My Experience with Pardus 2.1

There isn't much press about Pardus lately.  Well, there hasn't been since Pardus got included in the sad list of dormant distros, some years ago.

Then, Pardus came back...but not without controversy.  Instead of the old, independent distro it used to be, it came back with a Debian base.  Some of its former fans got disappointed and said the revived Turkish leopard was nothing but Debian with Pardus icons and logo.  I, for one, did notice several elements in the new Pardus (like GRUB Customizer), that were not originally in Debian's repos.  

Before Pardus went to Debian, I used to like that Pardus a lot.  In fact, I still have Pardus 2011 installed on my netbook, where it is still working happily, even if it's outdated.

Then, the Anka Team was formed with the goal of keeping the uniqueness of Pardus alive, and their efforts have given birth to Pisi, which soon will see the light of day.  I have a beta version of Pisi installed on my laptop and it is great!

But I feel at ease with Debian, too.  Most of my favorite distros have a Debian base.  Thus, I gave Pardus 2012-13 Debian a try.  It became the host of all my games and of my Steam client.

Then, I decided it was time for a bold experiment and upgraded it to Pardus 2.1 Beta.

Bad idea!  The upgrade rendered my system unusable.  Well, that's what happens when you try to upgrade an old system the rolling-distro way.  I knew it wasn't going to work, but my curiosity was stronger.

Then, I went the traditional way:  I performed a fresh install of 2.1.  I did notice several issues while running the live, maybe the biggest show-stopper was that I could not see my other partitions and I couldn't mount USB drives.

Still, I went ahead with the installation.  Pardus 2.1 is fully updated; it even sports KDE 4.11!  I had to see what it looked like installed.

Well, it was the same as with the live session: I couldn't see or mount my other partitions no matter how much I tried with my limited knowledge.

Then, I noticed a big amount of updates.  I figured that they would correct my problems, so I installed them...and went back to where I was when I upgraded Pardus 2013 to 2.1:  the sound was broken, KDE was unstable, and I got a nasty message that my user was not recognized...

That means Pardus 2.1 needs more polishing, without a doubt.  As a result, I went back to Pardus 2.0, which is not so up to date, but it is pretty recent.

And then, the enormous batch of updates showed in my system tray.  You'd have to be crazy to install them, especially because it was about 1 Gb of downloads.

Well, call me crazy:  I did perform the download and installed the updates.  I got several warnings that my system was broken...what a surprise!

But the real surprise was that after the process, I booted into a Pardus 2.0 with a shiny KDE 4.11.5 and updated packages!  That was great!

And a little later, around 200 new updates popped up.  I knew I was not a good idea to install them (I had been incredibly lucky after my previous downloads), but I had to see for myself what happened...

I proceeded with the updates...and got to a broken Pardus 2.1 that could not see my drives.

I finally settled for 2.0 and updated KDE and the other packages later.  However, I did not download again the 200 or so downloads that break the system. In other words, now I have a Pardus 2.0-2.1 hybrid.  I find this as a better solution than having either Pardus 2.0, which worked fine but was a bit outdated, or Pardus 2.1, that is not yet ready for prime time. 

That's the beauty of Linux!  You have lots of choices and the freedom to experiment.  Also, you lose that horrible fear of breaking your system.  After all, when things went wrong, I could install Pardus 2.0 again in less than 20 minutes!  That's why I kept pushing my limits in my experience with Pardus 2.1.