Ubuntu Hardy Heron
So, I installed Ubuntu 8.04 today (with a lot of trouble. Seems there's quite a serious bug in boot camp which causes a kernel panic if you try to partition your drive). Once I got it running, I had to do a fair bit of tweaking (Heron breaks the drivers for sound and brightness), but now it's up and running and going quite well.
This version has a lot of polish that the others just seemed to be lacking, which is of course important. It just feels a lot more mainstream and quite satisfying to use.
If you use Linux upgrade to it. If you don't and you use windows, you can now install it in a similar way to BeOS, as a program within windows at the slight expense of disk access speed.
Overall, I'd give it 8/10
This version has a lot of polish that the others just seemed to be lacking, which is of course important. It just feels a lot more mainstream and quite satisfying to use.
If you use Linux upgrade to it. If you don't and you use windows, you can now install it in a similar way to BeOS, as a program within windows at the slight expense of disk access speed.
Overall, I'd give it 8/10
Comments
It comes bundled with firefox 3 beta, which has shit compatibility for extensions still.
I can't log out, whenever I do I just get a black screen.
Oh, and I went to turn my computer on earlier, the hard drive my OS is installed two isn't showing up at boot.
So, at the moment, I regret upgrading.
Compiz Fusion seems to have stopped doing its title-bar glitch, too, which is nice.
AICMFP.
Or, I could just try teenpup 2008, I hear it's extremely user friendly.
The thing is, while I have some measure of computer ability, these sorts of things frustrate me to no end and I really have no desire to really delve into any OS and learn how things work. I'm an end-user, I don't care about that shit, it annoys me.
Anyway, I've long since learned to keep all my files on a completely separate hard drive, so I can afford to be a little picky regarding my OS if I want to.
Only reason I'm still using Windows (again, frustrating!) is because wine, while making leaps and bounds forward, still sucks and won't run things I want to use, like most games and the latest version of Photoshop. I hope ReactOS makes some major strides, I'd probably use the hell out of it if it ends up doing what they say it does consistently.
You ever use CentOS? FreeBSD? Puppy? I need like, reviews of this stuff.
I haven't tried Mandriva but I tend to be wary of any RPM-based distribution due to some bad experiences with Red Hat way back when. I've heard that they've implemented things like automatic dependency resolution now which removes my main problem with the format but still, give me DEB or give me death. Or Portage. Portage is also cool, although it can get annoying at first when you have to compile all the basic stuff you need to have a useful system.
Basically, long story short, I use Ubuntu, I like Ubuntu, and I have no plans on switching away from Ubuntu any time soon, but if you've got a computer to play around with it can't hurt to try a few other distros to find something that might suit your needs a bit better.
I remember in 2001 a company sold commercial copies of Linux called "Lindows" which was touted as running windows software without the security risks and looking like Windows. It was just a debian base with a custom KDE theme and wine pre-installed.
What's the deal with kubuntu and xubuntu? Just different desktop environments? What's the difference?
KDE is more customisable and feature-rich than Gnome (regular Ubuntu's desktop environment) but is also very cluttered and "flashy." Basically they crammed any neat thing they could think of into the environment without really worrying about making things in any way elegant.
XFCE is not as full-featured as either Gnome or KDE but it takes far fewer resources and runs well on older, less powerful computers.
Still, you can install any environment on any version of Ubuntu. It's just a matter of which one is the default.
It's got 9/10 now. New update which fixed brightness control.
EDIT: You mught find this useful.