KDE 4.0 Release Event and its back to Arch

As you know by now, KDE 4.0.0 has been released and met with mixed feedback all around. The KDE 4.0.0 events have been taking place all over the world with the main one from January 17-19, 2008 at Google’s Campus in Mountain View, California. You can find coverage of the first and second day at Dot. The release event keynote has also been made available online on Google video and can be found here.

I’m working on fixing up my Arch installation with KDEmod4, which is actually in the KDEmod testing repository since we do not have a complete KDE 4.0.0 desktop yet. I imagine there will be wide scale adoption of KDE 4.1 in all distributions, which is due in July, 2008 according to liquidat. From what I’ve read, Aaron Seigo, President of the KDE e.V. has a real way with words, but I’ll provide more on that in a follow up to this post.

Remember I said that my distro hop was over? Well, I better not say that again until I’ve used a distribution for atleast a year, which I haven’t. So far, I’ve been disappointed with Kubuntu’s KDE4 LiveCD because of the missing icons and use of old ones, which really spoiled the ‘Oxygen effect’ for me. Also, the installation refused to detect my partitions and setup my internet. openSUSE fixed all that and I must say that YaST provides a great foundation for making spins and so does Fedora’s Anaconda installer.

Since I have no time to compile my packages from source and go with Gentoo, I’m going back to Arch which happens to be the distribution I’ve used the most. Now I’ve had to download packages intermittently, so it could take another day to get my full desktop up and running so I can provide an actual review and an article on why I’m going back to Arch.

Just remember that if you’re keen on using KDE4 as soon as possible with a long-term approach, then make sure you’ve decided the distribution that’s best for you and wait for your (six months maximum I would say) distro to release the packages in its repositories. It also depends on how adventurous you wish to be.

Give KDE 4.0.0 love, time and bug reports only

There have been a host of articles and comments around the blogosphere, written after the launch of KDE 4.0.0 criticizing it for being released at the time it has and being just “oh-so-buggy”. Let me begin with this OSNews article on KDE 4.0.0. The review is fine when it comes to reporting a few kinks here and there even groaning about the fonts which might not be visibly appealing to everyone (I mean, opinion varies). And of course, its again the situation when users review three or four exciting features of KDE 4 without reminding or telling readers that there is more hidden treasure underneath in the form of the excellent new framework and technical backend.

Amidst the reactions to this article were a few comments that caught my attention, beginning with this one by dagw:

The KDE team obviously shot themselves in the foot with calling it 4.0. I’m sure they had a reason for not calling it Beta or Developer release, but whatever the reason it was a bad one. Especially since every complaint is met with a response of “well what did you expect, it’s a Beta software”. No matter which way I look at it, the KDE team screwed up this release, and it would probably be in their best interest to admit it and just flat out say, we jumped the gun.

What’s weird is how it is self-contradictory when he goes on to add, “That being said I’m in no way criticising the underlying technology. I’ve looked at the new framework and libraries, and they look pretty damn amazing.” Now in case any of you are planning to review the KDE 4.0.0 release or try it out, then keep these KDE 4.0 Review Reminders in mind.

To address the release timing point, I would say that if KDE 4.0.0 had not been released now and had been put off for a 4.1 release with those very features then it could result in a delay for other KDE applications as well. Once the KDE 4.0.0 team has presented a basic desktop with the developer framework in place, it serves to help developers of Amarok, Kopete and other KDE applications, if not in a large way considering that they would have to focus on their own features and stability, but to atleast help them finish the applications. It would also mean that people can take up new and current projects early on and eventually converge to a point when we have one amazing, complete desktop. One of the readers of the OSNews article gave the right details to describe what I’m talking about:

Amarok was ported in 2 days to OSX and could have been ported faster, according to developers. Phonon allows a media player to use GStreamer or Xine on Linux/BSD, Quicktime on OSX and DirectShow on Windows without changing code. Same goes for Solid, which will allow use of removable devices, Bluetooth, WiFi, ACPI on all supported OSes. And have a look at the impressive Decibel framework.

