On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 12:11:51PM -0400, Mark Warner wrote:
> Take this for what it's worth, from a barely competent desktop user that
> doesn't know beans about back end/server stuff:
Every Linux user started out there once. When I started, I knew a
handful of VI commands, ls, man, cd and really very little else. I
started out with a book and bundled Slackware CD.
I don't think I had even tried out Debian until I had ordered
a 4 CD bundle from Yggdrasil Computing. That was a great company
when the 'net was young and bandwidth was limited to dial-up for
most folks.
> Ubuntu is a fine distro, and Hardy is a fine version, but it's not my
> cup of tea. For me, it's too "Windowsy" at the level of the stock GUI.
> Seems like it gets in the way of doing things the way I'd like, at least
> in it's default configuration. That very well may be more of a Gnome
> thing than an Ubuntu thing. I admit to being partial to KDE. And while
> Kubuntu is more to my liking, it just doesn't turn my crank (how's that
> for an empirical assessment?).
I understand your distaste for GNOME. I was working at an OS company
that had an entire fully functional internet-driven operating system
in 16 MB when the GNOME folks were partying because one of their
libraries just hit the 16M mark. I had trouble using a product that
would celebrate bloat.
Kubuntu is the official KDE-based edition of Ubuntu. After finally
getting tired of things not working as expected in GNOME, I went back to
KDE. (I was using KDE before I started work at my current employer. I
had tried moving to GNOME as it was more popular around my workplace.)
Being a KDE fan, you may want to try one of the Kubuntu-KDE4 live CDs,
just to get a taste of what is to come in KDE4.
If MEPIS starts following the Debian time-lines, you may get tired of
waiting for the next release. Debian has this issue in part because
few Debian users actually *use* the stable branch. This was the major
reason I started looking at other distributions, back before I settled
on Kubuntu.
With regards to just changing the look of a KDE system, a lot can be
said for a nice set of custom icons. (The Oxygen set included with KDE4
look nice, too.) I'm glad KDE4 is bringing improved SVG support, as that
makes many of the icons much easier to have with flexable sizing. It
also makes for some nice flexably-sized background images.
> MEPIS 7 has been out for some time, and is now sitting atop a Debian
> Etch/stable code base. Other than installing and tweaking a few
> packages, the transition will entail nothing more than installing,
> updating, editing fstab to point to my /home, and making it my default
> boot in menu.lst -- a forty minute operation at most. But that's not
> gonna happen for a while -- I don't need the latest and greatest, and my
> current OS ain't broke and doesn't need fixin'.
Having it sit atop a Debian base gives you access to a lot of packages.
If you really want to see some things that don't look like Windows,
there are a number of neat light-weight window managers available at
this point. As they're just Window Managers, and perhaps a supporting
application or two, you can have these installed along-side KDE with no
problems. (They take up some disc space, but not much.) Just select a
different session when you log in.
I'm really a much better fit for one of the lighter-weight window
managers. Frankly, I'm surprised I bother using X most of the time. I
spend all my spare time in a large font Xterm with screen running.
At some point, one of my projects is to write a window manager of my
own. I have an idea I'd like to play with with regards to it... Of
course, one of my other projects is to write a terminal emulator of my
own... and I'm more likely to finish the terminal emulator first.
Cheers,
Steven Black
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