Hi, Just thought I'd mention how impressed I am with Linux, after using it for only 10 minutes. The Live CD of Mandriva 2008 loads software quicker than my XP Installation! I'm almost gutted that it doesn't work on my laptop, just crashes on setting CPU frequency! I will certainly look more into it in the summer. </End of pointless post>
Nice dude. The thing that really got me hooked was how stable and reliable it is. Once I went 6 months without having to do any major maintenance, I was completely sold. Now I could never deal with Windows again.
It's been a while since I used Mandriva, the last version I used was 2007 and I was impressed with it. I still prefer Debian based distros because I'm very comfortable with apt and the system layout but Mandriva was easy to use and detected and configured hardware very well. Linux is certainly progressing, I should probably take another look at pure Debian soon, probably check out latest testing. Would you say that unstable/sid is ok for desktop use? Last time I used it was a long time ago and it changed a bit too fast for it to be really useful to me. I like having very new software but don't like having Xorg updated every day.
I am running Lenny on some production desktop systems right now, even a few production MX filters that see 15k+ messages per hour. It's been good for me so far. Of course, Lenny's about to be released this summer, so it won't be in testing for that much longer. As for Sid, it's very fluid by nature, so you'll see things like X.org and even Glibc updated pretty regularly. Not for the feint of heart.
Now I'm really impressed... Got it working on my laptop by disabling ACPI, and now even the wireless works with ndiswrapper (took about 30 seconds to setup)!! I really like the 3d effects, although i'm sure the novelty will wear off eventually.
3D effects are great at first, but too much of it takes it's toll on your eyes. When you go back to a normal window manager the simplicity is quite nice.
My brain goes insane if I don't have wobbly windows now The issues I have when running Compiz is that the performance of Flash is terrible. Full screen mode is a no-no. Some games still have issues with Compiz too.
Well the novelty lasted less than 48 hours... with my laptop having onboard graphics the performance was reduced, and annoyed me! Whilst I'm still really impressed, a few things are beginning to annoy me, anyone have any suggestions? 1) When I switch between desktops, the taskbar shows all the open applications. Any idea how I can make each desktop have its own task bar? 2) I like to stream my music from a Windows PC. Currently I can only do this using VLC Media player (which i downloaded), and playback is sometimes jerky. Also, I cannot play a playlist, just a single track at a time :S. 3) I tried to install a trial of VMWare, it was an RPM, but when I tried to run the command 'vmware' it said it had to compile something, and eventually asked for the location of my C Headers (or something like that). It couldn't find them and installation / configuration stopped! 4) To compile software from source, do I need the kernel source? If so, where can I get it? (Mandriva One Spring 2008). Thanks in advance for any suggestions. Thomas
I did not like Mandriva all that much but it I found it to make an easy transition from Windows. I toy around with quite a few distributions and so far prefer Debian based ones. As with Addis I love Apt. I think the best one yet for my aging laptop is Sidux although at the moment I am re-trialling Kubuntu. Assuming you are using KDE, right click on the panel you wish to configure (bottom in this case) and choose to configure the panel. Go to the taskbar section and untick the 'Show windows from all desktops' option. VLC plays everything for me. As I never had any issues playing multimedia with Linux (apart from certain streaming videos like asx etc) I do not have experience trouble shooting this. I always use VLC to play m3u lists.... not sure why it will not it for you.... Why trial VMWare? Just use free VirtualBox.... Sorry.... do not do compiling me.... If it is not prepackaged I do not wanna know! Only jesting. I am not that good with Linux to answer that.... :doh:
