Let's count
|
| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| hkwint May 27, 2009 7:02 PM EDT |
9 Reasons to use Ubuntu:
Because I provide 6 reasons why Windows sucks and 2 reasons why Ubuntu works, and because you're curious. Honestly, I don't know much about marketing (you'd have known that if you read my last article and the discussion that followed I guess, ahum), but I think advocating Ubuntu by means of 'Windows sucks' is not the best way. |
| caitlyn May 27, 2009 7:05 PM EDT |
I agree with you Hans. I also don't necessarily think Ubuntu is always the best choice for a newcomer to Linux. |
| Scott_Ruecker May 27, 2009 8:50 PM EDT |
PCLOS has served me well with three different people now, people who had either not owned a computer before or had more than a novice level of experience. |
| jdixon May 27, 2009 8:59 PM EDT |
Mint and Mepis also make good beginner distros. Mandriva used to be in that list, but TracyAnne's horror stories have convinced me that it's no longer suitable. |
| hkwint May 27, 2009 9:12 PM EDT |
Actually, I didn't mean Ubuntu was not good, I meant advertising any Linux distro with 'use it because Windows sucks' is not a good idea. However, if this thread will be about which distro is the best for (ex?)-Windows users I'm equally happy. |
| caitlyn May 27, 2009 9:20 PM EDT |
jdixon: If you read my review of Mandriva 2009.1 for DistroWatch you know that I agree that it isn't suitable at the moment. The thing is, fix a few bugs and it would be the best again. Vector Linux is also a few bugs away, which I find amazing for a Slackware based distro. Wolvix 2.0, based on the current beta, should qualify when the final release is out. Hans: My agreement with you was also not meant to bash Ubuntu. I feel they suffer from the same disease as Mandriva at the moment. Get the bugs fixed, don't introduce new and nasty ones, and Ubuntu would be fine. |
| hkwint May 27, 2009 9:36 PM EDT |
Quoting:Get the bugs fixed, don't introduce new and nasty ones, and Ubuntu would be fine. That would probably require to reassign some OpenBSD devs to Ubuntu I'm afraid; probably Ubuntu but definitely Fedora comes with tons of new code every new release as far as I noticed. Isn't the LTS supposed to fix bugs to ensure a stable platform? |
| caitlyn May 27, 2009 10:00 PM EDT |
Yes, LTS is supposed to do that, and by 8.04.03 it pretty much has. The original release of Hardy was pretty... no, very buggy. One of the problems with both Ubuntu and Mandriva is the rigid six month release cycle and the determination to meet release dates come hell or high water. At least Fedora pushed back their release by at least a week to squash bugs. Ubuntu and Mandriva don't seem to understand the concept of blocking bugs, meaning bugs that actually can block a release. |
| rijelkentaurus May 28, 2009 12:05 PM EDT |
Caitlyn, for what it's worth, Mandriva 2009.1 is working absolutely flawlessly on my Dell Vostro 1700 with an nVidia 8600. Perfectly, including all power management, screen resolution, sound, multimedia controls...everything. Very good reason to choose a Dell, Dell and Mandriva are partners. I concede that my experience on my one piece of hardware is not necessarily consistent with performance on all hardware. However, I am thrilled to be using Mandriva again, everything else is just a pretender to the Linux throne in my mind. YMMV. |
| caitlyn May 28, 2009 1:39 PM EDT |
@ rijelkentaurus: "It works for me" posts are pretty meaningless. You don't have an Intel graphics chipset or one of the older ATI or nVidia chipsets on which Mandriva just doesn't work and for which they have no fix. I found lots of other little annoying bugs that either don't affect you or aren't important to you. I stand by my rather negative review of 2009.1. For a whole lot of people it just won't do. Don't believe me? Ask Tracyanne. |
| tracyanne May 28, 2009 4:51 PM EDT |
Unfortunately caitlyn is right. I'm still not happy with KDE4, although Mandriva's take on GNOME looks quite good on a virtual machine. |
| caitlyn May 28, 2009 5:54 PM EDT |
I also agree with tracyanne's use of the word "unfortunately". I've been a Mandriva (and before that Mandrake) fan for years. It was what I always recommended to newcomers to Linux as the best and most user friendly distro to start with. I'm not sure what I'd recommend now. Wolvix, maybe. |
| hkwint May 28, 2009 7:08 PM EDT |
