What's the best Linux distro?

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Fair point, though I think I heard something about Opera moving to its own libraries. Qt also has, for some reason, almost all the LaTeX editors and Matlab-clone frontends (Octave, Scilab and FreeMat are all Qt).

Some KDE apps that I like:
KTorrent
Kontact
KImageMapEditor
KNewsTicker
Amarok

There's some pretty neat stuff in the KDE repository, though I like plenty of GNOME apps as well.

I'm actually using KTorrent right now (giving KDE another spin in the last few days before the 10.10 upgrade). It works, of course, and I'm sure there are enough features in it... but I miss the clean, intuitive interface of Transmission. Ktorrent just looks like a mess to me, something I would avoid if given the choice. Amarok>Rhythmbox, granted. The others fulfill a function I don't need, so no opinion.

One question: I was expecting Rekonq to be a minimalistic but at least functional Webkit browser, sort of like Epiphany. Is it using an incredibly outdated Webkit version? It failed the Acid3 test horrendously for me, and seems to have slow page loading times.

I've never had this problem before, and I've used Slackware quite a bit over the years. Granted, I haven't used it in the past couple of years, but I very much doubt that the oldest surviving Linux distro would 'forget' to include a partitioning tool.


Your intuitive and friendly is my sparse and dumbed-down.

Different strokes for different folks.

They had a partitioning tool, it just didn't work. I think it was fdisk or something? It was pretty old-school, I know that much. Gave me some error message about being unable to handle a certain sized partition.

You are right, I just found out they ditched Qt with v10.5.


My guess is GTK+ wasn't around when these projects got started.

At the installation stage, you can use cfdisk or fdisk. I think cfdisk is the preferred one now. Not sure if there's any size limit, but I have no problem making one 32GB and one 16GB partition with cfdisk.

QFW

I disagree. KDE 4x sucks but 3x was good. The old KDE was loads better than the new one. I'm hoping in 5x that they will improve it and change the menu bar as well.

KDE 3 certainly load faster. OTOH if it's the start menu that you don't like, you can change it back by clicking on the K icon and select "Switch to Classic Menu Style".

I've recently been using one of my school's antediluvian Fedora Core 8 boxes with KDE3.5 I will agree that KDE3 was much better than KDE4, and a decent desktop in its own right. Still not quite to my tastes (seemed a little too much like Windows for some reason) but not a bad DE at all.

I'm more of a GNOME guy than a KDE person. The only distro with KDE on my computers is Slackware. Gentoo and Ubuntu use GNOME.

Never heard of the Acid3 test before. After seeing your post I checked out the Acid3 test page to see what it was like. I tested four browsers - Epiphany, Iceweasel, Konqueror, and Galeon. The only one it outright failed was Konqueror. The others all stopped at exactly 72%. Not sure what that means.

Anything other than 100% is failure, but obviously some fail worse than others. The current stable Firefox gets 94, Epiphany (Webkit-based) passes with 100%, as does Chrome/Chromium, Opera, and any proper Webkit browser like Safari (on Mac) or Midori. Konqueror fails pretty hard (even worse than IE, if I recall correctly) with error messages of "You should not see this at all" in the upper-left hand. That same error message along with some other weird behavior appears in Rekonq. EDIT: Just tested Arora. It almost passes. All the Qt Webkit browsers must still be on an old version of Webkit for some reason.

You're running Lenny then, aren't you? You must have an older version of Gecko for Iceweasel and Epiphany to be scoring 72.

Anyone else tried Lucid Puppy Linux, it came as a 127 MB download so I thought I'd try it - it wasn't great.. First time I tried it I was shown lots of windows and the cursor seems to be too sensitive [something I find generally with Linux but this time rolling over icons launched programs even several times]. My mobile broadband didn't work - Ubuntu has the option to configure it and neither did Wifi unfortunately.

I am now downloading Ubuntu Netbook remix [10.10] instead and wiped the installation of Puppy Dog Linux from my flash drive - it was too basic and difficult to use. Ive used many distros of Linux before.

Quick Questrion

Netbook has a 1.66GHz atom processor and 1GB of Ram and came preinstalled with Windows XP with a separate empty partition. Would it run the full version of Ubuntu well enough - are the minimum system specs for Ubuntu accurate and does it still give decent performance?

Yes, it would still run decently well. The realistic requirements for a modern desktop-centric distro (like Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, etc) with GNOME are about the same as they are for XP.

On that hardware, I might prefer to go for a lighter set-up, eg Debian with LXDE, but regular Ubuntu should run fine. If you find it too slow, you can go in Synaptic Package Manager and install Xfce or LXDE to use one of those instead of GNOME.