Thinking about giving up windows..

[Don66]

Just installed Mandrake 9.0 Beta1 to a spare drive and I was surprised to find that it worked with all of my hardware.
Very easy to install and configure. I would have to say almost easier than windows.
All in all very nice. Esp. the mp3 ripper and the player
The only thing I can't figure out is how to change the desktop resolution.

 

[mcveigh]

try "ctrl-alt-(+ or -)" at the same time.

or manually edit your xf868config file

 

[Don66]

Thanks for the info.

 

[stash]

Just out of curiosity, can you list your hardware?

 

[galt]

After a year of RedHat, I tried Mandrake 8.2 and absolutely love it. Its not so bloated as RH, more user friendly, and the package manager is so much better. Not to mention urpmi =)

However, no matter how much I feel like dumping windows, I seem to go back to it. Stable, looks very good, works so well. The latest blow was today when I stumbled across the bug report page on KDE's website. Some of those are SOOO nasty. Not saying windows 2k is without problems. But atleast I dont know of any. Looking at the KDE page made me think twice about completely moving over to linux.

 

[Nothinman]

Not saying windows 2k is without problems. But atleast I dont know of any.

Nice dose of "what I don't know, won't hurt me", eh?

 

[mcveigh]

Originally posted by: galt
After a year of RedHat, I tried Mandrake 8.2 and absolutely love it. Its not so bloated as RH, more user friendly, and the package manager is so much better. Not to mention urpmi =)

However, no matter how much I feel like dumping windows, I seem to go back to it. Stable, looks very good, works so well. The latest blow was today when I stumbled across the bug report page on KDE's website. Some of those are SOOO nasty. Not saying windows 2k is without problems. But atleast I dont know of any. Looking at the KDE page made me think twice about completely moving over to linux.

you found mandrake not as bloated as redhat????

that's a first I think

 

[Gooberlx2]

no matter how much I feel like dumping windows, I seem to go back to it.

Yeah, I still use windows as my primary OS. But I've been enjoying dual-boot gentoo/winxp on my laptop for about 1.5 weeks, and had RedHat before that. (I'll try Mandrake before I go back to RH. (tried SuSe though. Not bad...pretty much standard, good Hardware detection))

If you want no bloat and full optimisation then try Gentoo. It rocks. (Takes just forever to setup, though)

 

[N11]

I'm not sure what you mean by Red Hat being bloated. You can customize your install to how you see fit.... You can turn off services, remove rpms, etc...

Red Hat is a fully packed distribution which is great because you can be certain all of those packages and rpms will work well with it.

 

[Nothinman]

you found mandrake not as bloated as redhat????


that's a first I think

If you learn how to use the package manager, neither are bloated any more than you want them to be.

 

[Don66]

Just out of curiosity, can you list your hardware?

Here is everything that works so far
MSI 845 ultra
P4 1.6A,
Maxtor 40GB
512MB DDR
Radeon8500
Realtek nic
Westell Wirespeed DSL modem
Yamaha 3200e
Liteon 16x48x dvd
Epson 740 printer usb
microsoft trackball optical usb

Seems to have good usb support.
I'm going to keep playing with it for now, and learn something new.
Also seems a bit faster to load than XP

 

[galt]

I mean the least bloat you can get with a 20 minute install. With RH, I'd have to spend a good 40 minutes with the packages alone, picking and choosing (and its really hard to figure out what you can take out with names like famd0 and whatnot) the packages and installing. The best I could do with RH was 850 megs with KDE and software development. RH would also install tetex and jadetex and latex and thistex and thatex and so much stuff I didn't think I'd need.

With Mandrake, the menu option for packages is SO MUCH BETTER than RH. I just deselected all except KDE and then selected gcc and g++ and the install came to 600 mb. That is a large difference. I could spend another couple hours with RH and bring it down to 600mb, but I simply dont want to spend that much time staring at the package manager and package list.

Gooberlx2, I tried gentoo on another computer (a server) and it wouldnt install. I tried three times and still no go. (It had some funky server chipset with 64bit pci slots and other weird stuff on it, which is why I guess the install failed). I'll try again on my amd machine when I have some free time.


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"Nice dose of "what I don't know, won't hurt me", eh? "

Something like that. Atleast with windows I know that if explorer is opening a soundfile and I switch desktops, then it wont leak memory like crazy. Also, many of the bugs I read about on the KDE page weren't complicated. Simple things like "open a file x number of times in application y and you get memory leaks" really scare me. I've left my windows machine on for days and the memory usage stays below 70 megs (when I close all apps). And with KDE it seems like almost anything I do that isnt the simplest of tasks would cause a memory leak. Just scares me a bit.

