Public Commander Keen Forum

Keening_Product wrote:Upgrades complete. Woah, so responsive! I knew to expect a speed increase, but there are some basic things that I wasn't expecting to improve. Window animations (cheap thrills) slickening up, for example, and general workflow improvements as a result. They don't take less time so much as provide a smoother transition between tasks.

I fresh installed Kubuntu 14.10 with the new drive and this is my first full KDE installation. I was impressed by the partial install I did on 14.04, and this is just above and beyond what I'd expected. Even the default Ubuntu application centre has been replaced with something better-designed and more responsive.

Also, the Xorg Crack Pushers ppa is the best ppa ever.

I'm really happy with the upgrades - improved productivity ahead.

Hmm... I should probably update my xubuntu from 14.04 to .10 so we'll see how that goes

I haven't heard of that ppa before, gonna go check it out now

Apart from new versions of a few applications, it's not that much different. If you don't want to have to upgrade for a while, don't bother.

Working on my uncle's Sempron 2800. It's been sitting here for 6 months while I experiment with various distros in my spare time, largely hindered by USB booting problems. Mint has been the most reliable in that department, so I'm falling back to that for this mission instead of one of the lighter distros I've been using on other machines.

It originally had 512MB RAM, hence trying lighter weight distros. Mint tends to require a minimum of 300MB for the base system even with Xfce so I put another 512MB in there. MINT Xfce was alright but there were some theme glitches and the screen kept going black and hanging X for some reason (though occasionally it would recover). So it's now on MATE and running quite smooth despite probably using the same version of the graphics driver. The graphics card is an old 7 series AGP Radeon.

Now to play around with some Amiga 500 emulation on it.

Yeah, I've found MATE and Cinnamon seem to be more graphics driver-friendly than XFCE - my Xubuntu 14.04 install saw other windows glitch like crazy when STK was running, but under Cinnamon and MATE (on Fedora) there were no such issues.

Cinnamon's footprint is, as I think I've said a few times before, surprisingly small.

So I installed Skype on Kubuntu 14.10 and lost chunks of KDE and my graphics drivers in the process. System recovery went psycho trying to fix a slab of unused 32-bit packages and in the end I couldn't fix the problem.

I'd been getting sick of Ubuntu's sh!t for a while now anyway, so installed OpenSUSE in its place (I'm partitioned to allow OS drop-in).

It took me ages to install prop graphics drivers in Ubuntu and I ended up having to install the X.Org Crack Pushers PPA to get things to work. In SUSE it was around five clicks and five minutes to enable a built-in Nvidia community repo from YaST. Delicious.

Only complaint so far is MP3 doesn't work out-of-the-box, but at least online help for that is easy to find.

*Blindly clicks around her windows PC only dimly aware that occasionally things go wrong, usually other people's things.*

This is the first major bug I've had since I switched to Linux, and was an easy fix in the end. Well worth it for the massive performance boosts, the amazing KDE interface, easy to install free software, excellent application integration and so on.

I had more problems I couldn't fix on Windows.

I live a charmed life. I daren't change anything lest my winning streak run out.

Commander Spleen wrote:

Bridge's website would have to be one of the worst out there.

Indeed. I avoided it at first in favour of Antergos, but it drew me back in because it supports both LXDE and Xfce, while Antergos has an Xfce version but no LXDE. I'm using the Xfce edition on my development PC, but plan to do some Arch Linux stuff at the Makerspace in the near future where LXDE will be the desktop of choice and using the same distro for both will limit the necessity of relearning.

Although I did like that Antergos has a cleaner installation and nicer graphical package manager installed with the AUR enabled by default. I don't remember the name of Antergos' package manager at the moment, but Bridge Linux uses Packages for GNOME and it is pretty terrible. I'm just doing everything by the terminal at the moment--which I generally prefer, but having a supplementary visual browsing method comes in handy.

What do you like about it? Or is it just that it's Arch with some of the installation pain removed?

Aye, mainly just that. Although it's a great experience to build a system from scratch, I've done that too many times over the past 12 months and I just want something that's solid and functional without so much potential for broken stuff during setup.

I, too, have been trying Antergos, and I really dig it, but it being Arch, I'm secretly counting the days until I accidentally break something and have to crawl back to my Ubuntu backup. (Maybe I am tech savy enough to avoid that, but not counting on it.)

Loving the heck out of pacman. Don't know why the Debian people decided to require "apt-get do this apt-get so much typing". I also gave OpenSUSE tumbleweed a shot but couldn't really figure out their repo system; are you supposed to choose and add a repo for every little thing, because that seems annoying. Keening_Product, or anyone else, please feel free to correct my impression.

