I gather a lot of people use this distro, but I still can't see why. One reviewer complained that PCLinuxOS starts well but always falls short, and that, I think, is a fair comment.

The installer (from Mandriva) is good. The installed system is surprising light and fast for KDE. The software provided doesn't generate too many complaints when run from the CLI. The media player is VLC, with all the codecs built in, and it works. But...

There's only one mirror to download from, which starts at 80KB/s and then slows down. I checked morning, noon, and night over 3 days, but the CD is a 4 hour download.

You still get a very limited amount of software, and still get unnecessary duplication (e.g. 3 file managers). Many people outside Europe still have no broadband: imagine their having to download OpenOffice!

I looked at Synaptic, the package manager. Gnucash is listed under Office, but not under Finance. KMyMoney is listed under neither.

I couldn't change desktops with Ctrl-Alt-Cursor, so I looked for the keyboard shortcuts configuration. There didn't seem to be any way to set a shortcut for this, nor for launching a program. Since I'm no expert on KDE, I clicked Help: the KDE help files are not installed (they weren't there last year, either).

If you want Enlightenment or Rat Poison, there's only one game in town, but there are lots of good KDE distros: Kororaa, Kubuntu, Mepis, Mint, Salix, OpenSUSE, Vector SOHO. So why would anybody want this one?