polishlinux.org

Pardus

Pardus is a Turkish distribution that comes with KDE as the default desktop. It is however not just another pack of known open source apps. Pardus comes with its own, original GUI system installer, a package management system — PISI and system settings applet — TASMA, as well as a few additional goodies.

Pic 1. Pardus - random desktop

Desktop

The design of Pardus is very pilished. Starting with the GRUB manager, through the boot process to the KDM session manager and to the KDE desktop the system has a very consistent look and feel. The Pardus artwork team paid attention to such details as their own icon set, skins for fbsplash and KDM.

TASMA is an improved version of KDE control center (changed interface) powered by Çomar (backend) enriched with extra bookmarks which help you to configure a LAN, a firewall or users. It's not as good as Mandriva DrakeConf or openSUSE Yast but it works very well. In short Pardus is a "clean" distribution for both common and experienced users.

Software management

PiSi is the package manager. It is fast an efficient. Pardus authors have surely looked at delta-RPM which is in openSUSE, because PiSi packages update process doesn't download whole new applications but only (if possible) those packages which have been changed.

System performance

The performance of Pardus seems very good. The applications are launched without latency and the OS seems to respect the computer’s resources, not eating them up too fast. The booting time (from GRUB to KDM) is similar to Gentoo (or even faster).