From: Geoffrey Clements on
That's it, after 5 years me and Gentoo are parting ways. It's now the third
time something has stopped working just when I need it. This time the
printer, working one day and not the next. What did I do in-between? I
recompiled the kernel to support autofs (this was an incremental compile),
installed the autofs userspace tools and after that the printer, sound
_and_ desktop notifications have all stopped working. Weird.

So I'm on the lookout for another distro. for the desktop. I'm used to KDE
so I want something orientated to KDE also I prefer deb based package
management over rpm (I think I'm allowed to have at least one package-ist
attitude at my age plus I'm feeling crotchety at the moment). 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'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.

[K]Ubuntu well, err, not sure if I want that - it seems to be aimed at
people new to Linux.

I know there are lots of other distros. perhaps too many. If anyone cares to
share some thoughts I'd be grateful, ta!

--
Geoff Registered Linux user 196308
Replace bitbucket with geoff to mail me.
From: Chris Whelan on
Geoffrey Clements wrote:

> That's it, after 5 years me and Gentoo are parting ways. It's now the
> third time something has stopped working just when I need it. This time
> the printer, working one day and not the next. What did I do in-between? I
> recompiled the kernel to support autofs (this was an incremental compile),
> installed the autofs userspace tools and after that the printer, sound
> _and_ desktop notifications have all stopped working. Weird.
>
> So I'm on the lookout for another distro. for the desktop. I'm used to KDE
> so I want something orientated to KDE also I prefer deb based package
> management over rpm (I think I'm allowed to have at least one package-ist
> attitude at my age plus I'm feeling crotchety at the moment). 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'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.

Before I read this far, I was thinking that I should suggest Mepis. (You
don't have to pay.)

It is primarily the work of one person, (Warren Woodford), which is both
good and bad!

Warren is a genius; of that there is no doubt. He tends to not want to
involve himself fully with the small but competent community that has
sprung up unbidden around him.

Mepis is, IME, very stable; it also has the best hardware support of any
distro I have used. It has good, out of the box support for closed source
graphics drivers, Skype, Flash, and all the other things real people
want.It is most certainly not cutting edge, and this can be an annoyance to
some. I often try two or three distributions a week, but always come back
to Mepis.

The current version is 7.0; this was released at the end of 2007, so is
ancient by the standards of some distros! Version 8.0 Beta 1 was released
last week. I haven't managed to break it so far.

If you have the time and resource, why not try it live?

Chris

--
Remove prejudice to reply.
From: Ben Bacarisse on
Geoffrey Clements <bitbucket(a)electron.me.uk> writes:

> That's it, after 5 years me and Gentoo are parting ways.
<snip>
> So I'm on the lookout for another distro.
<snip>
> [K]Ubuntu well, err, not sure if I want that - it seems to be aimed at
> people new to Linux.

That is the aim, yes, but I am long-standing Linux user and find it
quite acceptable. Open a terminal and off you go!

> I know there are lots of other distros. perhaps too many. If anyone cares to
> share some thoughts I'd be grateful, ta!

A key issue would be how up-to-date you want things to be. Ubuntu is
quite good for this (if you trust tracking their twice-yearly update
schedule) but because it takes .deb packages I can add in repositories
to get bleeding edge (well, nearly) emacs.

--
Ben.
From: Glyn Millington on
Geoffrey Clements <bitbucket(a)electron.me.uk> writes:

> So I'm on the lookout for another distro. for the desktop. I'm used to KDE
> so I want something orientated to KDE also I prefer deb based package
> management over rpm (I think I'm allowed to have at least one package-ist
> attitude at my age plus I'm feeling crotchety at the moment).

Well Slackware is a good solid set-up; and those things which don't come
on the CDs you can find at


http://slackbuilds.org


atb








Glyn
From: Hannes Schaardt on
Hello Geoffrey,

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!

I can recommend sidux[1]. It's a small and fast Debian/sid based distro
supporting KDE and XFCE with a very active community.

[1] http://www.sidux.com
--
Hannes