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.

No doubt in my mind that debian distros have the largest software repos and so for anyone not wishing to spend hours trying overcome compiling problems... debian distros are the best. Fedora is the best of the rpm although F18 was an utter debacle... almost unusable and their 13 month lifespan makes it a bit limiting if one has to cope with say a family bereavement as i have recently and haven't got the time to backup/archive all their work. Ubuntu gives one 6 month release but one can do an annual release (which is what i do) or use the LTS 2 year cycle (although now 5 years i believe - but not much point as in year two many apps are by then quite dated). Centos, Suse and several of the rpm distros may be a good enough desktop but the way the repos are set up seems poor after debian. Enterprising pclos use apt-rpm with synaptic (only distro to do that i think) and so of the rpm distros that is relatively pain free to use but repos are small which put me off, as well as NO indication of releases - ready when Ready... no problem with that attitude but it's nice to know approximately when - maybe one is going to set up a new system in the next 2 or 3 months and it's helpful to know when the new release is and coincide?

Crunchbang, Salineos, Ultimate, Zorin, PInguy, Snowlinux, etal - the newer distros making an improvement on *buntu, tend to have smarter features they've developed but stability, staffing for maintenance, appear to struggle. as Dr Jeep said to me once which was good advice when i started with linux in 2007 - get to know a distro and stick with it.

Slackware and derivatives - i admire as somehow they are faster than others. Vector i have mentioned and whilst being a smaller user community, is a well polished desktop with server and a friendly user community. The slackware repos can be accessed which are almost as large as debian ones. Salix seems a polished result but relationships between developers isn't good although may have improved since i tried it. "Go Slack and you won't go back" - i didn't... in the sense i kept it going on one machine and vector is my 2nd choice operating system.

Having been a xubuntu user since 2009 i have to say i have seen it go from strength to strength - while some things have irritated me in the "Precise" release... fair to say it was not a good effort for LTS. The repos, apt package management, developing staff and large community make it the most stable and supported platform. It has always been considered as the 'clunker' distro but since Unity i think it's fair to say that it has developed into being a consistently well developed distro. I've tried to use something else, looked at others and come back. The current development team are a good crowd and keen to build on success. There are better 'eye candy' xfce distros but 'under-the-bonnet' xubuntu takes some beating.

As for rolling release; looked at Mint's, Arch, Bridge, Aptosid - smart developers in each but stability... long term puts me off. Ideal distro to me is a point release annually when an adequate developing and testing cycle can be fully implemented. Bearing in mind long term considerations if you are considering debian i'd say xubuntu is #1 but Slack with its speed and eye candy gets #2 with me (rpm and yum doesn't get a look). Apt with synaptic is best by far but Slack's SLapt and gSLapt are a good similarity.

james

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