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shodanshok
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Re: I needed a new distro

Thu Jan 02, 2014 6:39 pm

kc77 wrote:
Flatland_Spider wrote:
just brew it! wrote:
Seems to me this degree of customizability is more valuable on an embedded platform with limited RAM and/or mass storage. For modern desktops and servers the size of the OS on disk and the memory footprint of the kernel are largely irrelevant. Disk space and RAM have both gotten cheap enough that only people with OCD care.

OTOH, a rather high percentage of computer geeks *are* afflicted with OCD to varying degrees, so there you go I guess. :wink:


A glut of computing resources and how the optimizations only produce minimal performance gains have been arguments against compiling from source for a while.

It is a little OCD. I like knowing what switches my programs were compiled with, and it's nice to know I don't have stuff that I don't need to cause security holes. Less code is better.


GCC for a lot of the older archs is pretty damn good with just march=native but the newer archs can still show some pretty big gains, 25% or more is'nt uncommon. Here's a comparison done on my system.

Image
The top two are march=native. The bottom was compiled with this.

-O2 -pipe -march=bdver1 -mno-movbe -mno-fma -mno-bmi -mno-tbm --param l1-cache-size=16 --param l1-cache-line-size=64 --param l2-cache-size=2048 -mtune=bdver1


Here's another comparison with Apache.

Image

To say my machine appeared to be something else after making those adjustments during compile time would be an understatement. :D


Sure, some specific packages gain a big boost using specifically-tailored compiler options. However I really think that is overkill to custom-compile an entire distribution, even considering how too aggressive compiler setting can wreak havoc on some programs.

I used Gentoo for 3 years and I was very satisfied with the results, but now I am much more pleased to use a Fedora or Debian-derived distro and compiling the specific package that benefit from aggressive optimization ;)

Regards.
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shodanshok
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Re: I needed a new distro

Thu Jan 02, 2014 6:47 pm

kc77 wrote:
just brew it! wrote:
And try doing it on a UEFI motherboard sometime if you want an exercise in extreme frustration! :lol:

Remember the discussion about this months ago? All of my nightmares came true when some new Dell laptops came in with Secure Boot enabled. Installing Linux on that thing was like playing 11-dimensional Jenga.


Uff, the whole UEFI thing is really depressing at times...
Two month ago, I remotely installed a DELL R720XT w/UEFI boot, and I had problems:
- detecting an external USB CDROM reader
- after that, I decided to go with PXE boot, only to find that CentOS 6.4 minimal and netinstaller had problem with the specific DELL's UEFI BIOS (some file were placed in a wrong directory, CentOS 6.5 solved that)
- the UEFI-based RAID controller interface had a bug that prevent me to create two RAID10 array of very different size (256 GB and 3.0 TB, respectively. The second array was forced to 1.8 TB maximum)

Solution: switch to MBR based boot (albeit driven by the UEFI BIOS code) and press CTRL+R to configure the array in the dear, good, old way, via a text-based interface.

The secure-boot affair can only add to this frustration... but if you don't need Windows it can be disabled, right?
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kc77
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Re: I needed a new distro

Thu Jan 02, 2014 7:21 pm

shodanshok wrote:

Sure, some specific packages gain a big boost using specifically-tailored compiler options. However I really think that is overkill to custom-compile an entire distribution, even considering how too aggressive compiler setting can wreak havoc on some programs.

I used Gentoo for 3 years and I was very satisfied with the results, but now I am much more pleased to use a Fedora or Debian-derived distro and compiling the specific package that benefit from aggressive optimization ;)

Regards.


Oh I agree. I've tried Gentoo numerous times and while the speed increase is nice, it's a torturous road to get there. Certain packages are available in Gentoo others are not, etc. That's why I just add those flags to my bash so every time I open terminal and compile anything it's done with those flags. It's much easier to do that on an Ubuntu install then standing up Gentoo even if you forgo the speed improvements.
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jmcknight
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Re: I needed a new distro

Thu Jan 02, 2014 11:18 pm

kc77 wrote:
shodanshok wrote:

Sure, some specific packages gain a big boost using specifically-tailored compiler options. However I really think that is overkill to custom-compile an entire distribution, even considering how too aggressive compiler setting can wreak havoc on some programs.

I used Gentoo for 3 years and I was very satisfied with the results, but now I am much more pleased to use a Fedora or Debian-derived distro and compiling the specific package that benefit from aggressive optimization ;)

Regards.


