I've finally snapped
in [UK Linux]
|
From: Geoffrey Clements on 3 Sep 2008 16:23 That's it, after 5 years me and Gentoo are parting ways. It's now the third time something has stopped working just when I need it. This time the printer, working one day and not the next. What did I do in-between? I recompiled the kernel to support autofs (this was an incremental compile), installed the autofs userspace tools and after that the printer, sound _and_ desktop notifications have all stopped working. Weird. So I'm on the lookout for another distro. for the desktop. I'm used to KDE so I want something orientated to KDE also I prefer deb based package management over rpm (I think I'm allowed to have at least one package-ist attitude at my age plus I'm feeling crotchety at the moment). I use Debian stable on my server so I'm thinking of using Testing but I'm not sure how to cope with getting all the non-free stuff such as NVidia drivers, Skype, Flash and so on. I'm looking at Mepis but can't quite work out if I need to pay to get the full distro. plus it seems to have only a few people working on it. [K]Ubuntu well, err, not sure if I want that - it seems to be aimed at people new to Linux. I know there are lots of other distros. perhaps too many. If anyone cares to share some thoughts I'd be grateful, ta! -- Geoff Registered Linux user 196308 Replace bitbucket with geoff to mail me.
From: Chris Whelan on 3 Sep 2008 17:29 Geoffrey Clements wrote: > That's it, after 5 years me and Gentoo are parting ways. It's now the > third time something has stopped working just when I need it. This time > the printer, working one day and not the next. What did I do in-between? I > recompiled the kernel to support autofs (this was an incremental compile), > installed the autofs userspace tools and after that the printer, sound > _and_ desktop notifications have all stopped working. Weird. > > So I'm on the lookout for another distro. for the desktop. I'm used to KDE > so I want something orientated to KDE also I prefer deb based package > management over rpm (I think I'm allowed to have at least one package-ist > attitude at my age plus I'm feeling crotchety at the moment). I use Debian > stable on my server so I'm thinking of using Testing but I'm not sure how > to cope with getting all the non-free stuff such as NVidia drivers, Skype, > Flash and so on. > > I'm looking at Mepis but can't quite work out if I need to pay to get the > full distro. plus it seems to have only a few people working on it. Before I read this far, I was thinking that I should suggest Mepis. (You don't have to pay.) It is primarily the work of one person, (Warren Woodford), which is both good and bad! Warren is a genius; of that there is no doubt. He tends to not want to involve himself fully with the small but competent community that has sprung up unbidden around him. Mepis is, IME, very stable; it also has the best hardware support of any distro I have used. It has good, out of the box support for closed source graphics drivers, Skype, Flash, and all the other things real people want.It is most certainly not cutting edge, and this can be an annoyance to some. I often try two or three distributions a week, but always come back to Mepis. The current version is 7.0; this was released at the end of 2007, so is ancient by the standards of some distros! Version 8.0 Beta 1 was released last week. I haven't managed to break it so far. If you have the time and resource, why not try it live? Chris -- Remove prejudice to reply.
From: Ben Bacarisse on 3 Sep 2008 17:42 Geoffrey Clements <bitbucket(a)electron.me.uk> writes: > That's it, after 5 years me and Gentoo are parting ways. <snip> > So I'm on the lookout for another distro. <snip> > [K]Ubuntu well, err, not sure if I want that - it seems to be aimed at > people new to Linux. That is the aim, yes, but I am long-standing Linux user and find it quite acceptable. Open a terminal and off you go! > I know there are lots of other distros. perhaps too many. If anyone cares to > share some thoughts I'd be grateful, ta! A key issue would be how up-to-date you want things to be. Ubuntu is quite good for this (if you trust tracking their twice-yearly update schedule) but because it takes .deb packages I can add in repositories to get bleeding edge (well, nearly) emacs. -- Ben.
From: Glyn Millington on 3 Sep 2008 17:06 Geoffrey Clements <bitbucket(a)electron.me.uk> writes: > So I'm on the lookout for another distro. for the desktop. I'm used to KDE > so I want something orientated to KDE also I prefer deb based package > management over rpm (I think I'm allowed to have at least one package-ist > attitude at my age plus I'm feeling crotchety at the moment). Well Slackware is a good solid set-up; and those things which don't come on the CDs you can find at http://slackbuilds.org atb Glyn
From: Hannes Schaardt on 4 Sep 2008 04:39
Hello Geoffrey, Geoffrey Clements wrote: > I know there are lots of other distros. perhaps too many. If anyone cares to > share some thoughts I'd be grateful, ta! I can recommend sidux[1]. It's a small and fast Debian/sid based distro supporting KDE and XFCE with a very active community. [1] http://www.sidux.com -- Hannes |