I like PCLinuxOS. I have used it in the past to present my lab at LinuxWorld. TexStar was always amazing back when I was using Mandrake, and PCLinuxOS is a very worthy follow-on to that work.

At the same time, I am not a person to have a great deal of, for lack of a better term, Distro Religion. Not to be confused with Disco Religion, or even just Disco.

OpenSUSE is a useful project for Novell, in that is feeds latest tech into the more sedately released Novell Linux stuff. OpenSUSE is the Novel what Fedora is to RedHat.

If you read my most current set of posts about using Fedora in the office, almost every point I make about Fedora, both here and at on-being-open.blogspot.com, over the last 6 or 7 seven post could be applied just as easily to OpenSUSE.

PCLinuxOS lives in a different space. It does not act as a technology exploration for a corporate Linux version. It is, in and of itself, a desktop Linux. As such, it can be used for both personal and corporate usages...with one big exception.

RedHat and Novell versions are of course corporately supported, and have all sorts of interesting integrations with management toolsets. They can be rolled into Data Center buys, so that the glass house and the desktop is a single-sourced Linux. Whatever PCLinuxOS is in any other sense, it is not yet a distro like Ubuntu, Novell, or Redhat, with corporate support contracts, large support organizations, server versions, etc.

Part of the reason I spent so much time talking about this as it related to Fedora was to underline that Fedora is not a terrific OS to use for beginners, or people looking for formal support. Same thing is true about OpenSUSE. They are both hacker OS's, and are lovely for looking at bleeding edge features that will one day be in their respective corporate edition.

PCLinuxOS did make a very smart move when they changed their code base. By moving away from Mandrake to Debian they are now based off the same distro that Ubuntu, Mint, Xandros, LinSpire, and others are based off. Some of the easiest to install Linuxii there are. I have no idea how much work they adopt (if any) from those other projects, but the potential is there for TexStar and crew to put their unique spin on top of a super-solid base. And that does in fact make PClinuxOS a terrific OS. Doesn't hurt that it has all that chewy Linux goodness at its core either!