I was going to keep a current edition of Ubuntu on my Thinkpad just to stay up-to-date with it, but PCLinuxOS is so much more pleasant to use I may remove Ubuntu entirely and use the disk space for testing other distributions. It's a nice dual-core T61, and again Ubuntu acts like it's on tranquilizers. Audacity is unusable on it. But PCLinuxOS fits this machine like hand-in-glove, and Audacity performance is good.

These performance differences are so large I may have to make time to investigate why. These PCs are all different: AMD Sempron and Athlon, SATA 3.0, 1-2GB RAM, ATI and NVidia, and the Thinkpad is an Intel Core Duo with 1GB RAM and Intel video. The video and wireless drivers are all supported by genuine FOSS drivers in the kernel; no extra fuss required. I shop carefully and select well-supported components because I surely do hate diagnosis-and-fixit drama.

Even my wonderful significant-other-person notices the difference. She's a typical competent user, one who isn't afraid of computers or command-lines, and doesn't mind spending some time learning new things she can do with a computer, or ways to be more efficient. For example, she likes to take advantage of KDE's desktop slideshow feature and stuff it full of her own photos. She uses Digikam and OpenOffice, and created her own custom application menu so she can find her most-used apps quickly. (Take that, Joe Sixpack, it's not that hard if you're not too stubborn to give it a try.)

So that's the day three status report. Stay tuned for more riveting distro drama right here on LinuxPlanet!

Carla Schroder is the author of the Linux Cookbook and the Linux Networking Cookbook (O'Reilly Media), the upcoming "Building a Digital Sound Studio with Audacity" (NoStarch Press), a lifelong book lover, and the managing editor of LinuxPlanet and Linux Today.

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