Mikey-3 wrote: > > I'm fascinated that Ubuntu is that much different than Debian. I've > only used a few distros (I'm currently screwing around with HH in > Ubuntu, so I haven't played that much with some of the lesser-known > ones. > > So Do you use KDE instead of Gnome? > >
No, I do still use Gnome some of the time, but Fluxbox a lot of the time, usually with Geany as editor and xfe as file manager in both cases. I use many KDE applications in preference to the Gnome ones - Kmail and Korganizer in preference to Evolution. Kjots in preference to Gjots. K3b for CD burning. I also use WDM as the display/logon manager in place of KDM or GDM. Fluxbox just gets out of your way when you want to do something. KDE is OK, and I've installed it for people. I find the number of mouse clicks to get anything done, at least as it comes out of the box, rather irritating. It is however considerably less dumbed down and more configurable than Gnome, which seems to make a fetish lately of taking useful functionality out in case it confuses some 5 year old someplace and causes him emotional damage. But they are both a bit too prominent pieces of the environment for my taste. The essential difference between Debian and Ubuntu is continuous upgrades versus named releases. Do you get all your apps updated in the rolling updates of a package like the current Etch or Lenny? Or do you only get security releases, and then have to do a staged version upgrade to get the lastest version of Open Office? Debian, you will always get the apps updated, and then you move from version to version by doing apt-get dist-upgrade. This is why Woodford took Mepis to Debian and away from Ubuntu as the base. http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS6170488551.html A reasonable way to approach Debian is, use the testing version only when it is at least 6 months old. Otherwise use stable. Lenny is currently nearing moving to Stable. I've been on Lenny now for about a year, and will stay with it for at least 6 months, maybe longer, but at some time after that will upgrade to the then Testing version. You see the uprade problem in its most acute form in Mandriva. Mandriva is nice to install for naive users since it has a great GUI driven admin centre and it comes with a proper user manual. But, you put in Mandriva 2008, and now out comes 2008.1, and what do you do? You can change the urpmi repositories and do a net upgrade, but its risky. Do it half a dozen times and you are just about guaranteed one disaster. Or, you can do a clean install, assuming you put /home on a separate partition. I've done it, but don't like it, and certainly don't intend doing it every six or nine months for a bunch of people. Still less turn them loose on DIY! So you end up treating it like Windows, and leaving in 2008 for a couple of years and only doing the 2008 updates, which are going to be security only. That is not very satisfactory either. Debian is the way to go. If you really want to learn Linux, Slackware is also worth considering. Fast, though not I think much faster than Debian, and very bare bones. Slackware stopped supporting Gnome a while back, though. There is a big difference using nothing but Linux, and using it on native hardware, and having many different desktop environments available at the click of a mouse, and using one distro as it comes out of the box occasionally through a VM. It changes your concept of both usability and look and feel. If you do install Debian, by the way, put in the i386 version, not the 64 bit version. I am running amd64 Debian and 64 bit is not worth the trouble. At this point I would also install Lenny rather than Etch, it is almost finalized as Stable, almost certainly will be by the end of the month. However Debian's motto is 'no wine before its time', so you can't be sure. Peter -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/RR-in-Wine-tp19763770p19792647.html Sent from the Revolution - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
