Pardus 2008 review

I’ve tried many user friendly distributions such as Ubuntu, Mandriva, Mint, Pclinuxos… but there’s always been a reason for me to switch. In absence of Pclinusos 2008 I decided to try Pardus 2008 exactly one week ago…

Installation

Unfortunately the Pardus 2008 disk is not a livecd which means that installation is mostly a shot in the dark. Strangely the defualt language is Turkish but those with a keen eye will find that pressing F2 at boot will give an option for English (and many other languages). The actual installer itself is among one of the most intuitive I’ve seen although not by far as most installers nowadays are a simple case of clicking next. Shamefully the install takes approximately 30 minutes, It seemed a bit quicker than that but its still a far cry from the 10-15 minute installs of most modern distributions.

Aesthetics

Upon first boot your greeted with a first run wizard called ‘Kaptain’ which does a great job of helping you get everything running and afterwards my defualt desktop looked somewhat like this:

My defualt desktop

Every Pardus install will look different due to the easily customisable Kaptain however I wanted to further customise this install and I ended up with something like this:

I’ve never had such a beautiful desktop before. It’s mainly thanks to the highly versatile control centre ‘Tasma’ which is best described as an improved upon kde centre:

Tasma

Package management

By default Pardus comes installed with everything the basic user could need Firefox, Openoffice, Amarok, Kaffeine; which is all I need. However if there’s anything else you need to install you can use the Pardus package manager ‘PISI (Packages Installed Successfully as Intended).

PISI

Personally I still prefer Synaptic to PISI but there’s no denying that PISI is still exellent in its own right. The repositories are fairly complete they have everything you could ever need in them although you may be dissapointed as it doesn’t have as much ‘choice’ as more popular distributions (i.e. it doesn’t have at least half a dozen video players). Unfortunately there is only one Pardus server from which I draw average speeds of about 300KB/s which despite being fairly fast doesn’t utilise my full bandwith as I usually get speeds of approximately 1200 KB/s.

Multimedia support

Multimedia support is extremely important and luckily I havent found any multimedia flaws with Pardus yet. All my music is handled with Amarok which plays all my MP3’s, Ogg’s and WMA’s. All of my video files are handled by Kaffeine which i’ve tested with avi’s and wmv’s, Pardus can even play DVD’s out of the box:

DVD playback - Silent hill

Flash and Java are also installed out of the box so I can happily surf around sites like youtube.

Speed/Stability

Pardus 2008 is probably the fastest distribution I have ever used. Its quite nippy on my mediocre 1.5 GHz processor. I’ve also never experienced any crashes or slow-down. If speed is your thing than Pardus is the ultimate desktop distro.

Conclusion

Pardus 2008 is everything I could of asked for it looks good, plays all my multimedia, it’s super-fast/stable and it’s so easy even a Mac OS X user could easily adapt to it. Pardus has taken over my linux partition at the moment I consider it the best distribution available at this time; I won’t switch distribution anytime soon perhaps I may use Pclinuxos 2008 for reviewing purposes but it’ll be hard to top pardus 2008.