On Sun, 15 Sep 2013 09:02:45 +0100 Wayne Stallwood ALUGlist@digimatic.co.uk allegedly wrote:
Not liking the default desktop manager is a strange reason to dump a whole distro IMO, particularly when there are sub branches of that distro offering different defaults. But even without that everything else is just an apt-get away.
Wayne
Take a look at the discssion about "trust" in ubuntu and its derivatives at https://github.com/nylira/prism-break/issues/334 The question addressed is whether (for example) xubuntu should be trusted because it does not contain the unity lens and/or other privacy infringing software. It is not just about the desktop manager, more the philosophy of the distro builder.
Some people take the view that Canonical is not working in the best interests of the FOSS community. Ironically I am now (albeit temporarily) back to using xubuntu (from Mint) following my exchange with James back in July (he gave Bev a long list of distros he'd tried). Longer term I want to move away from ubuntu and any derivative permanently. I am currently playing with Arch and its derivative Manjaro because, like you. I am attracted to the rolling distro model. I looked at Gentoo, but life is just too short to build everything from source - even I am not that zealous. I am a great fan of debian (I use it on all my servers) but I want something a little more bleeding edge for my desktop.
I had pretty good experiences with the Debian edition of mint. Never tried the stock editions. I still don't fully understand the reason why they run both but LMDE is a nice step towards running "proper" Debian. They should concentrate all their efforts there rather than the "Yet Another Ubuntu Derivative"
I found the Mint LMDE version worryingly out of date (for security updates) quite quickly. At least ubuntu released patches quickly.
Cheers
Mick ---------------------------------------------------------------------
Mick Morgan gpg fingerprint: FC23 3338 F664 5E66 876B 72C0 0A1F E60B 5BAD D312 http://baldric.net
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