Hi,

Not sure if you can give your thoughts and reconmendations (I know everyone has different views) on KDE Distros, I have used Kubuntu in the past but the impression I always get from it is it is a poor cousin of Ubuntu, plus the Ubuntu Distros don't have the most appelaing looks to them (for me).

The Distros I am currently looking at are as follows

1. MintLinux - Have since removed this from my list as the KDE Comunity Edition seems to be a fair way behind the Gnome version in the release cycle

2. SuSE - Have had problems with this in the past, plus the most anoying fature I have found previously was it had no command line package installed (Apt, Yum...)

3. Fedora - Haven't looked at Fedora since it was Fedora Core 2 so has probable changed an lot since, then but from what I remember it was a good Distro (only problem back then was it wouldn't install on my hardware)

4. Mandriva - Seems an ok distro, but from prior experience seems to use a bit more resources than other distros.

5. PCLinuxOS - The off shoot of Mandriva seems fairly good, but has small support and with the KDE 3 version the KDe menu structure anoyed me (minor gripe)


You will notice from the list I have no slack distros iin my list, I must say I have never used a slack based distro, but as I am ideally looking for a desktop replacement distro my main requirement is one that once up takes minimal maintenance and Previously I always heard than slack distros were high on maintenance.

While I think about it is probably a good idea if I give you an idea of what it will be running on

HP G60-217EM Laptop
2gb Ram
250gb HD
AMD Turion Dual-Core RM-72 2.10ghz Processor
Integrated Webcam
Dual Layer DVD/ lightscribe writer
Widescreen Display (1366 x 768)

Thanks,



Gavin,

You could try the sidux kde version
it rocks
sidux rocks period!
http://sidux.com/

http://sidux.com/module-mirrors.html


Others may be Ultimate edition 2.3 KDE
that's big
http://ultimateedition.info/ultimate-edition-2-3/

I've used both Mandriva and Fedora 11 running KDE. I've been satisfied with both.

It's been written, but not by me, that Mandriva's a very KDE-centric distro, and it shows in the way KDE is so 'seamless' in the 2009 versions. This may be so, but to be honest, I haven't seen much difference when running Fedora, which is a Gnome-centric distro. Both run KDE 4.2 with nothing but complete stability on my machine.

And this may be the thing - You may be more limited with the AMD graphics card. No 3-D with the available drivers. Nvidia has proprietary drivers available that will get you the 3-D stuff, which helps. There are scripts available in Fedora that makes their installation very easy; I'm not sure about Mandriva (but I have installed them manually without too much trouble in the past).

Odd objection to SuSE. It is an rpm-based distro and these don't use the apt, apt-get, synaptic set of utilities for managing .deb package files. Package management has changed with SuSE over recent releases, but now the underlying utility is zypper and, if you want to use a GUI, yast would be what you want.

And it also odd that you didn't find the same thing with fedora as that is an rpm-based distro, too.

The difference I found with Fedora to SuSE was that it had Yum which was nice an easy to install apps with compared to SuSe when I last used it, where at the time they didn't seem to have anything compariable, I have also had some serious problems with SuSE where I would have a real problems getting it to print to my HP1020 Printer (even when using the foo2zjs driver).

To me it is essential to have a way I can automate installs through scripts, as I usally write a script after the first install to install all my main apps, to simplify the process if I need to do a re-install at any time in the future.

Wait for Slackware 13.0.

Does that include the KDE version, that was released just a few days back ?.