There’s much to be said about KDE4 besides Plasma and SVG rendering, but reviewers aren’t looking in the right place.

The Road to KDE 4: Phonon Makes Multimedia Easier
The Road to KDE 4: Solid Brings Hardware
Configuration and Control to KDE
The Pillars of KDE 4: Decibel
The Pillars of KDE 4: Decibel Definitions and Benefits

Jos Poortvliet, a KDE volunteer points out in his response to the article that packaging is also a tricky issue with there being a time period required to adapt to the release, which eventually we have to do. He also shares the point that other applications would be affected, primarily the ones in the main KDE desktop right from basic applications like Kate or Juk to the KDE-Edu project.

The community would suffer the most with a later release date - this is what most users do not realize. The community consists of contributors broadly of two types - users and developers. Users submit their feedback and the bugs they moan about on the blogs but sometimes don’t bother to officially report thinking its already done (yes, it tends to be a common perspective). They are also the ones who are mainly waiting for the finished product. The developers are the ones behind the project and receive the users’ feedback, adding new features and fixes and responding to the user community. So simply put, a later release would mean a longer time to review, which in term would mean a longer time required to fix bugs and keep rolling in the features.

KDE 4.0.0 is in a state where it can be used. After all the warnings you must have received or received here, it is probably clear KDE 4.0.0 is not ready for full-time usage but it will certainly crash less and let developers carry out their work and probably allow you to contribute. If 4.0.0 for some reason just refuses to run on your computer then wait a bit longer for 4.0.1 or 4.0.2 (which I cannot say will be officially announced, but you can always ask on IRC or check the repositories of your distribution that has KDE 4.0.0). This release will ultimately attract more users even if it does happen to temporarily put them off with features being unstable or “not ready” according to them, because watching the efficiency with which things get fixed and new stuff appears will keep make them stick around.

You might have also realized that there are just a handful of distributions that are offering KDE 4.0.0 in their repositories or development releases. I’ve seen a couple of requests on the Arch Linux Forums for putting KDE 4.0.0 in testing but I do not think that it would make sense. The big guns like openSUSE, Ubuntu and Fedora have a good number of developers to test and package this release and true stability would be witnessed in KDE 4 when the majority of the distributions start adopting it as their main or secondary KDE version.

Calling KDE 4.0.0 a step backwards is a little too strong for a couple of complaints about the theme so I do hope this pretty lame situation improves. If you want to hear it from the boss himself, Aaron Seigo’s post on why KDE 4.0 should be release now is a great read. Till then just give this sparkling new desktop environment a little time and patience even if you cannot love it (how you cannot love it is beyond me but then again we’re all different!). Stand up and be counted by getting involved in the process. Learn a programming language like C++ or Python or brush up your existing skills (as in my case), try to see if you can find bugs and learn how to report them here.

While you do all this just remember to leave the reality for once, and live the dream!

KDE 4.0.0: a new “free” beginning

The new version of KDE finally here and I’m using it. KDE 4.0.0 has been released after two years of work and the announcement can be found here. So free yourself and get a distro (I’d recommend Kubuntu) and download the latest KDE 4.0 packages. If you’re looking for something stable then KDE 3.5.8 is fine for the time being. I downloaded kde4-core last night in Kubuntu and soon I’ll go for the full-blown KDE 4.0 solution.

The most important thing I noticed that is quite stable and usable but I’m pretty sure at the moment you’ll find a reason to get frustrated. The desktop effects are finally working for me and I think that its nothing too fancy, very usable and pleasant. Konqueror loads websites real quick but I feel that there is some way to go before it becomes a swiss-knife again. Every time I close Konqi I get an error for some reason.

