1 Dec
2005
1 Dec
'05
3:40 p.m.
Cini, Richard wrote:
All:
I'm thinking of ditching Windows totally on my desktop at home
as I build my next upgraded x86-bsed PC. So, I wanted to take a poll of the
group for a recommendation on which Linux distro to use. I downloaded Fedora
Core, Slackware, FreeBSD, Unbuntu and Linspire.
Always been a Slackware fan myself (used it since the SLS days, apart from a
brief diversion to RedHat). It's less bloated than the likes of Fedora, but
still comes with the option of a lot of desktop software.
Not used Unbuntu or Linspire so can't comment. FreeBSD isn't Linux, so can't
really comment there either (although experience has been that it's brilliant
for server-side but you'll have your work cut out configuring it to be a good
desktop machine)
Personal observations about Linux over the years:
1) It's suffering from *serious* bloat, feature-creep and eye candy these
days. Presumably the 'sweet spot' was 8-9 years ago when the ratio of clueful
programmers versus muppets who contributed was a lot higher. Main problem's
people launching into projects without any proper design or planning
beforehand I think (both the popular desktop environments, Gnome and KDE, seem
to suffer badly from this).
2) In the desktop world, there still isn't a decent graphics package (Gimp is
awful to use) or audio processing app. I'm currently struggling to find any
half-decent OCR tool too.
3) Systems still suffer from rot, just like Windows does. After a while, it
gets very difficult to be able to tell what bits can be removed because you're
not using them (or that were installed in a bundle with something that you do
use, and are just using up diskspace). Linux badly needs some sort of
kernel-level package / module / library management (offerings like RPM tend to
be too coarse grain IMHO)
4) WINE is actually pretty darn good these days if you want to run Windows
apps on your Linux box.
5) The OS as a whole is one heck of a lot more stable than Windows.
Any thoughts from the group?
I'm leaning toward the "put a Mac on your desktop, put Linux on your
servers"
approach, myself. That is without having actually used a Mac since the LC days
though - but I know that a lot of things irritate me about the Linux desktop
world, whilst even more things irritate me about the Windows desktop world. :-)
I'm not convinced it's possible to produce a desktop environment with the
open-source cooperative model without it turning into a giant bloated
inconsistent mess!
HTH,
Jules