I forgot to blog that over christmas I had a brief look at the state of the art in linux desktop distributions. I tried three, two from cover disks in 'Linux Format' magazine:
- Ubuntu 7.10
- Interesting to see that the ubuntu CD is now a live CD that boots to let you play with it but the desktop has an 'install' shortcut so you can install it as well. Nice presentation.
- Fedora 8
- This installed nicely and was ok, a bit like Ubuntu but blue. Seen one gnome desktop, seen them all.
- PCLinuxOS
- This was an interesting new distribution that uses KDE rather than gnome and also uses apt for repositories which I still prefer to rpm/yum.
These distributions all have the nice new Beryl/Compiz guis to give Vista style windows animations (I like the bouncing effect) but what I really liked was the 'cube', a quick way to move between virtual desktops using the keyboard. Unfortunately none of them would work properly with my home desktop multi-monitor setup despite hours wasted editing X config files. Is it really at the limit of modern computer science for X to not get confused as to which monitor is which? Do microsoft have a patent on it? I got it running apart from the title bars not appearing on windows (ffs).
I ended up installing PCLinuxOS on my laptop (Dell D410) as I decided I like the depth of KDE compared to gnomes attempt to mimic windows 'simplicity'. Unfortunately I'm now in a situation where I have to sign in as root to get it to connect to a wireless network (argh). There's probably an easy way to do this but in the googling I have done it has eluded me thus far. If it weren't for this I'd be perfectly happy with it on the laptop. I'm not sure the battery life is as good as it is with Windows but with its extended life battery it runs for a couple of hours between charges which is about as long as I get to use it.
Conclusion: the year of the linux laptop maybe, probably not the desktop.
Peter's Moblog