Oh I agree. I've tried Gentoo numerous times and while the speed increase is nice, it's a torturous road to get there. Certain packages are available in Gentoo others are not, etc. That's why I just add those flags to my bash so every time I open terminal and compile anything it's done with those flags. It's much easier to do that on an Ubuntu install then standing up Gentoo even if you forgo the speed improvements.


I came from using Gentoo for almost 8 years (only ever did 2 installs of it in all that time -- fantastic!) but I got tired of the constant need to handhold it through major updates, expect breakage then time to fix it, some instability when having to unmask certain software that was either outdated or not ready for prime time. In the end I switched to openSUSE 12.3 almost a year ago and couldn't be happier. It has some of the benefits of enterprise, it's modern but not bleeding edge, and more importantly -- when I see that there's a major update it doesn't scare the hell out of me.
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Flatland_Spider
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Re: I needed a new distro

Sat Jan 04, 2014 2:05 am

jmcknight wrote:
While that's true, I don't get the motivation behind completely gutting that stuff from the installer. A near equally user-friendly distro (openSUSE) has all of this in perhaps the nicest graphical installer I've seen without it being daunting.


The OpenSUSE installer is kind daunting. It's very comprehensive, and it's easy to get into more advanced areas, which are just confusing for those who don't know what they're doing.

Anaconda, the RHEL/CentOS/SL/Fedora, installer strikes a good balance between advanced options and simplicity.

shodanshok wrote:
Uff, the whole UEFI thing is really depressing at times...


Especially since there is Coreboot.
 
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Re: I needed a new distro

Sat Jan 04, 2014 10:26 am

PenGun wrote:
Concupiscence wrote:
I've been using Xubuntu since early 2012 and have been pretty happy overall. But Ubuntu proper's making a series of decisions I find really distasteful, so I'm evaluating where to go next. God help me, I'm really thinking about Slackware64.

Good, come on in, leave that GUI nonsense behind, learn to curse.

I'm just kidding,the install is ncurses of course. The rest is ... well sorta up to you. Want to run as root, fill yer boots, it's your machine to use, or destroy if you want. She will do just what she is told, no backtalk, it's why I use Slackware.


I've been an on-again, off-again Slackware user for nine years. I've always admired its technical straightforwardness and speed, and for not foisting a bunch of distro-self-serving gunk onto its users. Slack's come a long way - SlackBuilds alone automates a ton of routine drudgery in source compilation and functionally turns it into package management - but part of me's still hesitant to make the jump. I think I just need to rip the bandaid off and get on with it.
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Re: I needed a new distro

Sun Feb 16, 2014 6:03 pm

After a few months of running openSUSE, I find myself back to CentOS 6. openSUSE is a great distro and I would still recommend it to people but personally, the little problems I did have with it became big ones that I either could no longer overlook or I couldn't be arsed to deal in workarounds anymore. Then there were things that just never worked at all that I've had no problems with in other distros.

I can't say anything about GNOME 3 that hasn't been said many times before, but with the proper extensions it's definitely usable. I just find that since switching back to CentOS 6 for desktop/workstation use, my workflow is back where it used to be and I've had no problems at all.

I've heard people say that CentOS is "boring" because it's not bleeding edge. While that's a fair assessment, that sort of review tells me that these people don't use Linux for anything remotely serious like having a job that depends on it. Sure, some aspects of it are old but when you require the utmost in stability and security, you tend to not mind. Plus with the addition of things like ElRepo, you get a crusty old GNOME 2.28 running on top of a 3.10 kernel or later.
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Re: I needed a new distro

Mon Feb 17, 2014 10:37 am

jmcknight wrote:
I've heard people say that CentOS is "boring" because it's not bleeding edge. While that's a fair assessment, that sort of review tells me that these people don't use Linux for anything remotely serious like having a job that depends on it. Sure, some aspects of it are old but when you require the utmost in stability and security, you tend to not mind. Plus with the addition of things like ElRepo, you get a crusty old GNOME 2.28 running on top of a 3.10 kernel or later.

The same criticism gets leveled at the official Debian releases as well. But Debian isn't meant to be bleeding edge, it is meant to be stable and reliable.