Dolphin is working fine and is much better than the Dolphin that Kubuntu implemented in Gutsy, though I’m a little annoyed that tabs haven’t been implemented and I could really use them. Also this time round, all the Oxygen icons have been added and my desktop icons from KDE 3 weren’t scattered like in RC2. The plasmoids seem to work. I can get a clock and launcher running fine. I hope they feature a “Get More” button like they did for the wallpapers in KDE 3.

Speaking of wallpapers, I just noticed something that I don’t think I saw in RC2. Just like Fedora 8 has Infinity, KDE 4.0 has Slideshow and you can choose a folder full of wallpapers and it will display a different image after a certain time period which you can set. Firefox looks ugly and its basically with the case of any GTK2+ application. The KDE 3.5.x GTK2+ settings option soon needs to be added in the Control Centre to fix this.

Now, I’ve been using Kubuntu and the only drawback I find is Adept which can be a little buggy. Also at the moment, I am unable to get a fresh install of KDE 4 without having to install KDE 3.5.8. While that isn’t a bad thing, I prefer to stick to KDE 4 from now on only because things seem to be shaping up better and better every day. For this reason I intend to try Debian next and download the latest KDE 4 packages from the testing and unstable repository. Debian is a fine distribution and is supported on several architectures which I think is simply amazing. It will more or less be a rolling release just like Arch is, so that will suit me even better.

Before I end this post, I’d just like to congratulate all the contributors and developers of KDE on the wonderful desktop they have given us and I would like to wish them all the best in the road ahead to making this truly the best “free” desktop experience for users.

KDE 4.0.0 Tagged and the end of my distro hop?

As I write this after what’s been a really busy week gone by for me, but more importantly for the KDE development team and contributors who have been committing changes to the trunk at an extraordinary pace, (especially on the final day) KDE4 is just three days away and counting. The big man behind the project has already issued a warning: “New Desktop Environment in the Wild: Children Beware“. Yes, KDE4 could and probably will eat your children alive… yes (and provide a host of educational applications, but then your children would be dead before that!). Nah. One of the developers announced the tagging as well as the commencement of the 4.1.x work.

There is a video of the new KWin effects and the main thing that strikes me when I see them is that they can be useful eyecandy that enhance the experience instead of only providing visual satisfaction. The Polish website which made the screencast also has some screenshots available. I don’t understand the language but the screenshots are in English and are pretty clear. Here’s one for you to see below.

Ah, now then. Did I mention that I stopped hopping for distros? Well I’ve told myself this several times but till now I haven’t really kept it. Now that I’ve tried the distros I’ve wanted to try for now, I’ve decided that Kubuntu is ideal for me. “Kubuntu, you say? #17 on Distrowatch in the last six months? Isn’t that a little… erm, low?” No, as a matter of fact it isn’t. There are few decent Kubuntu reviews around which could tempt me to write one if time permits, but here is the one that got me thinking about Kubuntu.

I’ve just come off PCLinuxOS 2007 (PCLOS) and I had been happy with it but had decided to try Kubuntu 7.10 ‘Gutsy Gibbon’ after being a little put off with the 7.04 ‘Feisty Fawn’. Now with PCLOS I just had a few packages needed to install and I knew that displacing its radical approach would take some doing. Sure, YaST does a great job in openSUSE but the Software Management was slow and I couldn’t really work with that. I was on the verge of installing the Smart Package Manager but didn’t. It was also a question of finding the right KDE distro to recommend to my friends which was easy to use. Now I’m not much of a GNOME fan and that won’t change. My first distro was Fedora Core 3, that was long ago. Then I heard of Ubuntu and Feisty managed to load despite my low memory configuration at that time (making a swap beforehand did wonders).

