Every now and again, my laptop breaks in some interesting kind of way (it’s old, but I’m sort of fond of it as it’s light and has five hours of battery life from each of two batteries and I’m a poor impoverished student). This normally results in me replacing some component and then, if needed, doing a software re-install.

I recently had just such an event and decided to try out a few other distros rather than just install Fedora that I’ve been using for a number of years. I asked for distro recommendations a while ago and decided to follow some of those up. I’ll spare you the details of those that didn’t make the cut and move on to the distro from which I am currently typing this, Pardus 2009.

Install and first impressions

I first tried the Pardus 2011 beta, but the installer crashed, so I moved on to Pardus 2009.2 (as an aside, few distros will boot from CD on my laptop as they tend not to recognise the CD drive in its docking station, so I did a USB stick install). The installation was not very fast, but was very easy and nicely presented.

After rebooting, I discovered that Pardus has Plasma Desktop 4.4 (I should have expected that from the 2009 bit) and some – imho – ugly desktop icons. However, they were easily changed back to the Oxygen ones. I’m always mystified when distros change the default KDE styles nowadays, but that is just a personal preference.

Cool Package Management

So far, Pardus has been a joy to use. The admin tools are great, it seems stable and even has what seems to be an early version of a NetworkManager Plasma widget that works well and looks good (configuration is not as intuitive as in Plasma 4.5’s widget).

One thing that really impressed me was when I tried to run KWord from KRunner. It wasn’t installed, but instead of showing no matches, KRunner showed an option to install KWord. I clicked on that and a few clicks and a password later, KWord was ready to go. I tried typing ‘Kate’ in KRunner and the option to install the KDE SDK was presented, so it can even search within packages, instantaneously. I haven’t seen this anywhere else and to me it is really cool. The package manager itself seems quick and quite well designed – for speed and information I prefer it to KPackageKit which is what I’m used to on Fedora (though on Fedora I often just use Yum directly, particularly for tasks like updates).

The world of 4.4

It’s only a few months since Plasma Desktop 4.5 was released, but I’ve been surprised on Pardus how much I am missing the features and enhancements that I have got used to. Manipulating widgets in the panel is more difficult. KRunner seems a bit big. The Network Management widget is not as good.

There are other things too, in the apps. I can’t get directions from Marble any more. WebKit is less accessible if a page won’t load correctly in KHTML.

In terms of KDE software, it’s just not quite as polished and as nice as what I have become used to.

Stick with Pardus?

There is plenty to like about Pardus, although at heart I’m probably someone who would prefer to have the latest software and accept a few rough edges (Fedora…).

I think I will stick with Pardus on this laptop, for a while, and see how it goes. If I ever get around to my long term plan of upgrading my parents’ computer from Windows XP then Pardus could be a strong candidate for that too. It’s impressive.