I've found Ubuntu to be a reasonable tradeoff if you want a Debian-derived distro that is more current. Ubuntu LTS releases tend to be a little more up-to-date than Debian Stable, and get 5 years of patch support; the non-LTS are pretty bleeding edge, with all the good and bad things that implies. The KDE release that got paired with 12.04 LTS had a few rough edges, but overall I find it quite usable; that's what I run (at home and work) now on systems I actually care about.
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jmcknight
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Re: I needed a new distro

Mon Feb 17, 2014 1:15 pm

just brew it! wrote:
jmcknight wrote:
I've heard people say that CentOS is "boring" because it's not bleeding edge. While that's a fair assessment, that sort of review tells me that these people don't use Linux for anything remotely serious like having a job that depends on it. Sure, some aspects of it are old but when you require the utmost in stability and security, you tend to not mind. Plus with the addition of things like ElRepo, you get a crusty old GNOME 2.28 running on top of a 3.10 kernel or later.

The same criticism gets leveled at the official Debian releases as well. But Debian isn't meant to be bleeding edge, it is meant to be stable and reliable.

I've found Ubuntu to be a reasonable tradeoff if you want a Debian-derived distro that is more current. Ubuntu LTS releases tend to be a little more up-to-date than Debian Stable, and get 5 years of patch support; the non-LTS are pretty bleeding edge, with all the good and bad things that implies. The KDE release that got paired with 12.04 LTS had a few rough edges, but overall I find it quite usable; that's what I run (at home and work) now on systems I actually care about.

Next to CentOS, I recommend Debian all the time to people. Between the 2 it really comes down to how you like things run in terms of packaging and init systems. Me personally, I prefer yum to apt and like the init system a little better in CentOS. I generally don't mind using an older GNOME 2.28.2 because my Linux use is more geared toward what enterprise offers. Sure, my screenshots don't look as pretty but as a serious Linux user, that's hardly important.
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Flatland_Spider
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Re: I needed a new distro

Mon Feb 17, 2014 1:17 pm

I like something Zach Holman from Github said in a presentation, "Your product should be cutting edge, not your tech," and "Stability is sexy." This makes sense. If the admins are fighting fires, they're not improving things, and going home at 5:00pm is underrated.

I'm willing to beta test stuff, but I'm not going to have my production environment be a beta test. If a company is producing a product, sure dog food your own stuff, but I'll pass on it.
 
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Re: I needed a new distro

Mon Feb 17, 2014 1:35 pm

Flatland_Spider wrote:
I'm willing to beta test stuff, but I'm not going to have my production environment be a beta test. If a company is producing a product, sure dog food your own stuff, but I'll pass on it.

...and this is why I pass on Fedora and the non-LTS Ubuntu releases these days, for any system I don't consider to be a pure "screw around" box.
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jmcknight
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Re: I needed a new distro

Mon Feb 17, 2014 2:20 pm

just brew it! wrote:
Flatland_Spider wrote:
I'm willing to beta test stuff, but I'm not going to have my production environment be a beta test. If a company is producing a product, sure dog food your own stuff, but I'll pass on it.

...and this is why I pass on Fedora and the non-LTS Ubuntu releases these days, for any system I don't consider to be a pure "screw around" box.

This is why I avoid Ubuntu as a whole and steer clear of Fedora. As a CentOS (and RHEL) user on the desktop/workstation level, I see Fedora as being nothing more than a working proof-of-concept that will hopefully one day be usable and stable. So by avoiding these distros it means at the end of the day I get work done without having to babysit and handhold my distro. CentOS (as well as Ubuntu LTS) tend to be those install-then-forget-about-it distros. This is more appealing to me than latest and greatest of everything at the expense of things not working or the overall experience sucking.
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Re: I needed a new distro

Mon Feb 17, 2014 2:57 pm

jmcknight wrote:
just brew it! wrote:
Flatland_Spider wrote:
I'm willing to beta test stuff, but I'm not going to have my production environment be a beta test. If a company is producing a product, sure dog food your own stuff, but I'll pass on it.

...and this is why I pass on Fedora and the non-LTS Ubuntu releases these days, for any system I don't consider to be a pure "screw around" box.

This is why I avoid Ubuntu as a whole and steer clear of Fedora. As a CentOS (and RHEL) user on the desktop/workstation level, I see Fedora as being nothing more than a working proof-of-concept that will hopefully one day be usable and stable. So by avoiding these distros it means at the end of the day I get work done without having to babysit and handhold my distro. CentOS (as well as Ubuntu LTS) tend to be those install-then-forget-about-it distros. This is more appealing to me than latest and greatest of everything at the expense of things not working or the overall experience sucking.

