Two nights ago, I got sick of my trashed Gutsy installation, which had become bloated, slow, and a little glitchy. Yes — I can trash an Ubuntu installation beyond recognition in only four months.
Well, I’d been reading about Fedora 8, which had some shiny new features like built-in PulseAudio. I’d also generally got good vibes from the community about the distro. So, I decided I would reinstall with Fedora (amd64). I wiped my Ubuntu partition, and stuck Fedora in its place.
Well, my first experience with Fedora was the slow, and slightly ugly, bootup process. An out-of-the-box Fedora was even slower to boot up than my slow Gutsy system. Not to mention a partially text-mode boot experience (because Fedora uses an Xorg-based splash screen, which can only start late in the boot process, leaving lots of text on the screen until it gets to the stage where it can start X), and they didn’t even bother to put any form of splash on the shutdown process. Maybe that’s subtle, but it’s the subtle things that make me love Ubuntu so much.
Another issue that couldn’t be ignored was the lack of a network connection. Fedora does not support the RT2570 wireless USB chipset out of the box. So, I had to drag out a network cable to get some form of networking. Even after getting a network connection, downloading the development packages (gcc and the like), downloading SerialMonkey’s RT2570 driver, I still couldn’t get it to compile. For some reason, it couldn’t see the kernel headers I had installed.
I quite liked the fact that Fedora barely deviates from the default GNOME setup. If you choose the Clearlooks theme with the GNOME icon set, they even keep the original GNOME “foot” logo on the Applications menu — something that I believe Ubuntu should be doing for all themes except for its own Human theme. Things like the spatial file manager, and the default shutdown/logout menus are enabled by default. I believe that the spatial file manager, once you get used to it, is better than the browser-based view.
However, after only a few hours, I quickly became frustrated. Fedora didn’t have an in-built method for installing NVIDIA drivers. Also, I didn’t like many of its system administration utilities. I spent ages figuring out how to add our ISP’s Fedora mirror to the yum configuration, and was disappointed to find out that they didn’t mirror the development repository.
Later, I downloaded a netboot .iso of Ubuntu Hardy, and wiped Fedora clean. Maybe I’ll come back to Fedora later, but Ubuntu has everything I need, and I feel more comfortable using it.
P.S. Ubuntu Hardy has PulseAudio built-in!
Maybe you should try OpenSuse 10.3… I’m running 10.2 at work and 10.3 at home. They both breathed new life into my aging computers.
Installing nvidia on 10.3 is a snap. (I believe a 1-click install–Just google opensuse nvidia). It’s also surprisingly fast. Boot up at home is about 20 seconds or so. Plus, the OpenSuse team does a nice job on the “small” touches — custom grub screen, splash, + the kicker that everyone is imitating.
As for gnome, part of the problem why Ubuntu runs slow is because of gnome. Gnome is *bloated* — ironic, huh? It’s designed to be simple to use but the code is bloated. (I read that somewhere but I don’t remember the link). In any case, it seems to be true if you run the latest gnome with the latest KDE 3 on the same computer.
There’s only one small hitch when you’re installing OpenSuse. There’s a non-intuitive option in the install — synch with network — or something like that — it’ll download all 3 GB of packages and turn a quick 20 min install into a hour long (or more) affair.
I used to like SuSE. In fact, if it weren’t for SuSE 9.2 and the multi-headed beast that is YaST, I wouldn’t have dived into Linux so deeply as I have. Hmm. Maybe would have, and it was just inevitable.
But I really grew to hate the fact that SuSE couldn’t live without Qt and all the KDE packages. YaST was a Qt application, so it really couldn’t be helped. I really really hate Qt for some reason, and I just felt awful that it was on my system.
One-click NVIDIA installation really wasn’t my problem with Fedora. It takes about five minutes to install the kernel headers, gcc and the like, and run the NVIDIA installer. Not hard.
But yeah, GNOME is definitely bloated. And GTK+ is just damn slow. On a computer with just the “nv” driver running, dragging a window over another window will create massive lag. On the same system, with the same nv driver, doing the same in KDE3 will have no lag whatsoever.
I also run GoboLinux occasionally (not often, because it is a pain to maintain, and breaks often), which only has KDE3 (apparently, GNOME is incompatible with its revamped filesystem), and the whole system is much snappier than Ubuntu or Fedora.
But, I am a visual person, and aesthetics in the desktop environment really matter to me. Unfortunately, because of that, KDE just doesn’t cut it. It’s ugly, to put it simply. Ugly in the way it looks, and ugly in the design of the user interface.
I didn’t like SuSE because of its bloat. GNOME may be bloated, and KDE slim, but SuSE is far more bloated than Ubuntu, desktop environment aside. I have grown to love Ubuntu’s way of doing things, and it’s going to be very hard for me to go back. If you ask me, OpenSuSE has kind of…died.
I’m not a OpenSuse fanboy as I also run ArchLinux … however, in all fairness, OpenSuse has gone a long way since the 9.X days. Compared to a Ubuntu Fiesty install on the same machine, 10.3 is way zippier and boots a heck of lot faster (20 secs or so). As for yast, yes I will admit it is still slow specially when you compare it to apt-get or aptitude, but it’s not as painful as past versions.
If you’re a visual person, I’ve heard good things (about asthetics, etc) about KDE 4…it supposedly also (although that’s what the debate is) uses less resources than KDE 3.
I’ve been meaning to try out KDE 4. My only experience with their “next-gen” user interface was when I compiled a Qt frontend to WebKit. When I dragged the toolbar around, there were these nice animations when these little spaces on the side of the window expanded to fit the toolbar.