No, seriously. All you had to do is read the title. But if you're still here and perhaps you're a new to Linux user or troubled experienced Linux user like myself, you may benefit from what I'm about to say.
I've been a serial distrohopper for many years. My first distribution was Linux Mint in late 2016. I still remember quite fondly that skeuomorphic Cinnamon desktop and I remember everything just working at that time. Keep in mind I absolutely loved Linux after this experience. I had no reason to switch, but as is normal for most people who get that thrill of using Linux for the first time, you start to see the other distributions and things you think could be done better on another. In my case, I didn't realize that a desktop environment could be installed on the distribution you were already on until later. I would switch to Kubuntu and Lubuntu, and then soon to Manjaro Xfce. On Manjaro I discovered I could switch from that particular desktop environment to MATE, a fork of GNOME 2. Manjaro MATE was my driver for half a year before I ran into a bug that left my system in an unusable state. I had no backups and all of the packages I remember updating were for systemd.
I would research systemd and discover this was a more widespread bug on Arch and Arch derivatives at the time. This is when I started to learn about other init systems such as runit, which made me promptly install Void Linux to test it out. Void was nice, but at this point the tiniest inconveniences were making me switch. I ended up trying to go back to something that resembled what I remember back on Linux Mint except I was avoiding systemd. This led me to Devuan. I used Devuan with the Trinity desktop for about as long as Manjaro MATE. I loved Trinity because it reminded me of being a kid using Windows XP. I even tried to get involved in the TDE community because by this time I was gaining a lot of knowledge about Linux and in particular Devuan. I still couldn't package anything, but at least I learned a thing or two about working in the shell.
I was starting to get into a habit of finding things I dislike about a particular distro or DE. I would continue to hop around and it was starting to get to an uncomfortable point. Looking back, this seems like my autistic brain just trying to put pieces together to see how different Linux distributions work, but I was becoming so irritated by my habit of pointing things out that I tried to go back to the basics. I was going to use a distro that used systemd, and boy did I end up with an experience even worse than I remembered several years ago. Stop jobs that endlessly run, the configuration was all over the place, it intruded on everything I learned before, and this led me to finally trying something that wasn't Linux. I installed FreeBSD in 2021 and kept it for about a year and a half. At the time it could work because I had an extender hooked up to my PC using ethernet. As soon as I didn't have that it was no longer usable. On FreeBSD I learned that you don't need a million different distributions to accomplish the most common use cases for computing. FreeBSD could be a server and it could be a desktop. Unfortunately, the lacking wifi drivers still plague my ability to deploy FreeBSD on my network or for friends. This forced me to go back into the Linux ecosystem where I would subject myself to a habit of distrohopping. I finally decided to come up with a list of things I was looking for in a distribution:
PCLinuxOS is a distribution I first tried in late 2022. This was right after leaving FreeBSD because I wanted something without the second list item in particular. When I used FreeBSD, ConsoleKit2 was used to manage sessions including GNOME and KDE and to allow for more QoL features in your file managers and various other applications, and you have people here on Linux telling me it's deprecated? Give me a break. Until the systemdemons explicitly convince every project to remove their build options for Ck2 I'm going to use it. And this is what PCLinuxOS has done.
PCLinuxOS is a fork of Mandrake which was like the Linux Mint of the early 2000's, therefore you could probably imagine what it feels like to use it for the first time. You can set it and forget it, or (perhaps because of what I've told you up to this point) tinker as you please. It uses RPM which is the second packaging format I picked up and it's probably my favorite (especially compared to packaging for Devuan). Therefore, I feel comfortable helping the PCLinuxOS folks to the best of my ability and providing my own RPMs and SRPMs, which you can find in my Linux section.
Perhaps the only thing that PCLinuxOS doesn't fulfill is the server part. I also wish there was an
ISO which worked like Slackware or OpenSUSE installer (or like every other distribution from yore)
coming with a bunch of offline software for you to select to install. However, these are minor
details compared to what PCLOS offers for a new (or experienced) desktop user. You are presented
with an experience akin to Linux Mint except without the quirks of systemd or other pitfalls
that come every now and then. You can do whatever you want with it and that's exactly why I say
just use PCLinuxOS. Seriously. We need more people that aren't boomers