OK, so after my last post I was feeling a little fed up with the world according to Mark Shuttleworth and the rest of Ubuntu. I decided to take a peek at what else was out there...
I'd picked up a copy of Linux User & Developer magazine, with a cover CD of Sabayon Linux (based on Gentoo). I plugged the CD in and booted my (non-work-critical) laptop, and saw what I could see...
First off, it plays music while it boots. It's an interesting quirk, and not one that gets repeated with the installed version! Incidentally the DVD also came with live options for Tor web browsing plus a handful of games. The CD prompts you to set up Compiz Fusion graphics when X first loads - the first distro I have tried that has integrated such eye-candy from the off. The app package selection was good, and even for a live CD it was very responsive and fast.
Then I decided to see if there are packages to update.
Following instructions found somewhere on their site, I did the "do this after new install" thing... and waited.
And waited.
And then, after three hours of thinking, it came up with a non-error message, telling me to run a different command to find the real error message.
I ran this command. It told me that the package that it was trying to update didn't exist, apparently.
I like Sabayon. I like their attitude: forget finnicking about this license or that license, people want to be able to play MP3s, dammit! A whole lot better than Ubuntu's left-hand-vs-right-hand approach, not including proprietary drivers yet writing a whole lot of code to simplify installation of the same. But I really don't have the time to hunt through pages of documentation just to get at an error message! Not giving the user a useful error message at the off isn't just bad design - in this day and age, it's just rude.
So, Sabayon was out. A mate of mine raves over Fedora (no-longer-Core) 7, so I thought I'd give that a go. They have a KDE spin now. I like KDE, so I tried that.
For some obscure reason, it installed both KDE and Gnome despite me only selecting the former, and ensuring the latter was deselected. I'm fairly certain amaroK doesn't depend on Metacity, the GNOME window manager... The GUI package tool was more clunky than Adept or Synaptic, and the package selection more limited. Beryl was installed by default but not running by default. With it running, it had a tendency to forget to draw parts of the screen, a problem I had not experienced running it under Kubuntu Feisty or with Compiz under Sabayon.
Fedora is known as a good distro in terms of art, and indeed it looked gorgeous for the most part; though the login screen truncated the words "Username" and "Password", and try as I might I couldn't get the fonts to render just as I like them (it reminded me, in fact, of MS ClearType).
Niggles though they were, they were minor ones, and if I had to I could probably get on very well with Fedora. However, I simply just don't have the time to learn all those little differences between RPM and deb-based distros...
Tryint out Gutsy now, a week before launch. Let's see what happens. From Kubuntu, to the world, only to find out I'm back where I started...
I'd picked up a copy of Linux User & Developer magazine, with a cover CD of Sabayon Linux (based on Gentoo). I plugged the CD in and booted my (non-work-critical) laptop, and saw what I could see...
First off, it plays music while it boots. It's an interesting quirk, and not one that gets repeated with the installed version! Incidentally the DVD also came with live options for Tor web browsing plus a handful of games. The CD prompts you to set up Compiz Fusion graphics when X first loads - the first distro I have tried that has integrated such eye-candy from the off. The app package selection was good, and even for a live CD it was very responsive and fast.
Then I decided to see if there are packages to update.
Following instructions found somewhere on their site, I did the "do this after new install" thing... and waited.
And waited.
And then, after three hours of thinking, it came up with a non-error message, telling me to run a different command to find the real error message.
I ran this command. It told me that the package that it was trying to update didn't exist, apparently.
I like Sabayon. I like their attitude: forget finnicking about this license or that license, people want to be able to play MP3s, dammit! A whole lot better than Ubuntu's left-hand-vs-right-hand approach, not including proprietary drivers yet writing a whole lot of code to simplify installation of the same. But I really don't have the time to hunt through pages of documentation just to get at an error message! Not giving the user a useful error message at the off isn't just bad design - in this day and age, it's just rude.
So, Sabayon was out. A mate of mine raves over Fedora (no-longer-Core) 7, so I thought I'd give that a go. They have a KDE spin now. I like KDE, so I tried that.
For some obscure reason, it installed both KDE and Gnome despite me only selecting the former, and ensuring the latter was deselected. I'm fairly certain amaroK doesn't depend on Metacity, the GNOME window manager... The GUI package tool was more clunky than Adept or Synaptic, and the package selection more limited. Beryl was installed by default but not running by default. With it running, it had a tendency to forget to draw parts of the screen, a problem I had not experienced running it under Kubuntu Feisty or with Compiz under Sabayon.
Fedora is known as a good distro in terms of art, and indeed it looked gorgeous for the most part; though the login screen truncated the words "Username" and "Password", and try as I might I couldn't get the fonts to render just as I like them (it reminded me, in fact, of MS ClearType).
Niggles though they were, they were minor ones, and if I had to I could probably get on very well with Fedora. However, I simply just don't have the time to learn all those little differences between RPM and deb-based distros...
Tryint out Gutsy now, a week before launch. Let's see what happens. From Kubuntu, to the world, only to find out I'm back where I started...
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