 

[galt]

IMO, a good installation procedure would:

1) Give "Minimal" option with package selection -- this installs the bare necessecities like network and sound servers, one text editor, one web browser, and some config ability with the windowmanager of your choice (gnome, kde, icewm, etc).

2) Show package list so that user can choose the packages he wants -- (install program automatically installs packages to satisfy dependencies)

3) Start installing

What I don't like is the current system where they assume you will use 100 different applications and install them by default. I mean show me one regular user (internet + email + chat person) that would need latex or tetex or any of those things.

 

[knappster]

seems to me that most of the problems here are stemming from KDE...why not trying something not as bloated and memory intensive?

Windowmaker works great for me...i don't need a windows feel to have it be a fully usable system...

 

[Nothinman]

With RH, I'd have to spend a good 40 minutes with the packages alone, picking and choosing (and its really hard to figure out what you can take out with names like famd0 and whatnot) the packages and installing.

So uncheck everything and install what you want afterwards.

If you want a real easy minimal install use Debian. You can get a base install of like 150M (can't remember for sure, havn't installed it in a long time) and you can install whatever you need afterwards with a few commands.

Gooberlx2, I tried gentoo on another computer (a server) and it wouldnt install.

If a quick install is what you want, Gentoo is not for you because to get anything out of it you have to compile everything, otherwise you might as well use Debian or Slackware.

1) Give "Minimal" option with package selection -- this installs the bare necessecities like network and sound servers, one text editor, one web browser, and some config ability with the windowmanager of your choice (gnome, kde, icewm, etc).

What network servers are a bare necessity?

Install which text editor? vi, emacs, gedit? I'd be pretty pissed if vim wasn't in the default install.

Which web browser? Mozilla, Galeon, Konq?

What I don't like is the current system where they assume you will use 100 different applications and install them by default. I mean show me one regular user (internet + email + chat person) that would need latex or tetex or any of those things.

Most of the installed utils that you don't think you need are used in the background by other things, I don't know about latex in particular though.

 

[Fulcrum]

Sounds like a good Dual Boot situation to me!

 

[galt]

Nothinman: What network servers are a bare necessity?

I meant " network (as in network connectivity) and sound servers (for using the soundcard and stuff)". I assume you thought I said "network servers and sound servers".

Nothinman: If a quick install is what you want, Gentoo is not for you...

As much as I appretiate a quick install, I will spend the time necessary if the product will be worth it. I do like the idea of Gentoo very much, and I spent several hours trying to install it (tried compile and also from already compiled packages). Three tries and it still wouldn't work.

knappster: That is what I plan to do next. I have downloaded it and the next chance I get I will try WindowManger. I tried XFce or something like that and didnt like it too much. Fluxbox and WM are on my list of things I will try.

 

[Nothinman]

I meant " network (as in network connectivity) and sound servers (for using the soundcard and stuff)". I assume you thought I said "network servers and sound servers".

I did mis-read that, sorry.

But what if you don't need a sound server? My SBLive handles multiple apps opening it concurrently with no problem so esd or artsd is a waste.

My point was that there's no good default for everyone, especially with the infinite combination of things on Linux, infact the only really good one is to install a lot and let the user remove things they don't want.

 

[Armitage]

Originally posted by: galt

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"Nice dose of "what I don't know, won't hurt me", eh? "

Something like that. Atleast with windows I know that if explorer is opening a soundfile and I switch desktops, then it wont leak memory like crazy. Also, many of the bugs I read about on the KDE page weren't complicated. Simple things like "open a file x number of times in application y and you get memory leaks" really scare me. I've left my windows machine on for days and the memory usage stays below 70 megs (when I close all apps). And with KDE it seems like almost anything I do that isnt the simplest of tasks would cause a memory leak. Just scares me a bit.

So let me get this straight...
KDE shows you the bug list, and it scares you away from using it.
MS doesn't let you see the bug list, so you trust it.
Ignorance is bliss I guess.

In any case, I use KDE 2.2.2 at work and KDE 3.0 at home. They've been up for weeks with an absurd number of windows & apps open, lots of CPU & memory intensive stuff going on. And it's rock solid. Never crashes, never gets logged off or rebooted except when power fails. The only reason the uptime is only a few weeks is that our power situation has sucked lately.

So, maybe some people see memory leaks in some situations. But I think its far from the norm. And why does a memory leak "really scare" you? It's not like it's oozing out the bottom of you case At worst you swap a bit more, or crash your app.