software Out of the box here Which is kind of nice Because how would you get this stuff installed? You know, because it being Proprietary software, most distributions Are not going to have it in their repositories Well, you'd have to go grab Something like a snap, a flat pack Or an app image And one thing about PC Linux OS Is if I do it where it is Flat pack Flat pack is not installed out of the box So if you want flat pack Of course, you'd have to install it I'm assuming I can do a sudo install Flat pack to get it And of course, old habits die hard You don't have sudo privileges So switch over to the root user And do an apt install flat pack And there you go Flat pack and the various dependencies for it I'm going to decline installing that Let's go ahead and exit out of the root user Get back to the DT user If I do a where is snap I don't expect it to be installed And it's not Not snapd is actually the name of the daemon If I do a where is app image Any chance of that being installed? No So none of the big distro agnostic Package format, snap flat packs, app images They're not installed out of the box But again, you could install any Or all three of them if you want Just apt install name of the package format Let me close back out of the terminal And let me right click on the desktop One last thing I want to do is configure desktop and wallpaper Do they actually have any of their own wallpapers? Or is it just strictly the plasma wallpaper pack? It looks like Yeah, these are just plasma wallpapers Is part of the standard plasma wallpaper pack They don't have I thought maybe they would have some pc linux os Branded wallpapers, but it doesn't look like it Which I mean the default plasma wallpapers do look very nice Actually actually okay with the default wallpapers Rather minimal kind of plane Not bad though So that's just a quick revisiting of pc linux os It's been a number of years since I've checked it out And I did want to give it some coverage here on the channel Because again it's one of those distributions It's been around nearly 20 years And again for a time It was actually the most popular One of the most popular linux distributions on the planet If you go back to distro watch Which distro watch page hit rankings aren't a real accurate measure But if you go back and look at distro watch rankings Back in you know 2004, 2005, 2006 you know those years back then PC linux os would be at or near the top of the distro watch rankings back then And yet nobody, most of you guys If you've just switched to linux here in the last five years or so Have probably never even heard of pc linux os And I think that's unfortunate because I do think You know some of these legacy distributions Of course if you go back to the really ancient ones Like slackware and debion which both started in 1993 There are two oldest linux distributions They're important for a number of reasons But I do think it's important that we keep Some of these distributions going because So many things base off of for example debion Right what we could never let debion die It's such an important distribution Where something like pc linux os Some people would say it's less important But no I actually think because of its place in history You know it deserves a little more love from those of us That could show it a little more love Whether it be on video or in print And before I go I need to thank a few special people I need to thank the producers of this episode Gabe James Maxim, Matt Mim, Mitchell Paul Roll Wes, Armored Dragon, Bash Potato Chuck Commander Gregory George Lee, Methos, Nate Irion Paul, Peace, Arch, and Vador, Polytech Realities for a Less Red Prophet, Rowland Tools Devlin and Willie They're my highest tier patrons Over on Patreon without these guys This quick look at pc linux os wouldn't have been possible The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these Fine ladies and gentlemen All these names you're seeing on the screen right now These are all my supporters over on Patreon I don't have any corporate sponsors I'm sponsored by you guys, the community If you like my work want to see more videos about Linux And free and open source software Subscribe to distro tube over on Patreon All right guys, peace An RPM distro that uses apt and sysvianet That's unique