I look forward to everyones feedback of Trusty Tahr.
 
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Re: I needed a new distro

Mon Feb 17, 2014 3:02 pm

just brew it! wrote:
Flatland_Spider wrote:
I'm willing to beta test stuff, but I'm not going to have my production environment be a beta test. If a company is producing a product, sure dog food your own stuff, but I'll pass on it.

...and this is why I pass on Fedora and the non-LTS Ubuntu releases these days, for any system I don't consider to be a pure "screw around" box.


I've been installing the latest versions of Mint as they arrive on my work laptop. That's probably not the most "stable" thing to do, but frankly I only use the laptop to RDP into my workstation in the office, so if something goes amiss I just re-install the OS in a few minutes.

I've been using the Cinnamon interface. I tried KDE for a while and didn't care for it - it looks nice, but I can never find anything :roll:
 
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Re: I needed a new distro

Mon Feb 17, 2014 3:18 pm

cphite wrote:
I tried KDE for a while and didn't care for it - it looks nice, but I can never find anything :roll:

I create extra panels on the left and top edges of the screen and put launchers for all the applications I use regularly on 'em. They don't take up much space, and pretty much everything I need is just a single click away. My main beef with KDE is that it is a bit of a resource pig, but I've got 16GB of RAM so... *shrug*.
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jmcknight
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Re: I needed a new distro

Mon Feb 17, 2014 5:21 pm

Over the many years I've been using Linux, I've given KDE a serious go and have yet to find a use for it as my day-to-day workstation DE. I love its features and love the way it's developed versus GNOME, but from a usability standpoint I just don't find myself to have good workflow with it without requiring a lot of tweaking. As a CentOS user who will have the bite the bullet and use GNOME 3 again like I previously did with openSUSE, I'm hoping this makes it feasible for me to use a QT based environment: http://www.maui-project.org/
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Re: I needed a new distro

Mon Feb 17, 2014 8:36 pm

I was a very satisfied GNOME 2 user. Decided to give KDE a serious go a little over a year ago. There are still a few things I find mildly aggravating about it, but there are tweaks and workarounds for what I consider to be the egregious stuff, so I guess you could say KDE and I have made peace with each other. :wink:
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jmcknight
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Re: I needed a new distro

Mon Feb 17, 2014 9:17 pm

just brew it! wrote:
I was a very satisfied GNOME 2 user. Decided to give KDE a serious go a little over a year ago. There are still a few things I find mildly aggravating about it, but there are tweaks and workarounds for what I consider to be the egregious stuff, so I guess you could say KDE and I have made peace with each other. :wink:

Damnit -- now I want to give it another try. Any recommendations on where to start? openSUSE seems to roll a nice KDE and the last time I tried it in Debian Wheezy it was really nice and I had no problems with it. I think I'd like it a lot more if I could really force myself to use it much in the same way as I did with GNOME 3 in openSUSE.
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Forge
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Re: I needed a new distro

Mon Feb 17, 2014 10:41 pm

Why not XFCE? It has pretty good gnome integration, too, so you can keep the gnome utils with a nice non-tablet interface.
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jmcknight
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Re: I needed a new distro

Mon Feb 17, 2014 11:54 pm

Forge wrote:
Why not XFCE? It has pretty good gnome integration, too, so you can keep the gnome utils with a nice non-tablet interface.

XFCE is great but I find there to be some visual inconsistencies since most newer things these days use GTK3 where XFCE still uses GTK2 and not all newer themes provide a GTK2 version.
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Re: I needed a new distro

Tue Feb 18, 2014 1:36 am

jmcknight wrote:
Damnit -- now I want to give it another try. Any recommendations on where to start? openSUSE seems to roll a nice KDE and the last time I tried it in Debian Wheezy it was really nice and I had no problems with it. I think I'd like it a lot more if I could really force myself to use it much in the same way as I did with GNOME 3 in openSUSE.

Debian is probably your best bet; a friend and former co-worker has been using KDE on Debian for many years and swears by it. I'm running Kubuntu 12.04 LTS; I've been on Ubuntu since 8.04 so it was the path of least resistance. I haven't used SUSE in quite some time, but they used to have the reputation of being one of the best (if not *the* best) KDE distros.

