They also complained about default font rendering, which is a bit strange because I found rendering in OpenSUSE much worse out of the box than in Slackware 13.

Anyway for what little it's worth.... link [tuxradar.com]

Well they are right, it's too much effort to click on system settings and go to appearance and then fonts.
That's it I'm moving to openSUSE.

That roundup is primarily concerned with bling out the box, which (thankfully) is not one of PV's priorities

Some people are into that kind of thing and that's fine by me - they've got a nice selection of distros to choose from. I don't see that review as a slight on slackware.

I wonder what they did with the Systems Settings font selector.

I think it is a fair appraisal of KDE 4.2.4 in Slackware 13.0, it was a bit ropey, however it is unfair to compare it against KDE 4.3.2 (Mandriva) and KDE 4.3.3 (OpenSuse). I am sure KDE 4.3.3 in current would have got a lot better appraisal.

samac

Yeah, they compared KDE4.2.4 with 4.3.x of other distros. However, if you go by their reasons of not liking slack, then it wouldn't have made a difference. And they said you need to type "startx" to login. The reviewer doesn't even know the magic of inittab and runlevels. But hey, what more can you expect from a guy rating spoon-fed distros higher just because of their fancy ready-to-use GUIs.

/rant

It's just the same as Upstream, so it's using default font rendering, I much prefer customising those settings myself. Also about typing startx at boot, all they had to do was edit /etc/inittab if they really wanted to have KDM at boot, but again I prefer typing startx because sometimes I just don't need to load up KDE.

When ever reading an article I always consider the source

I've just installed KDE 4.3.4 from the latest current update. Huge improvement to speed. I normally run KDE with Openbox as the window manager, but using the default kwin seems even faster than the lightweight option. Well worth the upgrade thanks PV and crew.

samac

Tuxradar/Linux Format has always had an Ubuntu bias/focus to it(at least it seems like that to me), but they have shown signs of intelligence from time to time, such as this slackware article from back in june. How they can go from that to this latest superficial nonsense is beyond me. Perhaps some articles are written by staffers and others by freelancers. That could explain the quality difference.

That linked article is not the norm for their printed material. It (the above article) was actually quite good - I was surprised it came from Linux Format.

I know the last printed issue I picked up was full of simple spelling errors and inconsistencies. I'm not talking about European English to American English (colour - color) either. But things like saying "The last release [Slackware] came with LDE 3" It's not just the article on Slackware 13 that has bad information "The Slackware installer uses cfdisk" The installer does not partition discs, cfdisk, fdisk and parted are all available.

Many of the articles had spelling errors, or unchecked facts. Even the Nero 4.0 review. The reviewer said that version 4.0 has the new feature of adding 64bit support. Nero 64bit support was available in the 3.x releases, not sure about the 2.x release. The reviewer also states that there is a lack of documentation " nothing to read if you can't access the internet" Nero installs man pages to cover the gui and nerocmd portions, and multi-language PDF manuals. There were other articles with unchecked facts and small spelling errors as well. No one's perfect, but when an issue has an abundance of errors such as this one (DEC 2009 #125) it makes one wonder.

An article or two can be forgiven - but this many articles in a printed magazine? Honestly makes me doubt anything they publish.

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Only 5/10? Surely that must be a misprint, they meant 15/10

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Thanks for that distrubed1. Interesting insights there.

I haven't bought a paper computing magazine in many a year. I stopped buying them when they stopped writing articles of interest to people who wanted to program and became nothing but an advertising tool.

Ha-ha, good one, brianL.

I quite like LXF and after reading it for a while I have learned to calibrate the different authors' viewpoints.

The prevalence of Ubuntu (and gnome) centric articles in the magazine simply reflects the popularity of Ubuntu amongst linux (desktop) users. They often mention that explicitly in their editorials.