On Sunday, August 19, 2012 13:23:19, Mark Wallace wrote:
> What it is reallly saying is that the non-tech end users have rejected
> Unity. All of the other desktops can be configured to be fullly GUI
> operational and can be configured to taste. Even the Gnome 2.33 users
> have rejected Unity, sticking with old distros or going to other GTK
> based desktops.
That's not my personal conclusion, because Unity wasn't listed at all in the
survey from the year before. It's hard to take a transition of 0% -> 5% and
claim that to be an outright rejection. ;-)
Now -- that said, I recently took some time and tried out out the top 25 free
software distributions [as measured by distrowatch.com] and got to try Unity
on Ubuntu 12.04 in a VirtualBox VM, and I didn't immediately enjoy it. My
main issue was that it was 3D which made it suck to run in a VM -- I could
probably learn to tolerate it otherwise. [Things I remembered from Sean's
talk on Unity during the March "Desktop Shootout" helped.]
A brief list of findings from my 25 distro look:
[Distros with a "*" below are Debian derivatives.]
Distros I liked: *Mint Debian 201204 (with Xfce), Fedora 17, OpenSuSE 12.1
(with KDE4, surprisingly pleasant), *Debian [Squeeze, Wheezy, Sid] (changing
the default GUI at install time to either Xfce, KDE, or LXDE), Arch Linux
2012-08-04 (package installs are /super/ fast, but there's no graphical
installer, sound didn't work, and I had some issues finding the correct
instructions for installing Grub2 -- the "Beginners Guide" has it correct),
*Pear Linux 5 (humorous -- looks and acts like Mac OS X), *Snowlinux 2 "Ice",
Vector Linux 7.0 (based on Slackware but has a graphical installer and what
appears to be "real package management" -- nice), and *Knoppix 7.03 on DVD.
Distros I didn't like: *Ubuntu 12.04 (3D, Unity, Gnome3), Mageia 2 (no working
sound in the VM, found it quirky), *PCLinuxOS (when I have to look at
/etc/apt/sources.list because of a problem and I find only "rpm" lines there,
something is wrong twice-over), *Ultimate 3.4 ("3D to the max" for every login
option, causing it to repeatedly crash the video in the VM), Gentoo 12.1
(install via LiveCD. Base install + base KDE 4.8 was a full 3 day compile,
which includes time figuring out repeated dependency issues with emerge which
lead to using options 'emerge --newuse --update --deep <meta_pacakge_name>'.
After all that, couldn't get X to start.), Fuduntu 2012.3 (IIRC I didn't like
the graphical software installer), *SolusOS Eveline 1.1 (IIRC I didn't like
the graphical software installer.)
Distros that I tried, found tolerable, but otherwise didn't comment on above:
*Linux Mint 13 (with Cinnamon), CentOS 6.3, Slaco Puppy 5.3.3, *Lucid Puppy
5.2.8, Lubuntu 12.04, Sabayon Linux 9 (sound didn't work), *Zorin OS 6,
*Bodhi Linux 2.0.1 (sound didn't work), FreeBSD 9 (barebones, no X, didn't
find instructions to install X and other software), Chakra GNU/Linux 2012.07,
*Snowlinux 2 "Cream", *Crunchbang 10, *Crunchbang 10 BPO.
> Although KDE had some tough times when 4.0 came out, they have done a
> great job of tightening it up and now it is less buggy than Windows 7,
> although still kind of over engineered.
Mostly I agree. KDE 4.8 comes with a printer applet finally, BTW.
-- Chris
--
Chris Knadle
[email protected]
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