I fear the Penguin Fates just don't want me and KDE ever to get on.

Despite much googling, I just couldn't get PCLOS KDE working again. I'm still not convinced that it's a hardware problem, as it initially worked very nicely, with CPU useage generally unalarming.

I'm writing this from the same Thinkpad, now running PCLOS 2010 Gnome. It installed without a hitch, updated with no hassles and so far is working very nicely indeed.

Perhaps Gnome really is a little lighter on resources than KDE, although the system monitor doesn't seem to be showing anything substantially different from the CPU and RAM useage I glanced at before the KDE version snuffed it.

It also seems to include a couple of odds and ends in the initial installation that I didn't see in KDE - Abiword and Gnumeric, for instance.

OpenOffice was the same massive download ( and I think it said that it would use something like 435MB of hard drive space - might be mistaken - pretty massive. But it does seem to include all of OpenOffice.

I like the default desktop background - very smart and shiny, especially if one overlooks the fact that the central icon is a foot. The rest of the desktop - menus and so on - seems pretty stock Ubuntu, if I'm not mistaken. So far, I'm finding navigation a little simpler than I did with the KDE version - but would put this down to the relative familiarity of Gnome.

And the KDE version really was pretty, until it popped its clogs.

Both are/were surprisingly speedy on this old workhorse. FWIW, the system monitor shows that I'm using about 228MiB RAM, with CPU utilisation fluctuating between 25% and 65% - that is with only Firefox (and the system monitor) running, but really not too bad at all.

4.0GiB of the / partition has been used so far - that includes all updates, and OpenOffice. Better than KDE, but I still think that was a dodgy installation - perhaps it wasn't clearing cached files after updates.

Trouble is, the KDE version seems to be the "real" PCLOS. I'll get it working on something if it kills me... Just wish I could afford to use this as an excuse to look for something a little more powerful on my favourite auction - site.

Still - if anyone really wants to try PCLinuxOS and keeps running into trouble with the KDE version, consider giving the GNOME edition a shot. So far, so good.

Now watch it croak.