Quoting:"It works for me" posts are pretty meaningless. Of course not, as they are about the only person that really matters in this world: Me (and 'Me' refers to you, the one reading the word 'Me' in this case). This may sound as a joke, but it's meant rather serious: If Fedora 11 works for everyone but not for me, I cannot write a positive review about it. Please allow me not to continue to explain why Fedora 11 doesn't work for me, because I don't want to add to the "Linux not ready" FUD-wagon - as discussed in another thread. I really hope my hardware is to blame, and I should make a suggestion to the nice Fedora people as well I suppose. |
| theboomboomcars May 28, 2009 7:48 PM EDT |
caitlyn have you looked at sabayon? I haven't used 4.0 but I used 3.5 for a while and it was very nice and very complete, the only problem I had with it was it did source updating instead of binary and my laptop is an old celeron so it took a while to update. Though I think they went to binary updating for 4.0. |
| caitlyn May 28, 2009 9:16 PM EDT |
I honestly haven't looked at Sabayon. I hate Gentoo with a passion and I believe Sabayon is Gentoo-based. OTOH, if they update their packages with binaries rather than making me compile everything and anything then 90% of my objections to Gentoo have been removed. I may have to take a look. |
| rijelkentaurus May 28, 2009 9:20 PM EDT |
@Caitlyn, I appeared to have touched a nerve. I only meant it was working for me, and conceded as much, no reason to get worked up. Perhaps I am reading too much into it, but you never seem to like contrary opinions. And I love Mandriva's KDE4, but again YMMV. Next time I'll try installing it on a $2 netbook and see how it performs. |
| caitlyn May 28, 2009 10:10 PM EDT |
Yes, you're reading too much into it. I enjoy a spirited debate. |
| tuxtom May 29, 2009 5:27 AM EDT |
Quoting:And I love Mandriva's KDE4That will wear off...soon. Painfully. |
| jacog May 29, 2009 6:35 AM EDT |
I also like Mandriva's KDE4, despite a number of omissions and faults. |
| theboomboomcars May 29, 2009 9:11 AM EDT |
It does look like sabayon went to binary updates, I think I may download it and see what it's like. |
| caitlyn May 29, 2009 9:37 AM EDT |
Well... I don't have a $2 netbook. If anyone read my review one of the things I really did like was Mandriva's implementation of KDE 4.2.2. It actually is the best KDE4 implementation I've seen yet, except, of course, for the fact the KDE didn't show up in the session list for KDM. Adam Williamson, while defending Mandriva over on DWW, did acknowledge that bug is real and a hold over from the previous version. Seriously, though, the implementation of KDE4 in Mandriva was the first one I looked at that I really thought was well done. |
| azerthoth May 29, 2009 1:38 PM EDT |
@boomboom, Sabayon went binary some time ago. We are prepping a final release for this series shortly, which is basicly just an updated install media, then on to work for our next release cycle i.e. Sabayon 5. We have also taken to a rolling release with the binary updates, so if you install from the latest install media you can keep it current without having to re install. *edit* you can install from the older media too, however since we there are instances where we have pushed gigs of updates between new install media you are looking at multiple loss of time and bandwidth in doing so. Sabayon 3.5 was the first release to include the binary package management system, and 3.5Pod was the CD sized release. I advise against that one, as it was our Uber Geek must be Linux Guru and familiar with multiple package management systems release. */edit* |
| hkwint May 29, 2009 2:18 PM EDT |
Interesting AZ. I have been reading about Entropy as of lately (actually, since it started), but it was hard to track progress. Seems Fabio's dream may come true after all. |
| theboomboomcars May 29, 2009 3:20 PM EDT |
az I used 3.5 for about 6 months when ubuntu broke compatibility with my harware. I switched back to ubuntu because ubdates would take several hours on sabayon because of the compilation. I don't know if the binary updates took place later than when I was using it or not. The system was very fast, but updating would take all weekend and often over heat my laptop so it would never finish. I downloaded 4.1 and will try to install it to a usb stick since my cd drive has decided that it doesn't like me any more. |
| azerthoth May 29, 2009 3:36 PM EDT |
