On Wed, 31 Jul 2013, mick wrote:
On Tue, 23 Jul 2013 01:09:45 +0100 James Freer jessejazza3.uk@gmail.com allegedly wrote:
On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 5:22 PM, Bev Nicolson lumos60@gmail.com wrote:
Not too late and thanks for that info Mick. Happy to hear other comments or views.
Bev.
here's mine FWIW.
Last summer i did a distro hopping session just to compare. When choosing a distro i try and have a balanced view, tend to focus on the package management, maintenance provision, as well as obviously the desktop itself.
I switched to xfce in 2009 simply because i liked the minimal approach and i add (remove one or two apps) what i want, rather than as i used to do with gnome a combination of removing and adding. Linux is about choice i think we can agree on. Now Ubuntu Unity, cinnamon and latest gnome are now heavier in resources than kde. If you want eye candy kde is now in 2nd place.
You mention Mint; as far as xfce is concerned when i tried it i found out that the maintainer ONE person, had a personal tragedy to cope with and so xfce for almost a year was 'dead'. Worth bearing in mind that staff will have illness/difficulties and as a user one needs to be sure that maintenance is carried out. Some of the smaller community distros are maintained by very knowledgeable talented folk e.g. pclos (best looking xfce desktop along with Vector Linux), Salix. I have respect for Mint but staffing is an issue although that might have been resolved now.
James
Thanks for that fairly comprehensive skim through your distros.
I confess I hadn't realised that Mint relied on such slim resources to maintain the version I use. Since I am happy with xfce, and mint is based on ubuntu (rather than the LMDE version I started with) I might as well move to xubuntu.
Mick
Mick
Glad it was appreciated - cost me enough in CDs just burning isos and as a result "turned full circle".
All of the smaller distros are short on resources e.g. pclos having produced Phoenix (xfce version) have now ceased, Mate (aka gnome) and KDE are what they have released latterly.
But there are some distros that want to remain small; Mepis is one I haven't mentioned and then there's Vector.
Each version of Xubuntu varies a bit in quality. One thing I would say is that I have NOT found LTS versions less buggy than others - 12.04 is poor compared with 13.04. 13.04 is quite a step forward. One recent important thing I found was that it doesn't recognise usb 3.5 floppy drive or the 3.5 internal - bug somewhere as I spent a while with help trying to sort it out... installed 13.04 and it worked perfectly.
"Why on earth do you want to use floppy" - maybe now you've fallen off your chair!
My two machines for some reason won't boot off usb (not uncommon I gather with some m/bs). I've now got one DVD RW left (I think the quality is poor these days... or I was unlucky). I just thought I am not going to waste any more cash (five generations ago family roots in Scotland!). Easiest solution was to use usb for the iso and the PLoP bootloader on floppy. Although they weren't popular; I think they were more reliable than usb/SD card which are not for long term data storage (I've had two die on me this year), use usb portable 3.5 for the occasional transfer of data and portable disk drive or 'cloud' for larger amounts of data.
One thing I didn't mention was that since the days of Unity - Xubuntu users have increased, although now quite a few may well have gone onto Mate (aka gnome). You may want to give it a look (if you prefer something more polished) but then again Xubuntu 13.04 appearance was quite a step forward. There's a guy called ? Green on this list who's a xubuntu user and a pro IT guy who you may like to discuss things with. Perhaps he goes to the meetings which I would quite like to go along to again.
james