I'm a KDE guy myself -- it's big, but I like the eye-candy and the
Activities concept.
So far, there has only been one package I really need that I have problems
with in Fedora -- the nightly Makehuman build. It requires a debian
distro, So I run it on Ubuntu in Virtualbox on my Fedora machine when I
need it.
My choice of distros is more driven by networking issues, but my
experience is a lot like yours. I'm kind of torn. I wish Mageia well, so
I feel like I should install it one something just as a token of support,
but I use Linux for real work, and can't spend all my time tinkering (as
much as I enjoy it).
billo
On Tue, 19 Jun 2012, Neil wrote:
Has anybody tried out the new Mageia distro? I'm a Fedora guy, so I like
the rpm model and the easy upgrades/massive software that Fedora provides.
Oddly enough, I just did. A little (probably unnecessary) background, so you
know where I come from...
I, too, have been a fan of Fedora for years. I started out compiling early
slackware (0.9.7?), then picked up
again with Red Hat. When Mandrake came out, I switched to that, got too busy
with work to have spare Linux,
then eventually came back. By that time, Fedora had both Gnome and KDE, and I
flirted with both, and settled
on Gnome.
Lately, I've been wanting things that Fedora just isn't supplying (eclipse WDT,
for example), and I don't
want to have to compile the whole toolchain to try things out. I've also grown
disenchanted with Gnome, its'
Microsoftening, and its' bloat. A little while back, I installed XFCE, and
while I was fairly happy with it,
it was a bit clunky feeling.
Since F15 just EOLed, I decided to scan around, and picked up Mageia. On June
5th, I installed it with as
little gnome as possible, and XFCE. I found the interface pretty good, and with
less Gnome, XFCE seems to
fly. Unfortunately, Mageia seems a bit unpopulated. The repos are pretty slim
(at least, for the tools I
normally run). A friend of mine (also a Fedora guy) went through the same set
of tests as I did, so I'll just
quote from our email exchanges, as they were fresh in our minds...
"I'm also really not a fan of Gnome Shell, and have been fidling with XFCE
more. I've rebuilt my box with
Mageia (nee Mandriva) and XFCE, and have to say I'm reasonably impressed.
Pretty quick, with better tools
than XFCE, but without many of the dependencies as Fedora (Mandriva tended to
build extra tools without the
Gnome libraries.) I even managed to get Compiz largely working again within
just a day or two of playing. I
know putting desktop effects on a slim desktop is kind of counter-productive..
but I like them =]
OTOH, I'm not really impressed with the repos <G>"
"And looking through the [Debian] repos; compiz is there. xfce. diffpdf. I
*need* diffpdf and fslint. Others
I can't seem to find in Mageia: diffuse, some other tools.
Eclipse looks like it's getting dropped from the repos; but it looks like it
basically is for everybody else,
too (Fedora doesn't have sufficient dependencies to run the web tools), so
getting it from the source is
going to be the way to go, regardless. And since the Android dev kit is debian,
and rooted in Eclipse, I have
a higher degree of confidence there."
"I'm fairly happy with Xfce, right now. Light weight, quick. Installing it
without Gnome (at least in Mageia)
it came with much better tools."
There's more, but that's really the point at which we both booted up a Debian
VM, and decided we liked it.
We're both now running Debian -> XFCE4, and are both very happy with it (a week
in)
One of my decision factors was the range of packages in the repos. Fedora has
come up slightly short of
packages I need, and according to distrowatch (IIRC) Mageia has half as many.
Debian has significantly more
(less than Ubuntu, but I don't want to run Ubuntu).
Ubuntu 37,000
Debian 29,050
Fedora 22,000
Mageia 11,409
I wasn't thrilled about leaving the RPM model, myself; but my fears have proven
unfounded. apt-get seems
thorough; the repos are large, and mixing them turns out to be fairly simple.
Apt will even build you apps
from the source repos if binaries are missing (filling in dependencies,
grabbing source, and building it).
Or, just if you tell it to.
I currently have everything installed I wanted, at versions comparable to
Fedora, and the only thing I had to
compile myself was a menu-editor for XFCE (rather than load a Gnome one.) I
also managed to get a pretty
Gnome-free XFCE install (slimmer than anything else I've tried), which runs
quick, seems far more stable than
it did with Gnome floating around, and it even runs compiz without a hitch, so
far. I could be wrong, but I
feel that ditching some Gnome librariness has gotten out of XFCE's way.
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