Kubuntu was easy to install but it was necessary to update immediately to get Kopete fully functional and avoid a few crashes. Another factor that seems to have permanently hooked me is the Kubuntu Tutorials Day wiki page. I did kick myself for not realizing it took place a day after my birthday (which itself was far from enjoyable with work done). I don’t think I’ll miss an event like this again, I’ll make sure of that. jriddell’s PyKDE tutorial (first session of that day) is really worth reading. It has finally rekindled that desire to code again, with my last bit of meaningful code written was a simple text-based RPG in Java over a year ago. Today though it was just a small box, it was still something so I’m looking to build on that. I also intend to install Hardy Heron which is currently in development, so I can report bugs and provide feedback and contribute to the community better.

Just need to work on keeping my existing KDE 3.5.8 install and adding the Hardy repos now.

Early KDE 4.0 adoption and Kubuntu LTS

One of the KDE developers has provided a short and simple list of points to keep in mind before switching to KDE 4 from KDE 3. I think it is important to keep this list in mind because clearly KDE4 is only for early adopters and if you’re looking to carrying on your day to day work then ideally you should wait for the KDE 4.1 by which time several bugs will be fixed.

When I tried RC2 there was clearly work to be done with several small things like customizing the panel and bigger, important tasks like printing to be sorted out. There’s also the PIM suite that needs to be completed but unfortunately that won’t coincide with the KDE 4.0 release event so we’ll have to wait a bit longer. It is interesting to note that most speed improvement changes will take place later in the KDE 4 life cycle so it is clear that its going to be a faster and smoother appearance than it is now. KDE 4.1 will also release later this year so widespread adoption should certainly be seen this year itself.

I’ll quickly mention my thoughts on the Kubuntu LTS situation. According to the Kubuntu developer list, Kubuntu 8.04 will not be a Long Term Support (LTS) release unlike Ubuntu 8.04. Instead there will be an option to use KDE 3 or KDE 4. There are some posts going around saying that Canonical is killing Kubuntu and that its KDE development will suffer.

On the contrary, Canonical have provided some good interest in the development of KDE 4 in Kubuntu. If you had noticed when the first KDE 4 LiveCDs came out, they were mainly from Kubuntu and openSUSE, and as of now still are. Now, I’m not a big fan of Kubuntu but I think that with the small development team that Canonical has for Kubuntu, they’ve done a decent job with the KDE 3 releases. I think that there are other better KDE centric distros available to choose from.

As you can see from the counter, KDE 4 isn’t too far off and once we have a first release, it could mark a great year ahead for KDE development and usage.

Happy New Year!

No I didn’t write this just now. I’m out enjoying myself of course. Yeah, WordPress is nice enough to let me schedule my post so I got random enough to schedule it a little after midnight. You know, when everyone will be walking home after tons of booze or simply still having booze. Ok, ok for those of you who prefer the more solemn New Year (and for those of you who don’t too) here’s wishing you a Happy New Year!

I can’t wait to see what the year holds for Linux. There’s already been some fire in the media over a Red Hat-Ubuntu war and I’m already rubbing my hands with glee (just a little actually). Don’t get me wrong, its just that I honestly think competition is healthy so I hope this one is. Besides its going to push these giants and drive them towards really stamping their mark more firmly on the Linux community. I’ll leave you with this link to get you informed of the same then.

Why 2008 is promising for the Linux Desktop

Well usually these kind of posts are long lists that act as link-bait (face it, its usually the case!) I just want to provide a little detail on the few reasons why I think that Linux could make it big in 2008. I’m not saying it will become the most-used operating system within a year because that would take some doing with various requirements needing to be perfected. So, here are some of the realistic reasons why it all looks very promising for Linux in 2008:

1. A new Computing Platform - 2007 has seen the Asus Eee PC become one of the most sought after Christmas gifts this festive season. Now, this PC is packed with power that provides a good punch and lets you perform all your basic needs of Internet access, PDA functionality and basic mail and document creation at a very reasonable price. So with sub-$400 PCs like this and with the sub-$300 notebooks coming in the near future, the need for a free operating system that performs these tasks is fulfilled with Linux. Now if Asustek plans to ship a million Eee PCs in Q1 ‘08 alone, the future is certainly bright for Linux.

