WOW!

[Chomp]

I've been using PCLOS for... ummm... I'm not exactly sure actually, but I believe I made the switch to the distro hopper stopper in early '09.  I've never bothered to praise the efforts of Tex and the devs of PCLOS for the excellent work they did with KDE 3.5 for some reason.  When Tex stopped supporting KDE 3.5 I switched to KDE 4 shortly after.  I had a mixed reaction to this.  I was used to the excellent implementation and super stable KDE 3.5 in PCLOS and found KDE 4 to be rather slow and a bit of a pain to use because of this.  Additionally, serious problems(for me) occured in Firefox under KDE 4.  Firefox was so unresponsive and slow that I was forced, for the first time since Firefox 1.0, to switch to a different browser.  I made a topic about it and shortly afterwards Tex released an update that improved Firefox enough for me to be able to switch back as my full time browser, but it was still rather unresponsive and laggy, but usable enough it didn't frustrate me to the point of not using it.  I wasn't upset about all of this however.  Patience, I told myself.  You can't expect the devs to make an implementation as solid as they did with KDE 3.5 overnight.  It will take them time to work out the kinks, and besides that, you have to work with what you are provided with and try to make the best of it.

A little while later a somewhat sizable update for KDE 4 occured.  Performance was improved slightly and users came to the forum to praise the increased performance.  I held back from commenting as I felt the DE was still not as snappy and responsive as it should be.  Patience young padawan I repeated to myself.  You know perfectly well you have a good idea of how these things work and the difficulty that can be experienced when working with software on a development/packaging end.

It had been a couple of days since I had checked for an update so about 45 minutes ago I opened Synaptic(I prefer manually checking for updates for some reason) and found another sizable update to KDE 4 was available.  After I finished updating I logged out to restart X and then back in not really expecting anything significant.  I re-opened all the programs I had opened before in my previous session(Firefox, Chromium, Kmess, Xchat, Ktorrent, Synaptic, and Amarok), then went back to doing what I was doing before.  But something was different.  I got a weird feeling in my stomach.  Everything was just so darn responsive and snappy!  "What the heck is this?" I cried out loud(I have a bad habit of talking to myself, even when others are present).  I quickly started playing with apps I knew to be what I considered uncharacteristically slow.  The quick response by the apps to my actions both surprised and delighted me.  Then it came time for the ultimate test.  Just how much more responsive was Firefox now?  The first thing I did was my scroll test.  I navigated to the PCLOS forums as I knew it to be slow when scrolling.  My scrolling test consists of rolling the middle click as rapidly as possible back and forth.  The response I was used to was about 5 to 10 seconds of the page continuing to scroll up and down after I physically stopped scrolling.  Not this time.  As soon as I stopped scrolling so did the page.  "Waaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!!!" I screamed out loud(good thing my upstairs neighbour is used to hearing me talk to myself).  I furiously started clicking on the folders in my bookmarks toolbar as I found before the update that it would take about 3 to 4 clicks before the folder would actually display the content it held.  This wasn't consistent but it did happen on average I'd estimate 50% of the time.  Every single click on the folders in my bookmarks toolbar immediately opened displaying the juicy contents they contained. WOW!!!!

So here is my long overdue kudos to Tex and the rest of the PCLOS team.  Thank you for all of your hard work.  You guys are responsible for what I consider to be the best distro out there and I appreciate your efforts.

[BubbaBlues]

Aw man, that's what I was gonna say. 

[jaydot]

WOW! yourself chomp.  that's a wonderful compliment to our hardworking devs.  it's inspiring and i look forward to installing the final release.

i quit testing betas since it made me so ratty and this had the potential to spill over into my online responses, which heaven forfend.  it's been great fun reading about the niggles and glitches that have been fixed with such despatch.  tex and his band of intuxicators do us proud.  it's a privilege for me to be involved and make my tiny contribution to the smooth running of those bits that i can.  i enjoy being a front-end driver of the best rendering of linux there is.  i have no doubt that were i to indulge in a little distro-hopping my commentary would be littered with 'doesn't beat, not a patch on, not as beautiful as pclinuxos'.  that would be boring, so i shan't bother.  yum, yum, treats to come.

[flaminghotsauce]

I couldn't say WOW! any better than previously stated, so I must DITTO! I'm running a LiveCD  I just burned this evening on a Dell Latitude 610 that doesn't even have a hard drive. I'm impressed with the speed even though it's running from the disk.

I can't wait 'till the HDD shows up! Just WOW, er, ah DITTO!

Geat, fabulous!!

[dobbs]

+1