Reply inline below, only the areas where I feel I have a solid answer. On 3/10/06, Tarus Balog <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > 1) What should I look at in terms of a nice, clean, powerful desktop? > I like KDE. Is there a distro out there that is stable enough to use > in a mission critical application (i.e. my desktop) that is current > enough to contain lots of cool, bright, shiny things? I think Debian > is out since I don't want to run sid. CentOS? Ubuntu? I doubt anyone > has duplicated the usefulness of Exposé, but one can hope.
I run CentOS 4.2 at home and at work for desktop use. I'm quite happy with it. It's not got the latest bleeding edge stuff in it but I don't have to upgrade every six months either. Simply adding Dag Wieer's yum repository to your yum configuration will get you a lot of nice stuff that is missing from CentOS (and by extension RHEL) For the desktop I prefer KDE and have been using it since almost the beginning of the project. But when I'm in the mood for trying something new, I'll often log out and log back in with Xfce as my desktop instead. Xfce loads almost instantly on my AMD64 3700+ but KDE still takes awhile. Xfce is very snappy, very easy to use, and I really don't have a good excuse for not switching over completely by now. iTunes: xmms? I use and like xmms but it doesn't compare to iTunes. > Mail: Thunderbird Yup Browser: Firefox Yup > iPhoto: Gallery? Honestly this is one of the key apps that always gets me back on my crusty old Powerbook. > 3) Connectivity: How is the current support for wireless (I love the > "Location" feature of OSX) and bluetooth? iSync? Last I looked, SuSE was doing this a lot better than RHEL but I don't really use wireless anymore. You might want to play with SuSE. It's very well polished and might very well be a better laptop distro. Given the state of my powerbook I'll probably be doing the same thing as you in a few months and I will give SuSE another good long look at that time. But I won't kid you. Linux as a desktop is nowhere near as polished as OS X. Yes, I use it every day. I'm using it now at $WORK (a very very pro-Linux company that still issues WinXP laptops because of the shortcomings). I think it works brilliantly as a server but as a desktop it still feels very raw, rough around the edges, and missing a lot of applications (that have reached maturity like what you're used to on OS X). I keep trying OO.o every few months and though it has gotten better, it still feels very rough and hackerish. Firefox and Thunderbird are about the most polished/mature apps I've seen on Linux for the desktop. Gimp is still suffering from a crude interface that is disappointing alongside of Photoshop. I guess I better put on my flame-retardant kilt now. -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/