Then there’s Walmart’s gOS PC that caused a real stir this year that costs $200 and sold out in 2 weeks of its launch on November 1, 2007. With more such startups likely to be made, it begs the question as to what Microsoft plans to do about such startups. More free Linux distributions bundled with PCs and more of OpenOffice bundled with these PCs. Then when you see things like Vista being included in the Top 10 terrible tech products of all time, you know it can’t be good for the Redmond lot.

2. Competition on Distrowatch - The competition for best Linux distribution rages on with several new distributions making the top 10 and more, like Mint and Sabayon. The big guns like Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE seem to have also met a strong match with PCLinuxOS and MEPIS. New releases could include new and stable features that would make almost any Linux distribution a very good option for desktop users at large. It also means making more strides when it comes to innovation and meeting the needs of the desktop user.

3. Innovation - Apple has probably led the desktop when it comes to innovation. Now I’m referring mainly to features that enhance the desktop experience and may or may not prove useful in every task done by a user. Compiz Fusion is great aesthetically and has some good accessibility features if you look harder at it. PulseAudio looks like a promising sound server backend for most Linux distributions. Desktop environment developers are rolling out up-to-date and stable releases of GNOME, KDE, Xfce and even popular window managers. KDE 4 seems to be the pick of the promising releases and though it seems likely that the initial reviews will not be “exceptional” but atleast good, the platform the KDE developers are building for the future with updated code and framework seem to make it a very promising candidate to take the Linux desktop by the storm.

4. Low-end Alternatives - Users are slowly realizing that Linux distributions are useful for old or low-end machines and with light desktop environments or window managers users can perform their necessary tasks within a limited hardware configuration. K.Mandla has some useful articles here and here, on what one can do to keep a computer running even when it seems worthy of trash. Its great when you stop think about the fact that you don’t have to buy a new PC to be your media centre.

5. Free Software - As I mentioned earlier, OpenOffice could experience widespread adoption with the low-priced PCs that are entering the market. The current state of free, open-source software is quite good with a lot of features that are generally present in their Windows or Mac counterparts. As the year goes by, there will probably be more innovative software being made. The release of KDE 4 will provide a new Qt 4 framework that will increase the perfomance of Qt-based software on Linux, especially for the PCs that have average memory specifications. The software needs of people from various artists are also being met with several distributions putting together software focused on development of music, video and imaging being made available to all.

The key aspect governing all of this, is awareness. Why does Linux seem to raise question marks among current destkop users? The most important reason that one could say today, is that there are still people who do not know that this free alternative exists or they have misconceptions about Linux. I don’t blame them because everyone wants their PC to “just work”, so as long as their PC is doing that, it seems that nothing will change and they will get on with it. However, with better marketing today like Dell’s Ubuntu powered PCs and more, it is likely that hardware manufacturers are going to continue and possibly step up their focus on hardware development for the Linux user. This means that a future for the Linux desktop is promising and as new adopters of PCs come around, the present ones may soon see that Linux is a viable option.

Season’s Greetings

Well, its that wonderful time of the year again. December’s my favourite time of the year because my birthday, Christmas and New Year’s Eve, all really festive occasions are in the same month. So here’s wishing the currently few readers (I just started off this blog, remember?) a very Merry Christmas. I got a little college work today but after that I’m off with my mates.

Have a good one then!

KDE 4 Release Candidate 2 on 256MB RAM

My desktop is an Intel Pentium 4 2.93Ghz running with 256MB RAM and onboard graphics. Yeah, I know its a little low but I have some free time at the moment, and one of these days I might pop up at my hardware vendor and load this thing up with 1GB. Anyway, one of the KDE developers has tested KDE in a similar environment as I have, with the exception of it being clocked to 1Ghz instead of 2.5Ghz.

