Hej,

English is not my native language.
Linux is the only system I use since a week or so (Linux Mint 6), I want to use and will be using. I'm a newb though...

So, I switched to Linux. Bare with me on this one, I get to the questions and stuff a little bit later. I was incredibly tired of the "user friendly" Windows. I've been a MS user since '95, but now I just can't see myself getting back to Windows. And this statement comes after a week with Linux Mint 6.

Previously I've been choosing my distro for a month and came to the conclusion that Mint 6 is the best distro for me. Downloaded it, burned it, backuped my stuff, gparted my hdd (I didn't read this post before I messed around with it) and installed Linux Mint 6 with all the defaults. I don't know what I did wrong, or is the distro just so heavy on the system but Gnome was a pain for me. Lots of hangtimes, like it froze for a couple of seconds and after that it was fine. Both firefox and opera felt very chunky, like my processor was a pentium 4 or smth (I've got an old AMD Sempron 2,5GHz with 1,5GB RAM, Geforce 7600)

001. Double clicks, sometimes they just don't seem to be regestering. I've got a Logitech Cordless Optical EX110 (mouse and keys) with NEW Duracell batteries. It's not that big of a deal actaully but if there is a settings page somewhere pls point me to it... EDIT: Ok, nevermind, found it ;P

002. Firefox is slow. Even on XP with far more extensions it was faster then my current one. For example when I move the scrollbar up and down it moves, but with a delay. In Opera it's even worse. I've tried Midori, it crashed a lot but it was very fast, also Arora is very fast but I can't get youtube or any flash content get to work. All browsers new versions. I've deleted the default flash plugin that comes with Mint and installed the newest one that I've red about on this forum. Firefox 3.0.8 with Smart Bookmarks Bar, Download statusbar and Download Helper

003. Is there any hope for a decent torrent app for Linux? All I've tried many, but they did dramatically decrease my network speed, while the uTorrent that I run now in Wine runs great.

004. Just a thought. VLC on Linux is the best thing since sliced bread. EOT

005. Sites in the browsers run very, very slow, the download speed through HTML within the same browsers are 25% faster then they were on Windows, torrent runs basicly at the same speeds (utorrent) in Windows, ftp also. What could be the problem? All the sites load, with no errors but it's just painfull. Simple pages take a long time before any content is being displayed, same thing with https and ftp

006. Browsers in general feel clunky, almost like in the old days, when I had a peace of software that was just to new for my hardware and to demending.

007. Linux-Swap. In laymans words. What's it for, how REALLY big should it be, doest it make that big of a difference, is the placement of the partition important (begginig, end), is it wise to put different swaps on different hdd? ie I've got 2 hdd, first 80gb just for the system and the home dir, second one 1tb for stuff, and 4 usb 500gb with stuff. Dont ask what stuff.

008. I've been looking into Gentoo, Debian, Fedora, KateOS (although the text based network configuration scares me) and even DSL or Xubuntu. Which one would be the best choice for a guy like me based on the things I wrote? Things I need are:
- good text editor
- decent office suite with support for ms office file extentions
- wine (for utorrent, mobile phone software if it works, didn't test it yet, some games)
- vlc
- minimalistic gui, xfce looks very very good
- good web browser, don't care about the name or company, as long as it gets the job done - browsing, flash, flash download - files from youtube - download helper plugin or anything, good bookmark support and tabs)
- reinlendar support
- easy to use packet managing, synaptic one seems to be a nice choice but imho it laks some stuff
- very good security and privacy (if I want I wanna be albe to password protect everything)
- graphical istallation, but I want to be able to choose what packages (programs, not libraries) should be installed. Thats the thing that pissed me off in Mint a little bit. It just installed everything, and manuall deinstall can be panifull for a guy like me.
- thunar and a decent irc client. I've noticed that xchat which is great runs on gnome, and I need a good xfce one

I will probably ask more questions when I think of them, thanks for any kind of help guys.

Hi,

Im just gonna suggest a few programs.

I run fluxbox window manager, fluxbox is very fast and highly configurable (although you will need to spend time learning how to configure it, ofcourse).