In the meantime, I've been trying out XMonad. Surprisingly, after many frustrating hours, I think I actually understand the config to a greater degree than just copy/paste. Concerning the window management itself, not having to resize, more or less ever, is a nice change, but sometimes there aren't enough room for all the windows I want. I wish I felt confident enough to design my own layout; the last time I tried to reflect one, it went totally bonkers.

I cannot speak highly enough of OpenSUSE. As stable as a particularly stable rock, better equipped than Ubuntu (with the exception of an Apple-style software centre, but who really cares about that when YaST is as good as it is), faster than Ubuntu, more up-to-date than Ubuntu (and if you go for Tumbleweed about as up-to-date as Fedora) and remarkably accessible for noobs.

I could keep going on but I'll stop there. In short, I would recommend SUSE to a noob before I recommend Ubuntu.

My question was more "do we have to go to software.opensuse.org and install a new repo everytime we want a different kind of package"? That was what really turned me off: the first few things I tried to install, e.g. "zypper search xmonad" turned up nothing, and I had to go download it from the website like a... windows user . (I seem to remember one of the dependencies weren't satisfiable as well, I'm not sure if I was supposed to add another repo for it or what, but it was really confusing to me as a newbie.)

The thought did occur to me that maybe OpenSUSE had something like the AUR? But an extensive search of the wikis didn't turn up anything like that (again, please correct me if I missed something): while I did come upon some popular "must install" repos, none of them seemed to include even something like XMonad.

In short, it's my impression that we're unable to just "zypper in/pacman -S/apt-get install [package]" for all but the core OpenSUSE packages, without searching for and adding new repositories, and that's just really annoying to me.

Sorry, I somehow managed to miss your question when reading your post haha. Derping hard today.

For things not in the main repos, yes, but that's just like adding a PPA to Ubuntu only you don't need to hit the command line. I've had no experience with Tumbleweed though so package management may be a little different. There are a few community repos, yes, and Packman. You can read about them here: https://en.opensuse.org/Additional_package_repositories

Using Firefox to find and install software also works well with Apper, making the OpenSUSE website more or less like a software centre.

I haven't had to stry outside of the default repos often though, so I guess my experience on this is poor.

If I recall correctly, that wiki page was one of the first places I checked. Packman (and the others) didn't seem to have the ones I was looking for either.

Anyway, I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something obvious, or that my impression hadn't been unfairly skewed. I did enjoy the openSUSE paradigm until having to add the first repo; after that, it was just a downward spiral. While I'll take your word that repos are normally as straightforward as PPAs, I still needed to deal with a lot more of the former, since the openSUSE default repos seem to contain fewer packages. This potentially means I'd have to personally manage most of my installs, a very unattractive prospect compared to "apt-cache search [term]", "apt-get install [package result]".

Is there a reason for the decentralized nature of the openSUSE repos? I haven't come upon any page like the "Arch Way" describing their rationale. It seems to me that they increase complexity for the newbie both in the short-term, when said newbie has to figure out the various ways to search/install, and in the long-term, as this paradigm seems to lead to many more conflicting repos (the wiki page you linked to already having one).

Somehow OpenSUSE was one that I always steered clear of. Think I tried it many years ago when first starting out. I'm not into tiling window managers, so XMonad probably isn't my thing either.

KeenEmpire wrote:I, too, have been trying Antergos, and I really dig it, but it being Arch, I'm secretly counting the days until I accidentally break something and have to crawl back to my Ubuntu backup.

Aye, pretty much. Though I would seek refuge in Mint rather than Ubuntu.

It would be worth mentioning that I recently got Slackware running on the OpenPandora at a highly usable level. Previously it had issues with touchscreen calibration and non-functional wifi driver. Very limited repository, but it supports PNDs (packages which dynamically load and appear in the menu upon card insertion). For development purposes I mostly end up compiling things from scratch anyway. The default Ångström distro tends to be more troublesome even with a lot of good dev stuff readily available.

There is also a Debian option that has become fairly usable in recent months, which has a much broader range of packaged software available. It doesn't support PND packages which would make it feel like somewhat less of a Pandora, but it would be interesting to mess around with. But that can wait until the next time I go shopping for a batch of SD cards on eBay.

Definitely looking forward to the Pyra, its successor which will run Debian by default.

Commander Spleen wrote: Aye, pretty much. Though I would seek refuge in Mint rather than Ubuntu.

What's the difference? (Honest question) I'm using a customized xfce and xmonad, ran fixubuntu.com, so I'm not aware of any difference at this point aside from ubuntu being more upstream.

I actually gave up on using the touchscreen (ultrabook, not handheld size) for everything except as a backup for the mouse, partly because I've been trying to use the keyboard (hence XMonad, vim/emacs), but also because it only worked as intended (e.g. scrolling) on a small portion of programs. Just out of curiosity at this point, have you found a distro that works well with the touchscreen?