Well, sadly I didn’t take any screenshots because I formatted to install Arch Linux. Arch gave me some network problems surprisingly and I ended up flipping through my CDs and choosing PCLinuxOS. More than that is another story but I just want to make a quick report on what I noted about RC2. It isn’t stable enough for regular usage. I couldn’t test the desktop effects because of some missing X extensions (my onboard intel probably). When the final version is out I’ll go out of my way to make sure the effects work, till then I can wait.

So I fired up the Kickoff menu inspired by Novell and browsed the applications. There was a noticeable speed increase in all the applications I ran. Konqueror loaded in two seconds and so did Dolphin. I must say Dolphin looks really pretty. It looks much better than Nautilus in GNOME and is a great addition to the desktop environment. I personally prefer Konqueror so Dolphin will take a lot of getting used to before I can say that I really like.

Amarok was quick and looks great. I loaded two random albums from my music collection and tried to search through them and it was quick. Konversation and Kopete also experienced speed boosts. Kopete has some new icons which look good. It did feel a little buggy because the sign in notifications refused to fade away until I clicked a bit around the notifications. There were 3 to 4 notifications piling on each other so it seems there’s still work to be done. Since I was using openSUSE, I also tried YaST which has been ported to Qt4 and it loads quick. The Software Management is still slow for me and that I think needs to be worked out by the openSUSE development team.

Aesthetically, KDE looks promising as well. The widgets have been described as “SuperKaramba on steroids” among the KDE developer blogs and it indeed lives up to its name. Hopefully they will make widget creation easy, for instance turning any updated web snippet into a widget. The grey theme looks cool and doesn’t make it feel Mac-ish in my opinion. The black panel doesn’t feel like Vista either. The Oxygen icon set really makes sure that there is no chance of thinking either of the two ways. It is simply beautiful and looks like an enhanced version of Tango but of course, it is a separate project. I didn’t install KOffice2 and from what I’ve heard it could be one of the defining features of the KDE 4 series and probably oust OpenOffice from its place as best free, open-source office suite.

Sadly, the KDE-PIM suite won’t be ready in time for the launch of the final version. So we’ll have to wait a while longer for those packages. KDE 4, in my opinion will not hit its peak popularity until KDE 4.1 or 4.2 by which time a lot of bugs will be ironed out. Remember, a lot of the code has improved so it will probably be easier and quicker to iron out some of the bugs which is why I say 4.1 or 4.2. No longer will be KDE be called a bloated desktop environment. It could even give XFCE a run for its money as a good desktop environment for low-end PCs. That would be an impressive advancement in code - top-quality, free applications for low-end hardware. One of the many reasons for this speed increase is the continued common framework for KDE applications.

GNOME, are you watching?

An overview of my Linux experience in 2007

My experience with Linux could have started earlier if it hadn’t been for the slow spoeed of Ubuntu’s LiveCD on my P4 256MB RAM desktop. I messed around with Fedora Core 3 when it had released but that time I didn’t have a broad idea about Linux. I had a dialup modem which I somehow could not configure. Fortunately, I’ve moved on to a reasonably high speed connection and now networking isn’t a problem. I’ll just sum up my views about the distros I’ve used and give my suggestions for improvement in future or forthcoming releases.

Ubuntu - I managed to get Feisty to work fine finally after adding a swap before loading the LiveCD. The installation wasn’t as fast as some of the other distributions - 45 minutes. Compiz Fusion worked with minimal effects but it was still decent. I used to customize my desktop to look like Mac OS X Tiger at the time, now however I’d go for a simple Clearlooks theme. It isn’t a bad GNOME desktop really. Considering how much effort Canonical put into it, they’ve done a great job. Even though I think stuff like Tracker may seem unnecessary at times, it shows that they’re atleast trying to be a little creative with all the expectation upon them. It is the only GNOME distribution I’ve used this year and I do intend to try one or two more if I can, but I’ve found what I want with the K Desktop Environment (KDE). The community is excellent, sometimes IRC can be a little irresponsive though despite a lot of users present, but its probably just the timezone difference.