Transmission is a good torrent program (GTK2 and fast).

Firefox 3 is very clunky for me, especially as there's a problem with one of the extensions I use. Its freezing regularly for up to 1 minute, quite annoying. Its even maxing the cpu on certain sites (even typing this Im having to wait untill the text onscreen catches up with my typing).

Heard nothing but good things about fluxbox. Didn't manage to try it though yet.

About that torrent, GTK2 is a library, correct? Packages (programs) are based on certain libraries, correct? Is GTK2 based software the fastest out there?

GTK2 is a graphical toolkit. Meaning programmers can use it to build their own applications without needing to reinvent the wheel. It provides menus, icons, a lot more actually. Asking for the fastest toolkit does not really mean anything.

I use Evolution browser and Openbox. I also use Ratpoison when I want to do some programming. These are lightweight and fast.

If you want to hide your "stuff", why don't you simply encrypt the hard disk drives where it sits?

Concerning swap, how much RAM do you have? If you have, say, over 1GB of RAM, do not use hibernate, do not program or compile anything, or do anything memory hungry, you can probably remove swap altogether. Use free to see what your memory usage is.

As for all the perceived speed-issues: it would help if you
mentioned your hardware, current memory use at the time of
slowness, network connection type, DE/WM in use ...


Cheers,
Tink

discard everything that I wrote. I fixed the problems. Everything works fine. Why I've been using win for all those years is a mistery for me...

Jarl,
Sorry, but for those of us who have followed this, there is nothing to learn if you dont at least give us a clue as to the actual problem. All of us do stupid things each day....

English is not my native language.

Well, no one would ever have guessed it from that post. You write better than a lot of the people who were born in an English speaking country.

I don't think "failure to communicate" is anything you need to worry about.

Thanks man, I just wanted to be sure that some minor mistakes, stupid typos or grammar errors would not be pointed out and that my post made as most sense as possible

Yeah, sorry about that. Here's the deal. Turns out to most of my problems there was one explanation. I didn't realize that Linux Mint 6 when installed chooses to boot with the biggest resolution supported by either my monitor or graphics card. Since my monitor is a 24 inch widescreen Samsung and my graphics card is a little slow nVidia Geforce 7600 on AGP I figured that changing down the resolution should do the trick with the slow behaviour of Firefox and/or Opera. That was the thing that pissed me of the most. It's better now, really nice.

The second problem was with youtube files and/or flash videos being/not being displayed in my browser. All I needed to do was uninstall flashplugin-nonfree and install adobe-flashplugin. It's in the synaptic package manager which btw is the best thing since sliced bread. It's still not as fluid as on XP but at least it works. In windows at a given time I could have had opened 10 youtube tabs, all loading, none playing and my browsing experience would still be faster then on linux without any flash playing/loading. Don't really know why, I just try not to open any heavy sites in more then 5 tabs.

The site loading speed kinda still remains. It's like every site is being probed after I click/type a link and then they load, kida slow too. Direct download through http (i.e. distros) is amazing, very fast, I have the feeling that it is even faster then on my XP. The same thing goes for ftp and torrents.

Decent torrent app. Still using utorrent with wine. Don't see any reason to switch. It works great.

When it comes to distros for me I downloaded a couple: Damn Small Linux, Debian 5.0, Gentoo 2008, KateOS 3.6, Linux Mint 6 Fluxbox, Linux Mint 6 KDE, Linux Mint 6 XFCE, Slackware 12.2, xPud, Xubuntu 8.10, Ubuntu 8.10 polish edition, Kwort, open SUSE 11.1.

I will give all of them a fair try, like a week or two for every distro and then choose my preferred one but right now my dvd is broken. When I get a new one I will burn and start installing each one. The first one that I will try is Debian. I call this distro "The Source". The thing is that i.e. Linux Mint 6 XFCE is based on Xubuntu 8.10 which is based on Ubuntu 8.10 which is based on Ubuntu 8.10 which finally is based on Debian 5.0. I don't like this fact so I will try out the source distro. This doesn't mean that Mint 6 XFCE will not get a fair try from me. Just a little bit later.

So, that's about it.

Peace.