Any Linux users here? I have been a linux user for quite some time, but when I got my Radeon 9700 last year, I had to go back to Windows only b/c at the time there were no Linux drivers for that card. Now that there are, I went ahead and grabbed the ISOs of RedHat 9. In all honesty, I'm not overly impressed by RedHat 9. Well, check that, I'm not impressed by what they've done to Gnome. It would be great for someone who is new to Linux, but it seems to me that they've "dumbed down" the settings tools a bit too much. It didn't run too quickly either. I've got an XP 1800 with 768 Megs of RAM and it still is kindof sluggish. I'm sure if I compiled it on my box, I'd be going great, but out of the box I'm disappointed. Now, I've always liked Gnome over KDE. I dunno, I've just found KDE to be really neat, but I liked Gnome's widget set and customization better than KDE. Thankfully, I installed KDE 3 in addition to Gnome, and HOLY COW!!! I am blown away by what they've done to KDE. It's so insanely easy to use, very customizable, just so nicely executed. Konqueror (upon which that new MacOS browser is based) is fabulous (what I'm using right now), the applications are great, its much more customizable than it had previously been, and it runs very quickly. I'd be perfectly happy to roll this out to the desktop of most of my users. It just runs beautifully. I've got to hand it to the KDE Developers, they have REALLY done something wonderful here, and I think they've got a great desktop for the masses. There's still some way to go, but I really like what I see. I'm afraid I may end up going back to Gnome again though -- I just don't feel quite right with KDE, despite how much I *LOVE* it. We'll see though. Any other Linux users here? What distros do you use? I'm thinking of giving Gentoo a look . . .
Yes KDE 3 is awesome. The transparent menu works so smoothly (without crashing) and so cool to look at. I also like blackbox, less is more is what I always say. I know in blackbox, you can have overlapping windows, for instance, have IE full screen in the background, then notepad partially on top of the IE window. With blackbox, I could just move the mouse cursor from the notepad window to the IE window, and then I can scroll the IE window with the notepad window still on top. Does windows have a hack for this? And so, is there a hack/program for windows that automatically copies text when you highlight them, so you don’t need to highlight and press ctrl+c? I always end up forgetting to press ctrl+c when I’m on a windows box. I use Red Hat 7.X and Slackware 8.1, just because it sounds cool Knoppix is also cool for people who are interested in Linux, just download the ISO, burn it, pop it in your cdrom, boot from the cdrom, and you have a working version Linux within minutes.
ah Vengeance, I thought you knew better than to go with RH.. they are the Microsoft of the Linux world..build for the lowest common denominator.. Slack or Suse would be my choices.. i'm running Suse 6.3 right now...pretty nice...kinda bloated in size if you go for a full install(6Gigs) but can be trimmed down to a functional Gig or less..
I have ran a builds of Mandrake, too bad my drivers for my win modem wouldn't compile on the 9.1 kernal. I am using Longhorn 4008 now.
I've been with RedHat since version 5.2, and I've used about a dozen different distros, but there's something about RedHat that just grabs me. A few years ago, I went through about 2 months of installing and using different Linux distros -- Stormix, Debian, Slack, Suse, TurboLinux, Caldera, Mandrake, etc. I ended up going back to (at the time) RH 6.2. Right now, I'm considering doing trying Gentoo and Debian. Debian's apt-get is just such a huge selling point, b/c it always happens that I end up in RPM hell within 3 or 4 months of installing RedHat. I've got Linux dual-boot on two different drives. My linux drive is removable, so I can just pop different HDs in there and install different distros without deleting my original. My biggest problem is that I am REALLY LAZY when it comes to Linux. If I have to configure something, I don't want to read about how to do it, I just want it to happen like magic, so I haven't learned a whole hell of a lot about how to really get in and do lots of stuff with it. If I go with Debian or Gentoo, I won't have the luxury of being lazy.
I've used Red Hat since about 5.1 (kernel 2.0.36 or so). Now I'm up to 9.0, and love KDE 3.1. Konqueror is really amazing - I've finally moved away from Mozilla. When just upgrade instead of doing a fresh install, I don't see the default GNOME desktop, since it doesn't overwrite the defaults, so I can't comment about it. However, I do like the fact that the fonts look pretty good right out of the box. Also, I like the new redhat-config-* tools, it makes life easier. I've tried other distributions, such as Gentoo and Mandrake, but always seem to come back to Red Hat for my laptop. Apt-get is also available for Red Hat, so I don't worry about dependency hell anymore. That's the one reason I would have migrated to Debian. I thought Gentoo was a great idea, but ran into enough ebuild problems to decide I wasn't ready to deal with it. Compilation takes a lot of time, and I didn't really notice enough benefit to the optimizations on my computer. The documentation is really good, though.
The fonts ARE amazing aren't they?!!!! Better than Windows, even with Windows XP's font smoothing on. Konqueror rocks, but I don't think I'm going to be using it over Mozilla for now (although I'm using it right now). I don't like the tabbed browsing in Konqueror as much as Mozilla. I've also run across a few pages that didn't render quite correctly. But Konqueror is so fast and so eye-friendly. If they add more features for tabbed browsing, I'll drop Mozilla for good. I'd heard about the apt-get for RPM, but I don't know much about it. I'll have to check it out. BTW, I found that KDE finally added child panels to KDE, and I'm hooked. I think I'll be using KDE from now on. I'll still stick with some of Gnome's applications though -- Evolution rules!
