I have been dabbling with Linux for years, and finally switched my workstation to Ubuntu 9.04 a month ago. Overall, I am satisfied, but not thrilled. I am not yet certain what exactly is the advantage over my old OS Windows 2000 actually. Ubuntu also has crashed and I have had to reboot. It doesn't really seem a whole lot faster. Of course, the mere fact that it's not MS is more than enough reason for me, however.

Anyhow I think perhaps Ubuntu is not the ideal distro for me. The reasons are:

1. It seems a bit slow--changing windows is slow, jEdit is *quite* slow, and other things are just not "snappy." I tried other WMs but didn't find one I liked like Gnome.

2. It is not the most stable OS I ever saw.

3. Thunderbird has (thus far) two bugs I have found. I suppose I could install it straight from Mozilla's site, but I don't want to lose my settings. One problem is that when I use a non-Gnome WM, the system fonts in Thunderbird are very small.

Anyhow I was thinking to run in VirtualBox as a test Debian, Fedora and OpenSUSE. I think Debian is very stable, but that I won't be happy because it's so plain--even though I'm a programmer nerd, last time I tried it I found the Gnome was too plain even for me.

So I figured I would try out those and see if one seems better for me and then switch.

Any other ideas or advice?

Thanks!

Until recently, my distro was "Schizophrenic 0.1"...... In this period I learned several things, but the main message is that there are not that many fundamental differences between Linux versions (distros). With respect to speed, it is really a question of how many bells and whistles you have---and this in turn is a function of the Desktop Environment (eg KDE, Gnome, XFCE, etc.) or the more spartan Window managers such as Fluxbox or IceWM.

For reliable, try Debian or Slackware
For simple and fast, try just about any distro with XFCE or maybe LXDE
For **really simple**, try Arch or maybe Puppy or DSL.

The "best" distro (for you) is often simply the last one you try......

I recently tried Fedora Core 10. I found that they make it difficult to use proprietary video card drivers.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Xorg/3rdPartyVideoDrivers

I don't understand your comment saying that Debian's Gnome Desktop Environment is too plain but you appear to have liked Gnome under Ubuntu. If you don't like Gnome then you might like KDE. It is more Windows-like. However KDE is a bit of a resource hog. If you want to try KDE then I recommend the PCLinuxOS 2009.1 distribution.

http://pclinuxos.com/

If Gnome and KDE are too slow for you then you might like FVWM2. It can be configured to look similar to Windows desktop. FVWM2 is a simple window manager, not a desktop environment like Gnome or KDE. FVWM can run on many distributions such as Debian.

http://packages.debian.org/lenny/fvwm

Lastly I would say that any distribution using X.org or XFree86 window system is going to run about the same speed as Windows XP on any given computer. Unfortunately the X window system is a resource hog in itself. Adding Gnome or KDE makes it worse. FVWM or Ice Window Manager or one of several other simple window managers is less of a drain on resources but graphics will always demand computer resources. Your computer will never run as fast using X as it did under Windows 2000.

Or I could be wrong.

If you're looking for stability and "snap," why not take a look at Slackware. Slackware is fast and efficient and offers you every opportunity to fine-tune as you see fit.

I recently installed Ubuntu (in VirtualBox) just to see what all the fuss is about; I found that it installed, configured itself and does what Linux distributions are supposed to do but, at the same time, that it did a lot of things "for" (or perhaps "to") me that I don't especially care for. Lots of eye-candy, Gnome (which, in my opinion, is a behemoth and I don't particularly like the look and feel -- but that's personal opinion) and other little gotcha's here and there.

Slackware is un-fooled-around-with; i.e., it does not, by default, do things that you may not want done for you -- if you're doing development work at all, Slackware is a dream environment to work in. For folk migrating from Microsoft I could recommend Ubuntu (looks and feels an awful lot like the Evil Empire's offering) but for a serious platform to do serious work, well, Slackware might be worth a look-see.

> Until recently, my distro was "Schizophrenic 0.1"......

I also used that. More than once in fact. Nice to know there is a community developing. lol.

