Going to take the plunge from Windows 7 to Ubuntu - Now all things Ubuntu/Linux

[Huw the Poo]

Heh, I don't blame you.

I went for Debian in the end.  The install went smoothly, but just like my initial install of OpenSUSE, the Akonadi server didn't like my previous settings and refused to launch Kontact, so once again I had to do a clean install and now I'm laboriously copying all my stuff over from my backup drive.  Bah.  Oh well, it'll be worth it in the end and at least I'm back on an APT-based system.

Speaking of APT...you'll never guess what?  The version of Debian I grabbed was disc 1, KDE 64-bit, and it didn't come with Synaptic!  What the hell?  I honestly could not find an application to install packages, so I had to use the CLI to install Synaptic.  Who the hell came up with that genius idea?!

Still...Debian.  It's like coming home!  I shall endeavour to keep it on my PC now, and should I encounter any annoyances I'll just do my best to fix them instead of ragequitting and installing some other distro.

[warning]

You should at least check out Linux Mint Debian Edition on a live cd.  It's really lovely and very polished.

[Huw the Poo]

Thanks, but I'm not switching now!  I've moved half my stuff across from my backup disk already and I'm not going through it all again!  Actually, I did try the KDE version of Mint before I installed Sabayon but I didn't like it for some reason that escapes me now.

Everything going well with Debian so far.  It's a hell of a lot easier to get full multimedia capability on Debian than it used to be.  Looking forward to the next release in about 18-20 months!

[Huw the Poo]

Would anyone like to hear a Linux joke?

Linux development is truly a team effort.  Red Hat develops the kernel, Novell develops the applications, Debian does the packaging and Ubuntu takes all the credit.

I laughed.

[Tokek]

Huw, any update on which distro you like best now?

My work just sent me to Linux training, so I have some basics along with stuff I picked up at work. Work basically uses CentOS 5.5 with KDE and I'm kind of looking for a decent distro to learn on. So far, I've tried Ubuntu (with KDE installed), OpenSUSE, Mandriva and currently trying out Sabayon. All these are on VMs since I don't have a dedicated machine for it yet.

Right now I'm most familiar with CentOS since that was what I use at work and what I was trained on. I don't like the Unity on Ubuntu 11.04, just seems weird to me. I like the look of OpenSUSE, it's very polished. So far, Sabayon is pretty nifty as well. However, I'm running all these on Virtualbox VMs, so they just run fine, no hardware issues, lol.

I guess I'll give them a try and see which one I like best. Right now, I'm leaning towards Ubuntu (with KDE) and OpenSUSE.

[hitbyambulance]

i'm liking Unity on Ubuntu, even though it still seems to be in a beta release state. i can see a few areas where usability can be (and should be) improved, but it's the most 'flowing' UI i've used on a *nix machine yet. too bad the memory usage is somewhat more substantial than GNOME/KDE...

i was going to replace OS X Tiger on my iBook G3 (ca. 2002) with Debian, but it doesn't look like that will fix the inability to connect to WPA2 networks over wifi - appears to be a hardware limitation of the original Airport.