Pinguy OS 14.04.2: A somewhat heavy distro that's easy to use for everyone

Sorry for the somewhat late post; I've been bogged down by schoolwork. 

I’ve heard a lot about Pinguy OS. It’s aimed at a simple desktop that everyone, “not just geeks”, can use. I’ve been intrigued by this (and also the quirky name) and I thought I’d review it. But first, a quick note.

The Live ISO is 2.6 GB in size and can be downloaded from http://pinguyos.com/download/. I used the 64-bit “Full” image. You can also download the “Mini” images which contain less software out of the box, but it’s still 1.9 GB in size for the 64-bit image.

1. First impressions and ease of use

The Pinguy OS desktop is based on GNOME 3 and is very heavy. It looks very easy to use, and the layout is similar to OS X.

Interestingly, it comes up with this advertisement on startup:

However, it feels very bogged down and slow. As the Conky indicates, it is using 982 MB of RAM doing nothing!

There is also a dock of commonly used places on the left:

Overall, quite easy to use but also not very fast.

Ease of use score: 8/10

2. Installer

Pinguy uses the Ubiquity installer, which is one of the easiest installers to use. Pinguy also gained UEFI support with this point release.

However, as seen here, there’s no slideshow as an introduction to the OS. The slideshow is quite helpful for new users and Pinguy seems to cater to them.

	Release date	ISO size (GB)	Distribution base	Default filesystem	Install time	Boot time	Size of install	Desktop RAM use	Kernel Version
KaOS 2015.02	2/24/2015	1.4	Independent	XFS	18:03	0:36	4.6	415	3.18.7
Ubuntu MATE 15.04	2/25/2015	1.1	Ubuntu Vivid (15.04)	ext4	12:57	0:27	4.2	457	3.18.0
Manjaro 0.8.12 Xfce	2/6/2015	1.4	Arch	ext4	11:33	0:27	4.7	351	3.16.7
Netrunner 15	2/16/2015	1.9	Ubuntu Utopic (14.10)	ext4	16:20	0:41	6.4	714	3.16.0
openSUSE 13.2 KDE	11/4/2014	4.4	Independent	Btrfs (used ext4 because of known bug)	15:29	0:39	4.4	422	3.16.6
Bodhi Linux 3.0.0	2/17/2015	0.6	Ubuntu Trusty (14.04 LTS)	ext4	5:50	0:34	2.2	348	3.16.0
Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon	11/29/2014	1.4	Ubuntu Trusty (14.04 LTS)	ext4	8:45	0:42	4.5	343	3.13.0
Pinguy OS 14.04.2	3/22/2015	2.6	Ubuntu Trusty (14.04 LTS)	ext4	20:54	0:47	7.4	745	3.13.0
Average of all distros	1/29/2015	1.7			13:43	0:36	4.8	474

Installer score: 9/10

3. Design

Pinguy OS is Gnome 3 based with custom icons and a conky. It looks quite nice and modern, but not quite futuristic like KDE Plasma 5 or Unity. This isn’t a problem though; for example OS X looks very similar in design to Pinguy and it is selling quite well. The default font is Droid Sans which works very well here.

Design score: 9.5/10

4. Applications

Pinguy comes with the default set of Ubuntu applications:

Web browser: Firefox

File manager: Nemo

Email client: Thunderbird

Text editor: GEdit (refreshing to see a distro that doesn’t rebrand it)

Image viewer: Image Viewer

Terminal emulator: Terminal

Music player: Clementine (also comes with Spotify)

Office suite: LibreOffice

Applications score: 10/10

5. Installing packages

Installing packages from the terminal is fairly easy using apt-get, and Pinguy also comes with the Ubuntu Software Center. GDebi and Synaptic also are included for those who use those tools.

Installing packages score: 10/10

Final Thoughts

Pinguy lives up to its promise of being a distro that is for everyone, not just geeks. However, it could be much lighter on resources as it seems to be a huge hog.

Final score: 46.5/50 = 93%

Distro name	Final Score
Manjaro 0.8.12 Xfce	99
Ubuntu MATE 15.04	97
Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon	95
Pinguy OS 14.04.2	91
openSUSE 13.2 KDE	93
Netrunner 15	90
Bodhi Linux 3.0.0	84
KaOS 2015.02	80
Average of all reviews	91