I tried LXDE and it was nice BUT there was a bug that if I had too many windows open, the taskbar icons disappeared off to the right. At least in Ubuntu.

> If Gnome and KDE are too slow for you then you might like FVWM2.

Great. I will check it out. Thanks.

> Your computer will never run as fast using X as it did under Windows 2000.



> if you're doing development work at all, Slackware is a dream environment to work in

OK, I will check this out also. I was a bit scared b/c it has a reputation of being so bare-bones that you need a degree in Linux to install it, but it seems that those days are actually long-gone.

Thanks!

>

Oh, not at all bare-bones! Slackware's installation is curses-text-based (X does not start during installation) which is simple and elegant (I think, anyway). Say you're setting up a data base server or something similar -- would you want X running by default? You need to answer a few questions; e.g., do you want networking, fixed-IP or DHCP, do you want services started (like MySQL, HTTP, CUPS, etc.) things like that, choices like that. And, when you boot, it starts in console mode rather than an X-based login (you manually startx, which you can, of course, change quickly and simply). It also comes with multiple window managers; blackbox, fluxbox, fvwm2, kde, twm, wmaker and xfce (it no longer comes with Gnome -- because maintaining Gnome has proven to be a pain in the hiney for the developers -- but Slackware-specific Gnome packages are freely available and to all reports work just fine thank you very much).

Slackware is not bleeding-edge (on purpose); the goal is stability so things do not get added or changed until the bleeding-edge-bugs are worked out. Personally, that's what I want simply because I do not want to constantly fiddle, twiddle and screw around getting things to work properly (if I wanted that, I'd be running winders). I typically don't reboot my systems for months at a time if that says anything.

Best of luck in your search.

I agree with tronayne. Slackware is a good choice for a desktop computer. I tried it last year. The only reason I don't use it is that Kubuntu and PCLinuxOS both automatically detect and configure the built in web cams and wireless NICs in my notebook computers. You no longer need extensive Linux knowledge to use Slackware.

Debian is known as most stable but it is a distribution for advanced users. But if you want something more comfortable to use but still near to Debian I can recommend KNOPPIX.

> Debian is known as most stable but it is a distribution for advanced users

Yes, Debian you think is more for advanced users than Slackware? I think I will try both, but AFAIK the package manager in Debian is much easier than in Slackware. Maybe other things are harder.

+1 to that...the main difference between distros in this context are their choices of defaults, so, if you wish to get a snappy distro, its mostly a matter of making sure that you don't load it down with too much in the way of unnecessary processes and doing the necessary fine tuning, whichever distro you choose. Of course, it easier if your choice has defaults that are close to yours, but if you are prepared to arm-wrestle your distro into submission (I'm not, but there you go) there is no reason to get very bothered by what your distro does by default.

The other big factor is extensiveness and up-to-date-ness of repositories. One thing I don't like about Ubuntu is the way that, for the non-LTS versions, they stop doing app updates so soon. I'd like to decide when to upgrade the OS, rather than have them do it.

If that's your only objection to Gnome, then putting some time into customising Gnome would probably be worthwhile, even though the gnome team seem to want to concentrate on 'works out of the box' to the exclusion of 'you can have exactly what you want'.

I'm more of a kde person (actually, I find I can use Gnome for maybe a month without much irritation, but then it really begins to get on my nerves and I start feeling that its getting in the way) and kde-look is really quite useful. My preference is for a distro that makes it easy to load several GUI/WMs and decide this issue later, depending on what kind of mood I feel in at the time.

That's not good. I have seen some (apparent) crashes on 6.06 LTS, but mostly they weren't real Linux crashes; mostly it seems to have been apps with memory leaks, with the result that, once all of the swap space has gone, the box slows down to the point that it might as well be crashed. 8.04 seemed to cure that, or it least make it much less of a problem. Apps crash though (infrequently), but I haven't yet lost any data at all, which is the big thing...


"I was waiting for a bus and just when I'd finished waiting, a bus came along. Why is it, just when you finish waiting, a bus comes along?" Ric Mayall (as Kevin Turvey?)