I’m Turkish and I’m following the Pardus Project from the beginning. It’s a well know project in Turkey and because it’s supported by goverment it’s being used by goverment branches(not most) and universities(some) in Turkey. And it has a huge community. http://www.ozgurlukicin.com (Which means “for freedom”)is Turkish Main page for this community.

For other people’s thoughs I could say you need to know what is Pardus’ focus group. Pardus is for the people who know how to use a computer with avarage skills(Who can power on a computer, who knows how to open a borwser etc..). It’s not intented for power users or IT experts (this doesn’t mean it is not usefull for them but it’s a matter choice).
I’m going to be honest and objective about it but it is by far my best choice because every now and than you get hardware driver errors and other stupid minor or major errors with every distros. For example I installed the new Ubuntu 9.10 on my Acer 6930g and I couldn’t even start my wi-fi and ethernet, same goes for SUSE, in Mandrake 2010 I managed to use my wi-fi but it was painfull to beable to get sound working. In Pardus I get my notebook working out of the box and start using internet and listening my tunes…
But I couldn’t manage to get Pardus working on my old AMD destop with Raid 0 specs. So I installed Mandriva 2010 instead.
I don’t need to get confused in Pardus because of those restiricted codecs or drivers i search for the needed in Pisi and jobs done.
You can say it is same in others but than I’ll say not like Pardus. You won’t understand me untill you try it your self. Yes there isn’t a very big repository but it’s a very usefull repository and this is also because although Pardus is goverment supported it is developed by a hand full of people and it is using it’s own packge system Pisi.
And Pardus is the most community driven distro out there I’m able to use although it is goverment supported. You have an idea or you need something to be added to new version leave a comment in the forums and developers will answer your commet if its possible to fit that in new version or not or how to fit it.
As you can see it’s a matter of choices about finding which distro you feel comfortable. But try Pardus you wont regret it.

Thank you and Thank you Dan for your review.
P.S. one more thing don’t hesitate to use Turkish forums of Pardus. Community is very friendly and know English mostly. Lots of people will help you for solving your problems.

Many thanks for your thorough review. I’m on the verge of giving Pardus a try and this helped give me a better idea of what the experience might be like. (I’m familiar with KDE 3.5.x but haven’t yet experimented with 4.x).

I’m not sure how KDE 4.x will run on my oldish desktop hardware; the only way I’ll know is to take the plunge and install it. I’m also a bit concerned about Pardus’s use of grub2 as the bootloader, and whether it will detect my two other Linux distros (Ubuntu 8.04 and PCLinuxOS 2009) and actually boot them.

Pardus sounds like it’s something of a “sleeper” distro that is definitely worthy of more exposure. (It’s interesting that in your sample desktop screenshots, the wallpaper seems to be artsy photos of Turkish landscapes … free armchair travel).

Thanks again!

Here is a collection of Pardus Reviews.

http://www.pardusianer.de/node/55

Thanks for your article!

I looking forward to test it.

I tried your suggested alternative, Alt F2, but that is not as expansive as gnome-do.

My questions this: is it possible in any way to install gnome-do and have it function correctly on Pardus. If so, how?