Good distros to mess with

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Had great success with Ubuntu and XUbuntu thanks to the great support of the Ubuntu Community as well as this forum. Kudos to Orwell and Fuzzy!! !! However is there other distros worth messing with and how well do the roll-up releases work in Ubuntu.


http://www.ubuntu.com/community

Name is game-freak1998 on the site!! !!

Ubuntu has lots of stuff to play around with. Fedora is also a very nice distro, though be warned- the installer sucks. Debian is similar to Ubuntu, but will force you to take a somewhat more hands-on approach. I'd recommend against SUSE, but that may just be my anti-KDE bias speaking.

Aside from those, I think most of the well-regarded distros require an extremely intimate knowledge of Linux's inner workings. Slackware, Gentoo, Arch are the big l33t distros. Probably best to stay away from those, at least at first.

I've never really touched much non-live distros that aren't Ubuntu, but I would recommend Debian or Fedora, as Orwell said. Debian will cut the frontend umbilical cord & have you using the shell more, as your lord & saviour Linus Torvalds intended. Not sure about Fedora though, never really poked around with it much.

After that, if you want to get into things, experiment with building your own kernels. Once you get EXTREMELY comfortable with that, then maybe it may be time to poke around with the linux-from-scratch distros. Most like gentoo because it allows you to pull the source from the repositories & build them automatically, again as your the all mighty Linus Torvalds wants you to.

Orwell: It's nice to see I'm not the only one who can't stand the anti-ergonomical KDE! I guess I should maybe pull kubuntu-desktop package though & see how things are in 4.3 though...

They've got 4.3 in Ubuntu already? To be fair, each point release in KDE4 sucks less than the last. Someday I'm sure they'll come up with something usable... so long as you've got a quad core and 8GB of RAM to run it at tolerable speeds.

Fedora is what Torvalds uses. And he actually recommends against going and building everything from source, claims it defeats the purpose of a distribution. Fedora's nice. It's a bit more demanding on the user than Ubuntu, but still not terribly difficult. Also, they don't do any of Ubuntu's silly little program version freezes- you can expect your favorite applications to stay up to date between distro releases.

I've got KDE 4.2.2 and it runs fine with 1gig ram (fully used but half of it is by the disc cache) and a 3GHz pentium 4. Desktop effects are turned off but then I don't actually have an external graphics card

Lies, unless you have a bizarre idea of "running fine." Even the super-lean BSD with KDE4.2 was slow on my 4GB, 2.2GHz Core 2 laptop. Any Linux distro with KDE4.2 is as bad as, or worse than, Vista in terms of performance. To claim that it "runs fine" with a fraction of the computer power that I have seen being unable to deliver reasonable performance is nonsensical. KDE4 on my powerful laptop is slower than XFCE on my ancient G3 with a slow processor and 320megs of RAM, and XFCE really isn't that light.

The true nonsense is to ignore empirical evidence that dose not fit your beliefs! With desktop effects disabled I can websurf with several background KDE programs and play youtube all with a nice <30% CPU usage and snappy responses comparable to KDE3.

Even without desktop effects, KDE4 is miserably slow on my hardware. And with a relatively high-end machine, I should be able to have desktop effects if I want them.

Nevertheless your assertion was about my machine, where KDE4 runs rather nicely.

But that makes no sense. You have a somewhat better processor, but only a fraction of the RAM. Why would KDE4 run nicely on that machine but not mine? It's not as though the software is magically leaner over there. And what does "running nicely" even mean?

You are totally forgetting the graphics card he hasnt mentioned. Its better than yours.

I ran hugely overdone, eye-popping compiz effects under GNOME even with only 1 gig of RAM. Even without desktop effects, KDE is bad. It can't be that graphics-intensive that KDE with no effects is more demanding on the graphics card than GNOME+Compiz.

And my graphics card isn't that horrible. Sure, it's integrated graphics, but GMA X3100 is decent. I can run games on here pretty well.

I'm sorry I implied it was horrible, its not. But its a far stretch to say, a PCIe 9800GT(or more).

I can run full gnome compiz effects with my laptops ancient integrated ati.

But you can guess which one is better!

I think we can trust wikipedia in this case:



Sure you've got 4 gigs, but the shared bus is a bottleneck.

Anyway. Lets wait and see what the man uses for graphics. Then we can make a proper judgement.

That is extremely unlikely, its a Intel Corporation 82945G/GZ Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02)

But there's more possibilities than hardware, either of you tried KDE4 on my distro? (Debian testing)

Weather or not it makes sense is irrelevant, its an empirical fact.

Unless someone screwed up badly when packageing it on your distro.

Programs open in about 3 seconds, porgrams minimised to the tray open in <1 second, clicking on something inside the program, opening a new window in dolphin, changing a tab, etc averages at <1 second.

I wouldnt call that fast. My programs open in under a second and clicking on a minimized app restores it instantly. Probably under 1/10 second. But thats gnome. I will try KDE.

Its easily fast enough, although I repeated my test and it seems the bottleneck was the hard disk, its under a second if I close then reopen, I also remembered the time command.

For konqueror and dragon player real seems to have included the time until I closed them so user and sys are the ones to look at.

Unsurprisingly my glxgears score is way lower than yours, so a fancy graphics card isn't all that important