Overall, I had a very positive experience with Pardus, considering I didn't know what to expect going into it. I was very pleasantly surprised. It really has some innovative features and I like the approach a lot. I really like the fact that it's backed by the Scientific and Technological Research Council Of Turkey--perhaps this guaranteed support enables the developers to be bolder in their approach, I don't know. Either way, it's great to see a national body supporting the development of open source software like this and I wish more nations would follow suit. It could really be beneficial to us all.

Pardus is pretty easy to use and most things are taken care of for you with PISI, YALI, and the other tools but I'm not sure I would be happy giving it to complete novices to install. The documentation is great but I do think the distro could benefit from some kind of tool for installing graphics drivers and 3D desktop automatically. I was able to get my drivers installed but editing config files is not something novice users will want to do. The system is very fast and stable, which impressed me a lot. Pardus has a utility called MUDUR that is supposed to speed up the boot process. I'm not sure how much difference it made but the boot is certainly quick enough, it would be interesting to see how it compared in a benchmark to other distributions on the same hardware.

As I mentioned at the start, Pardus is not based on Slackware, Debian, Red Hat, or anything else and in this day and age that's a real rarity. It's nice to see someone trying to do something different and not imitate. I think this distro is really one to watch in the future; it's come so far in two years, where could it be in another two years time? Who knows? I, for one, can't wait to find out. It's already a nicely polished Linux distro and I was able to get a fully working desktop up very easily, it's also a very nice looking OS. So if you want to sample something a little different my advice is give Pardus a spin.

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