A few of my KDE tweaks...
- Enable "double click to open" to make mouse behavior more consistent with GNOME and Windows.
- Add panels top and left, resize them so they are smaller than default size, and put icons on them to launch frequently used applications.
- Move desktop switcher and clock to top panel to free up more space on bottom panel for task manager buttons.
- Expand number of virtual desktops to 10.
- Assign global hotkeys for direct access to each virtual desktop, and to send current window directly to another virtual desktop.
- Disable automatic reopening of previously open apps on login.
- Install alternative terminal app (I'm currently using terminator, as gnome-terminal has a weird incompatibility with KDE).
- Install alternative calculator app (I'm currently using galculator).
- Install chromium-browser, and set as the default web browser; create ~/bin/chromium-browser script, with the command "NO_CHROME_KDE_FILE_DIALOG=1 /usr/bin/chromium-browser $@" in it (works around weird incompatibility between Chrome/Chromium and KDE).
- Install audacious (simple, clean music player with a skin for "classic Winamp" look and feel).
- Enable KXStudio repository, install JACK audio stack and related tools from there.
(Those last 2 aren't really KDE specific; I was doing those on GNOME too.)
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jmcknight
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Re: I needed a new distro

Tue Feb 18, 2014 2:23 am

just brew it! wrote:
jmcknight wrote:
Damnit -- now I want to give it another try. Any recommendations on where to start? openSUSE seems to roll a nice KDE and the last time I tried it in Debian Wheezy it was really nice and I had no problems with it. I think I'd like it a lot more if I could really force myself to use it much in the same way as I did with GNOME 3 in openSUSE.

Debian is probably your best bet; a friend and former co-worker has been using KDE on Debian for many years and swears by it. I'm running Kubuntu 12.04 LTS; I've been on Ubuntu since 8.04 so it was the path of least resistance. I haven't used SUSE in quite some time, but they used to have the reputation of being one of the best (if not *the* best) KDE distros.

A few of my KDE tweaks...
- Enable "double click to open" to make mouse behavior more consistent with GNOME and Windows.
- Add panels top and left, resize them so they are smaller than default size, and put icons on them to launch frequently used applications.
- Move desktop switcher and clock to top panel to free up more space on bottom panel for task manager buttons.
- Expand number of virtual desktops to 10.
- Assign global hotkeys for direct access to each virtual desktop, and to send current window directly to another virtual desktop.
- Disable automatic reopening of previously open apps on login.
- Install alternative terminal app (I'm currently using terminator, as gnome-terminal has a weird incompatibility with KDE).
- Install alternative calculator app (I'm currently using galculator).
- Install chromium-browser, and set as the default web browser; create ~/bin/chromium-browser script, with the command "NO_CHROME_KDE_FILE_DIALOG=1 /usr/bin/chromium-browser $@" in it (works around weird incompatibility between Chrome/Chromium and KDE).
- Install audacious (simple, clean music player with a skin for "classic Winamp" look and feel).
- Enable KXStudio repository, install JACK audio stack and related tools from there.
(Those last 2 aren't really KDE specific; I was doing those on GNOME too.)

Oh wow, more tips than I was expecting. Thanks a bunch, I will definitely give this a go in a virtual machine.

How well does KDE integrate with PulseAudio? While not a requirement, I rather enjoy the ease of use in switching audio devices (primarily between onboard sound and HDMI out to TV). I previously did this via a bash script that changed a few settings in .asoundrc but if a KDE front end for this exists, that would be stellar.
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Re: I needed a new distro

Tue Feb 18, 2014 2:58 am

jmcknight wrote:
How well does KDE integrate with PulseAudio? While not a requirement, I rather enjoy the ease of use in switching audio devices (primarily between onboard sound and HDMI out to TV). I previously did this via a bash script that changed a few settings in .asoundrc but if a KDE front end for this exists, that would be stellar.

KDE does use PulseAudio as its native audio stack, though it does not seem to expose much of the PulseAudio control interface by default (or maybe I just haven't found it in the twisty little maze of KDE system settings menus). However, there's nothing stopping you from installing the various PulseAudio tools (e.g. pavucontrol) if you want, and your .asoundrc-munging script should still work since it is messing with the ALSA layer, which sits underneath everything regardless. (ALSA isn't part of PulseAudio, it operates at a lower level; think of it as Linux's soundcard driver and low-level audio API subsystem.)

