bjoernvold.com

No distro talk is complete without it!

mmmm... so Mark Shuttleworth stepped down, and I hear the new chickie is doing quite well, even changing the theme... will be glad to see ugly brown gone!

Ah, Ubuntu. I have a like/hate relationship with this distro.

I've played with it since 7.10, and have used the 10.04 alpha twice. Once, as the main OS on my Toshiba laptop. It was buggy until the update and then it was actually pretty darn good. Had some minor hiccups, but I would just run an update and it would be fine. I was surprised that it ran better than 9.10, not bad for an Alpha release!

Tried it again a few weeks back, and boy oh boy, they finally have it so the new theme is the default. I don't like at all the new theme Canonical has chosen for it, even more so than the brown/orange theme. It was not bad as far as stability goes, till I did an update and it gave me disk errors when trying to boot. I didn't care enough to try and fix it since I was dual-booting.

As much as I may say I don't like Ubuntu, I keep finding myself coming back to it and giving it a shot from time to time. I think I don't like the distro because of the user-base, as awful as that sounds. Most Ubuntu users I've talked with always think that Linux is Ubuntu, not the other way around. Or they point out something useful that a standard gnome program does, and hint that is the reason they like Ubuntu, not knowing or caring when I point out that any other distro can do the same. They just say "well, that's good but this is why I use Ubuntu."
But, that is why I enjoy the freedom of Linux, to each their distro that serves their needs the best.

I've read quite a bit that 9.04 was really buggy and not so good, but didn't try it out for myself (.deb doesn't run well on this machine).

Insofar as the latest distros go, I'm having an issue (and I believe it may be yours with 10) with the kernel; there's a bug in the doggone thing, and I'm on one of the systems it affects. So, I may hang tight with the next to the latest of all distros that I install for a while, not sure.

I think we have to give them credit for promoting Linux though. The side effect is that everybody thinks Linux is Ubuntu.
Ubuntu used to be good at hardware detection and it did "Just work" as I recall. It looks bad and is not as userfriendly as Mandriva or Suse, but they have brilliant documentation. They are not the enemy (MS is).
I have heard that Ubuntu has been buggy lately and there are many converts to Mandriva. But with their resources I am sure Ubuntu will strike back.

Ah, I see the most wonderful documentation for Arch and Gentoo. I used to use the Gentoo documentation to fix things in Mandriva lol. That was too funny to me!

Yes I think Arch has good documentation. Nevertheless I was proud of myself after setting up a gnome/kde Arch in Virtualbox. Not the everyday stuff - but it grows on you. I think the configuration file system is ok. And I managed due to the documentation.
I started with Gentoo but eh ahem I gave it up, or I did not finish. I will try again some day when I am bored.

maybe i will try installing gentoo tomorrow on my laptop, not much space left there though
and i don't want to end up messing up the MBR, takes to long to repair, so i have to add some new partitions

Oh and this is the ubuntu forum so i might as well add some reasons to why i use it.
Its based on Debian which is a good and stable distro,
It uses apt-get which has a lot more packages then i've ever seen in any other distro,
it comes in several different versions like: Mythbuntu for media pcs, kbuntu for KDE, Ubuntu whith gnome and a version for netbooks.
You don't have to do a lot of tinkering to get the hardware to work since the systems allow for easy access to propiarity drivers.
updating the kernel will not break the propiarity drivers because of the easy install tool for these drivers.
it's stable, it's fast, it's reliable IT WORKS! ^^

I have gone trough SUSE, FEDORA, MANDRIVA, DEBIAN, but fell back on ubuntu everytime. Now i'll try Gentoo and slackware to see if they are any good(i will put more effort in setting these up as i know these are a bit more stressy to set up)

Does Ubuntu have more software than Mandriva? And please do not mention all the *buntus. Is it really not possible to have both KDE and Gnome on the same installation - it can't be that bad? BTW I have a Laptop here that would make a perfect Gentoo project - let us get together and do that one - I have the space (well after I have deleted Vista anyway )

Yes there is a problem having both KDE and Gnome, it takes up huge amount of space and memory(thats what i have experienced at least) + your menus fills up with all the programs for both kde and gnome, and why have both? just a question you stick to the one you like(gnome)

Edit: oh forgot the most important thing, not everybody knows how to install both and shouldn't have to either, if we want people to walk away from windows/mac, we must also accept at not everybody wants to spend all day in front of the computer figuring out how to multiboot or install bitlbee, or needs to compile source code. I know it bugs me everytime something is wrong with a friends computer and i have to fix it, and usualy it something that takes me 2 minutes.

Make distros for everybody, ubuntu is good at this and it's easy to modify to your needs if you are an experienced user

I don't see how it will take up more memory. And a few extras on the menu you can edit. Mandriva I tell you - is much better! I have had some issues in cooker but that is why it is called cooker. So I have heard that Mandriva is the one that just works now - even on boxes where Ubuntu fails. But I must admit in the beginning I used Ubuntu because it was less trouble with the hardware. It did just work - I just think others are better or just as good now.
When it comes to ease of use Ubuntu is beaten by a mile by Mandriva.