Maybe the grass looked greener or the bits looked brighter.
Anyway I'm back! Whether you want me or not.
Lets start with the not so good and work our way to the better things.
I know there are people who like colorful things, me and my icons are not one of them.
The graphics drivers (maybe it is still new) may not be quite as good as other distros but then I can only guess they (the larger distros) have a lot more hands and money for these kind of things. They are actually OK to Good for non gaming activities but playing OpenArena gets a little stuttery at times, and this is the same machine I was playing on before so an orange to orange comparison.
There are a few apps that while I think should be available, maybe should not be installed by default. Zoom and Spotify are at the top of that list. Software that I use that is not available in the repo, VS Code and Ghostwriter but I was able to install them via Flatpak but time will tell if they get updated or if I have to manually update them.
The first update was a doozie, 444 but it is not really surprising considering the ISO was three months old and there was a major update a few days before I installed it.
On the better side and a first for me, someone who over the years, maybe even decades, software that was installed by default that updates itself. This has been a gripe of mine for some time, especially when it comes to security updates and the lag that happens between the fix and the update. Lets look at some of my recent past updates on Fedora. Firefox releases version 88 and I get it right then on Windows or where I have installed Firefox directly no using the repo version. A few days later the update makes it way into the repo and finally to my computer. I have seen a lag of up to a week at times.
With PCLinuxOS, the version of Firefox installed is not a repo version but the same version as you would get installing it from Mozilla. Same with Thunderbird. I have never seen this before. It also "lacks" the typical "we are going to make it open to one of our pages by default and good luck changing it" configuration, I'm looking at your Fedora.
The home page to Fedora Magazine is always there, even when selecting other options and there is no self check for updates as they are controlled by Fedora.
For reference, the Windows install as M$ does not control the install.
While I thought that Firefox would control the updates, I am not so sure now. However it might be both, the browser could update itself or the OS updater could update it. I have only seen a single update for Firefox so far and I wasn't paying attention as to what updated it. What I can tell you is the update to Firefox happened on the same day as the release and I have only seen that from self installs not repo installs that seem to lag from a day to a week.
All this is was on my notebook with a clean install and no dual boot, things didn't so as smooth when trying to install it on my desktop which dual boots with Windows 10.
I spent the better part of a day trying to fix Grub2 to get it to boot into anything via cli. When I finally did manage to get it to boot it was a kernel panic that killed the process multiple times. To get the desktop back up and running I wound up reinstalling Fedora which finally let me back into Windows after fixing Grub2. To complicate matters I am running a RAID card in RAID 1 so I really needed to get back to running and a lot of the instructions assume that you are running a hard drive directly connected and could retrieve the data using something else, not quite that easy with a RAID setup. Also add to it they are spinning rust and the RAID controller card was a freebie but not really that fast (it calls out 6 Gb/s per port and the drives match but it seems much slower) I want to switch it to a SSD but not sure if I want a SATA or NVMe which will require an additional card but I am not sure if the board I have can take full advantage of the speed, some research will be required as the main board calls out that it is PCI 3 ready, it is an older board from around 2014.
More updates as they happen later, now that I am back up and running I have other work to do.