Caveat: I may not be the best person to answer questions about PulseAudio, as I consider it to be a necessary evil and treat it accordingly. As hinted at in the last item on my tips list above, my Linux audio setup is anything but normal. In a nutshell, I insert the entire JACK audio stack in between PulseAudio and ALSA, and use JACK to handle most of the routing and control, treating PulseAudio as just another JACK signal source. I've been doing it this way since before I switched to KDE...
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Flatland_Spider
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Re: I needed a new distro

Tue Feb 18, 2014 9:16 am

jmcknight wrote:
Damnit -- now I want to give it another try. Any recommendations on where to start? openSUSE seems to roll a nice KDE and the last time I tried it in Debian Wheezy it was really nice and I had no problems with it. I think I'd like it a lot more if I could really force myself to use it much in the same way as I did with GNOME 3 in openSUSE.


OpenSUSE then Fedora.

OpenSUSE has the best KDE implementation out there. KDE is Suse's main DE, so it should be good.

KDE on Fedora amazingly is quite good. If I'm going to run a fat DE on my desktops, it's going to be KDE on Fedora.

Keep in mind KDE is heavily dependent on the video driver. If the video driver is bad, the user experience is going to be bad.

The visual inconsistencies in Xfce come from Gnome apps. They are reading the Gnome settings, and applying the visual style from those settings rather then the Xfce settings.
 
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Re: I needed a new distro

Tue Feb 18, 2014 9:53 am

Flatland_Spider wrote:
KDE on Fedora amazingly is quite good. If I'm going to run a fat DE on my desktops, it's going to be KDE on Fedora.

My issues with Fedora are that it often seems half-baked, and the support cycles are too short. Some people are willing to put up with that to get bleeding edge features; I'm not (at least, not on my primary desktop).
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cphite
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Re: I needed a new distro

Tue Feb 18, 2014 11:24 am

jmcknight wrote:
Forge wrote:
Why not XFCE? It has pretty good gnome integration, too, so you can keep the gnome utils with a nice non-tablet interface.

XFCE is great but I find there to be some visual inconsistencies since most newer things these days use GTK3 where XFCE still uses GTK2 and not all newer themes provide a GTK2 version.


I have Mint XFCE on an older laptop. It runs fast and seems pretty stable, but the look and feel seems... incomplete? Inconsistent? Various windows and popups have different styles, etc. It works, but it just doesn't seem "done" to me, if that makes any sense.
 
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Re: I needed a new distro

Tue Feb 18, 2014 6:18 pm

cphite wrote:
jmcknight wrote:
Forge wrote:
Why not XFCE? It has pretty good gnome integration, too, so you can keep the gnome utils with a nice non-tablet interface.

XFCE is great but I find there to be some visual inconsistencies since most newer things these days use GTK3 where XFCE still uses GTK2 and not all newer themes provide a GTK2 version.


I have Mint XFCE on an older laptop. It runs fast and seems pretty stable, but the look and feel seems... incomplete? Inconsistent? Various windows and popups have different styles, etc. It works, but it just doesn't seem "done" to me, if that makes any sense.


What you describe was mentioned previously. XFCE is still using GTK 2.X, and apps that have been updated for Gnome3 use GTK 3.X, which has a different theming engine.
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bthylafh
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Re: I needed a new distro

Tue Feb 18, 2014 8:07 pm

I was bored and decided to give Arch another chance. That lasted about fifteen minutes once I started going down the list of how to install completely manually. Partitioning is no big deal, nor mkfs or installing the bootstrap packages, but once I got to setting up grub manually I decided I wasn't that bored.
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Re: I needed a new distro

Tue Feb 18, 2014 9:23 pm

Forge wrote:

What you describe was mentioned previously. XFCE is still using GTK 2.X, and apps that have been updated for Gnome3 use GTK 3.X, which has a different theming engine.


Only so much of it is because of GTK3 incompatibility. XFCE in default form looks horrible. Even Gnome 2 without theming engines looks horrible. This is where Ubuntu came in back in the day because in the beginning Canonical spent A LOT of time on theming and font work. G2 under Ubuntu looked better than just about anything else not too long ago. Can't say that now, but then it was heads and shoulders above the G2 default look.

With regards to KDE I've tried it many times but it still frustrates me because of the simple things it gets wrong.
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Flatland_Spider
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Re: I needed a new distro

Tue Feb 18, 2014 9:27 pm

Yeah, the old Arch installer was better. The amount of work to get a base system installed is what keeps me from really getting into Arch (now) and Gentoo. All I want an installer to do is setup a network interface, partition my hard drive, and install a base system image.

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