(March 10, 2009 at 9:12 am)Kyuuketsuki Wrote: Off hand I don't know, can't remember ... I just didn't like it much (not saying for one moment this about a rational evaluation).
Not really confused, I just didn't get it ... how can I explain that? I get KDE because it appears to have been designed (at least superficially) to grab the attention of Windows users. I don't like Gnome much even though (ironically) I'll configure my Windows desktop to have many characteristics of the Gnome on. In the end it was just one of those distro's I looked at and went, "Meh!"
I like Gnome because it is simple. You have all the applications in the "Applications" menu, all your places/bookmarks in the "Places" menu, and system settings in the "System" menu. You can add multiple panels and customize them easily with applets. What I like most about Gnome is that it will always try to keep a system stable, and it won't release new upgrades that it hasn't properly tested. The KDE devs released 4.0 as a full release when it wasn't even properly tested, and since then they have rewritten massive sections of the code from scratch, introducing new bugs. KDE will take time to get back on track, and when they do I hope they produce a good system, but for now it is a complete mess.
Quote:Compiz (esp. Fusion) looks shiny. Might install it on SuSE if I ever build one of those again (not easy as my cellar is such a mess and I'm migrating to virtual machines). I like KDE 4, I was stopped from investigating it in depth because my hardware would constantly lockup ... I assumed that was a Linux specific distro flaw (OpenSuSE).
I suspect the lockup was either due to KDE or compiz (if you have it installed). The Ubuntu devs have made a lot of adjustments to compiz to ensure it doesn't crash as often as it did, and on my Gentoo install it hardly crashes at all due to it being compiled for the system. Of course during a lockup you could simply press Ctrl + Alt + F1 and bring up the text based view, login, and then kill compiz
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Quote:Uggh! I hate Red Hat/Fedora, have done ever since they did that BlueCurve desktop thing. Don't like RPM based installs either ... what package management system do the Unbuntu series use?
Amen to that. Ubuntu is a Debian based distribution, so it uses the far superior "apt" package manager. The Gentoo default is portage but I prefer paludis
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Quote:I know a lot of Linux bits, but none of it makes sense to me in a *whole* fashion ... this may be because Linux is "designed" by many different individuals or it may be I'm a brain-damaged Windows techy. Dunno.
I used to be a Windows techy as well, and I probably had the same view of Linux as you did. I thought it was ok, had tried it a few times, but nothing had stuck. It was only when I started a CS degree and started using it on servers that I finally saw the value of the system, and the awesome amount of power it has. Having complete control over your system with such a powerful shell (I use zsh) is just too irresistible, as well as the other features like the ext file systems, which is the main reason why Linux doesn't need disk defragmentors. Quoth wikipedia:
Wikipedia Wrote:Modern Linux filesystem(s) keep fragmentation at a minimum by keeping all blocks in a file close together, even if they can't be stored in consecutive sectors. Some filesystems, like ext3, effectively allocate the free block that is nearest to other blocks in a file. Therefore it is not necessary to worry about fragmentation in a Linux system.
