I've stopped distro hopping
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| caitlyn Feb 12, 2013 3:57 PM EDT |
Now that I'm not writing reviews I've stopped distro hopping. These little derivates rarely offer anything special or innovative in any case - just somebody's hobby project complete with bugs and not enough of a development team to fix them. Yes, I know there are exceptions and exceptional little distros out there. Sadly they are few and relatively far between. If openSUSE keeps putting out releases like 12.2 I may have settled on a distro for quite a while. |
| dinotrac Feb 12, 2013 4:40 PM EDT |
@caitlyn -- That good, eh? I've put one old love (kde) on one of our machines. Maybe I should put another old love (SuSE) on one as well. |
| caitlyn Feb 12, 2013 5:05 PM EDT |
Let's put it this way: openSUSE 12.2 just works. I rarely say that about any distro but I can about this one. It found all my hardware on two different machines and configured it properly. I haven't found any serious bugs at all. I can be critical as everybody knows and I've been critical of a couple of openSUSE releases in the past. Not this one. |
| number6x Feb 12, 2013 9:54 PM EDT |
I used S.u.S.E for many years. Paid for it release after release. It was the best distro. I had started with Slackware, so S.u.S.E was a natural choice. Slack with RPM, what was not to like. Then they had that great curses based installer and control tool Yast. S.u.S.E was always a great KDE supporter as well. The S.u.S.E developers always contributed heavily to KDE. After the Novel buyout they switched to Gnome and it just never fit. Funny because gnome worked well before the Novel deal, I often used the NextStep. It's very nice to hear that S.u.S.E is going back to being a great KDE distro. |
| henke54 Feb 13, 2013 2:08 AM EDT |
number6x wrote: It's very nice to hear that S.u.S.E is going back to being a great KDE distro. I like http://www.digikam.org/ ;-) |
| kikinovak Feb 14, 2013 6:29 PM EDT |
Last week I installed openSUSE 12.2 on a sandbox PC in my office, just out of mere curiosity. The PC is a standard Dell Optiplex 330 model from the french administration. First impressions: nice eye-candy, installer is very polished. Clean, but not dumbed-down. I opt pretty much for the standard options, except for GRUB, which the installer chooses not to put in the MBR, but I do. The desktop starts up, and... uh oh.. error message that Pulseaudio crashed and I have no sound. OK, will see that later. After the initial update (680 MB download, as much as I installed), I have KDE 4.8.5, the same I have on another identical machine here running Slackware 14.0. So let's see... ... uh oh, desktop becomes unresponsive. Opening menus and windows suddenly takes ages. Now the desktop freezes and I have to hard-reboot it. After restarting, I deactivate desktop indexing, graphical effects and all the bling... same problem after a few minutes, desktop freezing completely. New reboot. I launch Yast, only to receive an error message that there's a concurrent application running in the background. WTF? Affter an hour or so, I just throw the install DVD in the trash. Slackware runs just nice on this hardware without the least hiccup, so why bother with the cheap bling? |
| Steven_Rosenber Feb 14, 2013 7:36 PM EDT |
Once you find a distribution you are comfortable with, sticking with it is the thing to do -- especially if your hardware agrees. In practice, most of us are not quite deliriously happy. So we keep looking. |
| DiBosco Feb 14, 2013 8:07 PM EDT |
I recently installed Open SuSE on my laptop; it's the first time ever I have used anything other than Mandrake/Mandriva/Mageia. The latest kernel update borked the wifi on my laptop that was running Mageia and no-one could get it going. As I need my laptop for work a lot, often while on the move, I had to try something else. I was impressed with how easy Open SuSE was to install and get going and the wi-fi works, even if I usually have to enter my KWallet password on resume. I do think Mageia is a better general distro though (not withstanding the fact there are a lot of Broadcom issues at the moment). The package manager is *way* faster on Mageia and the control centre is superior. Mageia looks massively better too, Mandrake and its subsequent distros have always done KDE superbly well.. That's not to say SuSE doesn't work very nicely; it's snappy, the repositories are wonderfully easy to initialise and it is very stable. I will use it until support runs out for 12.2 I think as once you have your laptop set up it's too much of a hassle to change it. In the meanwhile I use Mageia on my main desktop for most of my work and regularly marvel at what a superb job they do. |
| caitlyn Feb 15, 2013 11:01 AM EDT |
