On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 9:14 AM, David L. Johnson <david.john...@lehigh.edu> wrote: > On 02/18/2012 10:56 PM, Les Denham wrote: >> >> >> Firstly, the version of Linux is not all that important. I've had good >> experiences with Ubuntu in the past, but thanks to some idiotic (in my >> opinion) decisions recently by the maintainers of both Gnome and KDE >> and by Ubuntu for its default desktop, I've given up on Ubuntu, Gnome, >> and KDE, all three of which I have used happily in the past. For the >> average user now I would recommend Linux Mint (which just works even >> more smoothly than Ubuntu) and, for those willing to learn a little or a >> lot about what is behind the pretty windows, either Sabayon or Gentoo. >> Whichever distro you choose, change the window manager to XFCE or LXDE. > > > Amen to that. Gnome has, IMNSHO, shot themselves in the foot with a bloated > interface that doesn't work on a lot of hardware with their version 3. For > that reason, you do need to be careful to not use a distribution that only > uses Gnome. It was a long annoying process for me to switch over after an > upgrade dumped me into Gnome 3. Xfce is fine, though, so and distribution > that allows you to choose will be good. Frankly, I don't know what Kde did, > but my advice is to avoid Gnome. >
This is starting to be more and more off-topic, but here are my 2 cents on distros: I'm very happy with KDE and have been using it since version 3.4. However, Kubuntu (Kde-based ubuntu distribution) is terrible and will probably get worse now that Canonical has moved the only fully paid maintainer to other projects. By "terrible" i mean that the twice yearly major upgrades would routinely break my X11 setup, which meant manually tweaking the xorg.conf file every time. Definitely not fun (http://xkcd.com/963/ pretty much describes my life under kubuntu). Switching to Archlinux solved all my problems, however. Kde is rock-solid and fast (even on not so recent hardware). I never had any problems Stefano > -- > > David L. Johnson > > When you are up to your ass in alligators, it's hard to remember that > your initial objective was to drain the swamp. > -- LBJ > -- __________________________________________________ Stefano Franchi Associate Research Professor Department of Hispanic Studies Ph: +1 (979) 845-2125 Texas A&M University Fax: +1 (979) 845-6421 College Station, Texas, USA stef...@tamu.edu http://stefano.cleinias.org