@hkwint, being an experienced gentoo user you can see where this would be an issue. Lots of people think Sabayon is Gentoo's "easy" button and come in with that mind set. The major problem with that approach is that sabayon is a massive overlay in it's own right were you to stick with source only, on top of which, going binary means static USE flags. This can be seen in the make.conf and package.use, however it also means that what comes through entropy will match those static USE flags, and any changes you have made to your local USE flags are basicly over ridden. It is still possible to treat it as a Gentoo system, however you had best be pretty good with portage. So if your looking for a portage only gentoo system with overlay ... you time would be better spent just doing a stage3 with the overlay and converting to openrc/baselayout2. The binary system OTOH is really nice and functions well, especially with the most recent update (not on any install media yet) that moves a large chunk of the process to git. *edit* @boomboom, I have written a nice how-to for that very thing, it's in the Sabayon wiki. */edit* |
| hkwint May 29, 2009 6:23 PM EDT |
Boot from USB is a nice topic. I have been fiddling last to weeks to make Fedora boot from USB. The first ever bootable USB I made was done from Gentoo CLI using syslinux; it was DSL on a 64MB SD card (transparent hardware is great, my mobo doesn't know it's an SD card!) On Fedora, no success on my first attempt, no success on my second attempt using another image, no success the first time using UNetBootin, the fourth attempt was a blocker with error report during installation, only the fifth time was I able to install Fedora. I was only able to do so by manually creating a xorg.conf (using X -configure) and exchanging the non-working nouveau for vesa (knew this from Gentoo! Otherwise I would have put Fedora aside). It made me rather sad, I was really impressed by F11 feature list and the management of the whole project, like reverting possibilities whenever a feature failed and such; I never saw good distro management like that before I suppose. But if it won't boot or install, what good is it? However, I'm reluctant to write a blog or article about it because it may have been my own fault, a rare exception or a small bug or so, and I don't want to add to the 'Linux not ready for desktop' FUD-bandwagon. After VESA, everything worked without a glitch I should add; and after I downloaded nvidia proprietary drivers, KDE4 looked good and shiny. The update system was great - at least in my opinion. Another sad thing to notice is that after several years of attempts, Linux still doesn't have a working 'overlay'-FS such as unionfs or aufs; or union-mount. I wanted to do a union-mount with my root directory mounted as readonly and writable 'cache' union-mounted on top of it. Then, on this 'union' I wanted to compile KDE4. But UnionFS was old, AUFS1 not maintained and AUFS2 didn't work; and supposedly won't anytime in the near future. Speaking about Sabayon-update: That was also one thing I didn't quite understand, but there was a bug in Sabayon somewhere (I heared nobody else about it, so I hope I was an exception) which lead to the system becoming very, very unresponsive. Minimizing and such took half a minute. Then I stopped using Sabayon, it's now overwritten with Fedora 10 with KDE (Forgot to mention: when F11 didn't work, I switched to F10). |
| azerthoth May 29, 2009 7:03 PM EDT |
hans there is a patch set up for live mode somewhere to allow you to do persistant changes. There is a persistent live mode distro based on Arch thats using it, Arch Live. The developer of it also gives a hand with Sabayon. I cant remember his email off the top of my head, but you can find him on irc.freenode.net with the nick of godane. Different from the persistant mode that Sabayon uses, which is file that holds the info. Neither allows you to write back to the file system so much as it loads and patches in information during the boot process. |
| theboomboomcars May 29, 2009 8:17 PM EDT |
I got it on a USB and checked it out, it looks nice, though I don't like the layout of KDE 4, I like my launchers on a panel not on the desktop, I also prefer to have my system information on the panels and not have to click an icon on the panel which then brings up something to show me the info. It is definitely a good looking setup, and I'll play with it and see if we can work together, I'll also give gnome a try. I like the idea of a rolling release. |
Posting in this forum is limited to members of the group: [ForumMods, SITEADMINS, MEMBERS.]
Becoming a member of LXer is easy and free. Join Us!