yes, pclinux is pclinuxos

i always keep a livecd in my laptop case. to be specific, knoppix, what else? ;) it's been very useful.

is linux ready for average users? i don't know. i guess it depends on whether you wanna try something different. it works well for me so far and enables me to do things i wanna do on my pcs. try it by urself. you may like it. for beginners, start w/ some well-polished desktop distributions, such as pclinuxos, ubuntu, federo, etc.

it would be nice to have bios open-sourced, but i don't see it necessary.