I've finally snapped
in [UK Linux]
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From: chris on 4 Sep 2008 04:41 Chris Whelan wrote: > Geoffrey Clements wrote: >> I'm looking at Mepis but can't quite work out if I need to pay to get the >> full distro. plus it seems to have only a few people working on it. > [ snip good Mepis description ] > If you have the time and resource, why not try it live? > I have to agree with everything Chris has said. I've been using Mepis as my only distro at home for the past 2.5 years, with no breakages at all. Some minor annoyances, but it all works. The best bit is all the fiddly things like; flash, acroread, nvidia, printer drivers ;) are all included by default. It is not payware, which is partly why Warren has had to go back to the day job recently as Mepis wasn't paying the bills. www.mepis.com has a list of mirrors where you can get it. It isn't the most cutting edge and development is slow, but it has (almost) everything you need and being based on Debian has access to a huge repository. For more cutting edge features, people have moved Mepis to the testing repos with success. The www.mepislovers.com forum is great BTW. Other KDE based distros that are getting good write-ups at the moment are SUSE and Mandriva.
From: Chris Davies on 4 Sep 2008 04:18 Geoffrey Clements <bitbucket(a)electron.me.uk> wrote: > So I'm on the lookout for another distro. for the desktop. [...] > I use Debian stable on my server so I'm thinking of using Testing but > I'm not sure how to cope with getting all the non-free stuff such as > NVidia drivers, Skype, Flash and so on. I use Debian (Testing) on my laptop, and have done for a few years. Skype works well apart from my OV11-based webcam (known fault). It has information about a repository at http://wiki.debian.org/skype. Flash works fine as installed from the standard(?) repositories. IMO stay away from swfdec as it doesn't play at all with Firefox/Iceweasel flashblock, and besides it refuses to play flash unless you explicitly click on it. Each time I upgrade something to do with video I re-run a natty utility I found on the web "sgfxi" that makes my NVidia graphics work again. (It's /so/ tempting to put it into the "make a new kernel" script, but I just haven't got round to trying that, yet). The www.debian-multimedia.org repository provides all the non-free mplayer (and, er, DeCSS) stuff so I'm not short of codecs, either. Oh, and Sun java installs (indirectly) via a standard package, too. I have a /etc/apt/preferences file that forces my system to prefer testing but to allow me to install specific versions of a package from any of stable, unstable, experimental, or volatile. I very briefly tried [XKU]buntu but I didn't like its single new user philosophy. I'm sure I could kick it, since it's based on Debian, but frankly I'd prefer to have a distribution that lets me play my way from the off. Hope that helps. Chris
From: David Mitchell on 4 Sep 2008 05:27 On Wed, 03 Sep 2008 21:23:32 +0100, Geoffrey Clements wrote: > I know there are lots of other distros. perhaps too many. If anyone > cares to share some thoughts I'd be grateful, ta! Until I switched to Ubuntu (because of its wonderful hardware detection) I'd tried Slackware and SuSE. SuSE is very KDE oriented, and has always worked well for me. -- ======================================================================= = David --- If you use Microsoft products, you will, inevitably, get = Mitchell --- viruses, so please don't add me to your address book. =======================================================================
From: Nick Kew on 4 Sep 2008 06:00 On Wed, 03 Sep 2008 21:23:32 +0100 Geoffrey Clements <bitbucket(a)electron.me.uk> wrote: > [K]Ubuntu well, err, not sure if I want that - it seems to be aimed at > people new to Linux. I made the move to ubuntu about two years ago, having been a Linux user since '96 and Unix since '87 (both dates from memory). I'm happy with it. -- Nick Kew Application Development with Apache - the Apache Modules Book http://www.apachetutor.org/
From: Daniel James on 4 Sep 2008 10:04
In article news:<s6i4p5xkba.ln2(a)news.roaima.co.uk>, Chris Davies wrote: > ... it refuses to play flash unless you explicitly click on > it ... That's a plus ... > I very briefly tried [XKU]buntu but I didn't like its single new user > philosophy. I'm sure I could kick it, since it's based on Debian, but > frankly I'd prefer to have a distribution that lets me play my way > from the off. Quite! Cheers, Daniel. |