Yet Another Linux Thread

Last January-ish I switched to Kubuntu again and loved it. Switching to Linux is something I seem to do about once a year, then switch back
I find I'm far more productive in Linux because it keeps my hands on the keyboard where they belong I've also replaced my Microscotch ComfortCurve 2000, which I've been using for 10 years, with a Das Keyboard 4 Ultimate.

Today I am about to install a 512GB ADATA SSD in my laptop, and so I plan on dual booting and installing Linux once more. Hopefully using it as my primary OS for much longer.

I'm looking to try some KDE-based distros. The four I've narrowed it down to are Linux Mint, Manjaro, Mageia and Kubuntu. I'm leaning towards Mint, but am open to other suggestions, warnings, errors and notices.

I use my desktop primarily for web development, maybe a little Java dev again, and maybe even a little A5 dev if I can figure out the android port this time. I have an old Intel i5 laptop (Lenovo Thinkpad) with dual screens (17" 4:3 and 22" 16:10). Last time I did have some minor wireless driver issues, but hopefully those are gone or ... something.

Anyone have some recommendations or advice, articles to check out, or software to include? Anyone subscribe to some Linux or KDE related resources I should check out? I'll have to relearn a lot of stuff, but I don't think it will take long for me to be up and running.

I did use Xubuntu first, and for the longest (about a year). I like KDE's widgets, and workspaces, and activities. Even with 2 monitors I still run a cube and swap between sides, but I also used activites to swap between jobs. I can set up a "College" activity so that all of my class related links and apps are open/available, or move to a Java dev activity, or move to a web dev activity, etc. It kinda blew my mind the last time I used it.

I'm not sure what has changed in XFCE over the last 2 years. It was nice, but I just felt like I was more productive in KDE.

I cannot fathom how anybody manages to get unstable to actually do stuff. It seems every time I try to run unstable a package that I require is broken by other packages that I require. And I go for a few minutes before rebooting and installing something else. Currently my main machine is running Debian stable. There is no Windows partition. I overwrote all drives with Debian.

For KDE I've run PC-BSD, Sabayon and Arch. I only use mate or cinnamon with Mint.

As for sabayon, I had good impression of it back then, but now I wonder if it is still good for a recommendation for you, so I look up their homepage again.

Its a binary distro of Gentoo, has its own package manager, I remember it as being a KDE distro but now it seems it offers the others as well. The latest DVD seems to be almost a year old but as a rolling release that just means there will be a crap-tonne of updates to install.

[EDIT] Yeah, debian and centos seem to be perpetually broken. And those are two of the big distros? wtf?

I've install Mint first, so far so good. Even my condenser mic works, and my webcam, both of which had issues with Ubuntu 12.04.

One issue so far is that I have had to reinsert my HDMI cable 3 times, twice for strange reasons. When I opened global keyboard shortcuts my monitor went dark. Then again when I opened Cheese.

I've been watching a couple Sabayon reviews on YouTube. Gentoo, with portage, was my first great experience on Linux. I remember having just tried Redhat and going bananas living in dependency hell, then finding Gentoo and being able to just 'emerge <package>' and poof! Everything is there. I learned a lot back then.

Arch looks good, but I must say there is an air of elitism on their site. But hey, maybe that's a good thing, and I'll add it to the list of distros to check out.

I don't know if you can call it a "kde distro". Debian has kde packages, but they really don't have the manpower to actually polish it the way other distros do.

Out of curiosity, what package bit you, when? I've been running Arch for the better part of a year, and pacman has always warned of package changes (vim to vim-minimal, et cetera).

Arch has been gaining a lot of good traction lately. Kernel devs have switched to it, and Linux Voice deemed it the best distro in 2014. Most importantly of all, I use and endorse Arch... For a KDE fan, however, while both Arch and Debian are great, I would not recommend either of them. You're better off with Mint or PC-BSD.

I have switched to Arch myself a few months ago, and I like it being hands on, it reminds me of Gentoo but better polished and with better documentation. I am not sure I agree w.r.t official packages, the last security vulnerabilities they were ahead of the pack with the fixes (for instance, with GHOST they patched glibc a few days before it went public). I do agree with the packaging regarding AUR, but as they are user packages it is kind of expected, and YMMV.

EDIT: Also, like Gentoo, I understand that Arch is more geared for power users - for regular users I would recommend another distro, e.g. Mint or just plain Ubuntu/KUbuntu.

I can't remember. It was probably 2 or 4 years ago... I'd have to search the boards to see when I was talking about it... I have no doubt that the breakage was my fault, but it just seems annoying to me as a user that I have to do exceptional work to make things work. I think even things that I didn't initially set up so I had to figure out how. All to keep my system updated. For the most part I just want vulnerabilities fixed. Rarely do I expect a software update to add features that I'll use (that usually comes with distro upgrades, which usually means reinstalling, though certainly power users can make it work by upgrading the system in place).

I'm not sure that means much. For a kernel hacker to use it doesn't mean much for the average user. That is somebody that already probably has put together a system from scratch. They might not mind having to maintain the system at that level because it's the level that they work at. As for the "deeming best", the article seems completely biased by the authors. They seem to leave out Gentoo entirely, and don't really give Fedora or Debian the attention they deserve... I mean, in my experience, Gentoo's documentation is unrivaled, and obviously Gentoo has the potential to outrun pretty much every major distro. Debian looks to match AUR for packages, and they are official and stable, not community contributions with little or no oversight!

Arch is a fine system. I recommend trying it at least once. I just don't think it's the ideal distribution for most people. Right now I'm running Debian predominantly for semi-Steam support. I hate Ubuntu so Debian is pretty much the next closest thing to what Valve is targetting. I wouldn't mind trying Gentoo again, as that is just a joy to run and their documentation is unrivaled and really puts you in complete control, and I wouldn't mind someday returning to the ease and bleed of Fedora as well (that might even motivate me to upgrade the Fedora allegro5 package someday... ).

A power user in Windows is like a normal GNU/Linux user. A GNU/Linux power user compiles everything from source, configures every service and application manually by tweaking configuration files or writing them from scratch, etc. You can make a system work exactly your way if you put the time into it. That is the Gentoo way. And to a lesser extent IMO, Arch's too I guess. Of course, Gentoo does make it possible to more or less get it running without a lot of extra work, but the system is designed to let you customize things to the extent that you want.

Yeah, absolutely. I respect bam's opinion, but I don't agree with it. If I have to recompile code to change something, that means the code sucks and should have had a config file. It also means I have to learn literally dozens if not hundreds of APIs and codebases to be expert enough to know what to fix if it's anything but a one-liner. Fixing something without understanding the rest means I'm introducing bugs, not fixing them.

I went through the hassle in highschool of getting Gentoo and compiling. And after custom compiling everything for my specific CPU over a day or two. I had... an OS essentially identical that wasn't magically faster like I hoped. I had the mistaken impression that all Linux was that difficult and I didn't come back to it for years with Linux Mint, and then Xubuntu.

I want the power to configure things as I want. (Which is why I love Linux for dev work.) But I want to be encapsulated from having to understand what's going on under-the-hood. My job is getting things done, not learning APIs.

Careful. I've had lots of dependency issues with Mint as they move forward. Things just stop working. My laptop had to be converted to Ubuntu from Mint because they completely stopped supporting the version that was only a couple years old (or less!). I couldn't get the packages I needed, and slowly the problem creeped up until it became a useless install.