FWIW, I've chosen to use Xfce rather than KDE since my systems aren't exactly the latest. openSUSE 12.2 is the first distro where NetworkManager hasn't given me grief with wireless, either with the Broadcom chipset in the netbook or with the Belkin USB thing I use on the desktop. It all just worked. In the past I've had to rip it out in favor if wicd if I wanted things to work and not to have dropped connections left and right or difficult connecting in the first place. @DiBosco: I generally agree with you about Mandriva and it's bastard stepchildren. I actually have been impressed with ROSA Linux Marathon. I haven't tried running Fresh for any length of time so I can't comment on it much. However, last September it became clear that I'd be supporting SUSE (the paid, enterprise versions) at work so I needed to refamiliarize myself with the SUSE way of doing things. I thought it was a temporary move and I didn't expect to like the end result nearly as much as I have. |
| Steven_Rosenber Feb 15, 2013 1:50 PM EDT |
So you like the Xfce implementation in openSUSE? Do they go beyond the vanilla settings? How do you think it compares to Xubuntu? |
| caitlyn Feb 15, 2013 2:09 PM EDT |
Yes, I like the Xfce implementation. It's pretty much plain vanilla, not very different at all from what kikinovak might find in Slackware except that it has more of the panel applets available out of the box. I haven't used Xubuntu in a long time so I can't make a fair comparison right now. I've only played with U(nity)buntu and Lubuntu 12.10. |
| kikinovak Feb 15, 2013 2:19 PM EDT |
@Steven: here's my personal blend of Slackware+Salix, with Xfce on steroids, on my workhorse PC. Slackware base with spkg and slapt-get on top, about 100 additional packages from Salix, and a dozen from my own package repo. Nice as a workhorse PC, and runs reasonably fast even on very old hardware. http://www.microlinux.fr/images/slackware_plus_salix.png Cheers, Niki |
| Steven_Rosenber Feb 15, 2013 4:28 PM EDT |
@kikinovak -- are you using cairo dock? |
| kikinovak Feb 15, 2013 4:49 PM EDT |
No, that's just Xfce's standard panel with 100 % transparency. This is the same setup I'm using for all my clients' desktops. Fast, reliable and bug-free. |
| Steven_Rosenber Feb 15, 2013 7:07 PM EDT |
Nice. I've been using the standard panel but putting it on the left side of the screen -- that's one thing from Unity and GNOME Shell that I do like. It allows move vertical space on today's short, wide screens. |
| kikinovak Feb 18, 2013 9:29 AM EDT |
OpenSUSE's Xfce implementation is "plain vanilla" only in the sense that a McDonald's Maxi Double Whooper Big Mac Extra Large Cheeseburger Menu is "a little snack". |
| Fettoosh Feb 18, 2013 1:24 PM EDT |
Quoting:that's one thing from Unity and GNOME Shell that I do like. KDE does that by "right click" => "Add Panel" => "empty Panel" which can be populated by drag and drop widgets or adding Panels and extending it further using Grouping Desktop |
| caitlyn Feb 18, 2013 2:57 PM EDT |
Oh, nonsense, kikinovak. Forget the endless Slackware commercials and tell me what isn't vanilla about the implementation of Xfce in openSUSE 12.2. I'm really interested since I still have SalixOS (XFCE edition) and openSUSE on this machine. I'm running openSUSE 12.2 right now, with Xfce and it sure looks like standard Xfce to me. |
| kikinovak Feb 18, 2013 6:06 PM EDT |
Right, then let the simple facts speak for themselves. Here's what you get when you build Xfce from the sources taken from xfce.org: http://www.microlinux.fr/images/xfce_vanilla.png (Ugly, isn't it?) The illustration is taken from chapter 4 ("L'environnement de bureau Xfce") in the second edition of my book "Linux aux petits oignons" (here's a link to the first edition http://tinyurl.com/no254g). This is also the exact same result you get when you install it using an unnamed distribution dating from 1993, since one of the working principles of said distribution (no names) is to implement software as shipped by the authors, without any branding nor modifications. This isn't a good or a bad thing per se, it's just how things are. In that case, Xfce is quite ugly, as stated. Vaguely reminiscent of an East German appartment block in the 1970s. But with a number of tweaks, the results look more satisfying to me: http://www.microlinux.fr/images/slackware_plus_salix.png Now I suggest you simply look at the image above in the first link I gave you (vanilla Xfce) and then take a peek at your openSUSE Xfce (which I think is very nice, by the way), and then you can start playing "spot the 150 differences" for an hour or two. Enjoy :o) |
| caitlyn Feb 19, 2013 12:08 AM EDT |
OK, I see the difference. In openSUSE the panel is across the entire bottom but mostly empty rather than CDE style in the center and a solid color without the mouse logo. Also, the start button says openSUSE. Otherwise, it's pretty much the same. The functionality is the same. |
| kikinovak Feb 19, 2013 2:41 AM EDT |
There's also much functionality missing in plain Xfce. But that's only because the Xfce developers concentrate on the "core" desktop. Unlike other desktops like GNOME and KDE, they don't want to replace any existing apps. Currently I have to add about 150 packages to vanilla Xfce to make it fully functional as a desktop. http://www.microlinux.fr/slackware/14.0/source/ But then, it's worth it, and I enjoy working with it. Been using it more or less regularly since the early 3.x versions (with that horrible xffm filemanager), and exclusively since 4.8. |
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