Rating: 7/10

PCLinuxOS - The first thing about it that really appealed to me about this KDE distribution (a GNOME version is also available now) was the fine artwork. The next thing I noticed was the speed. I do think that it deserves the number one rank at Distrowatch because for a KDE 3.5.x desktop environment, it is noticeably faster than some other distributions. The default packaging is pretty good too. Frostwire bundled by default is something I’ve never seen before. The inclusion of Synaptic I think was very important because Mandriva (which PCLOS is based on) doesn’t have a really fast package management system. Synaptic is also very user-friendly so that is a big plus. I had a small problem fixing the widescreen resolution but otherwise it is fine.

Rating: 7.5/10

Mandriva - It might interest those who don’t know, that Mandrake (which was what Mandriva was formerly called) used to be top of the Distrowatch charts a few years ago. They were noted for being very newbie-friendly and in my opinion are still one of the best out there for the same. In fact, I put Mandriva on the laptop of my first Linux convert who is a good friend of mine and installed KDE. It was second best when it came to running Compiz Fusion and now seems to be including PulseAudio in the forthcoming Spring release which should be good. I don’t think Mandriva Powerpack would be a bad option to replace Windows entirely when it comes to gamers because Cedega looks promising. However, I’ve seen a few complaints on the Mandriva forums and in the Wine AppDB about how Wine sometimes does a better job. It marginally beats PCLOS for me in the 2008 release, but PCLOS 2008 could completely change that.

Rating: 7.7/10

Arch Linux - After using Mandriva for a while I was looking for a good challenge. That’s when I decided to find out about some other distributions like Arch and Gentoo. At the time I didn’t have a clear idea of what the difference was, but now I do know that Arch uses binary packages while Gentoo mainly requires compiling from source. So I decided due to lack of time to compile that Arch was the option. The Arch Wiki isn’t flooded with articles but the installation guide is excellent. Installing Arch taught me a lot about Linux that Ubuntu and the others would not be able to teach me. I learned a bit more about the various configuration files apart from xorg.conf. Arch most importantly, was fast. And I mean really fast. I had installed KDEMod and I loved it. It was the best distro for me when it came to running Compiz Fusion. If you take a look at the Distrowatch page for Arch, you’ll see that most of the packages are using the latest stable version and this makes it a real, stable bleeding edge system. When KDE 4 is out, I might just be tempted to go back to Arch.

Rating: 8.5/10

openSUSE - Just before installing openSUSE I was on the verge of installing Gentoo but I didn’t for some reason. Instead I installed openSUSE with the intention of trying out KDE 4 Release Candidate 2 as early as I could. That basically means that I installed it about a few weeks from the date of this post. openSUSE has some beautiful artwork and uses custom splash screens for various applications like OpenOffice and the GIMP. Novell have always been known to be excellent innovators so its no surprise that KDE 4 is using the Kick-Off menu that Novell came up with. YasT is great for system management but its weakness probably lies in the slow Software Management system. The 1-Click Install has received some criticism though it does do well in adding repositories in addition to installing applications. I installed the latest GIMP and KDE 4 RC2 and I didn’t have a problem. I recently read the guidelines that have been made for openSUSE, and I do believe that they can be the number one Linux distribution if they sort out a few kinks like speed. There are some unnecessary services enabled by default, and this is where my knowledge of Arch Linux helped me choose the ones I really needed.

Rating: 8/10

Now I welcome any suggestions for distributions to try out in 2008. I’ve already got my eye on MEPIS with version 7.0 almost ready for release. Then there is Sabayon which looks promising and a some distros suited for low-end computers like Damn Small Linux and Puppy Linux. I also did try out XFCE with Xubuntu but it was for a short period. I did try XFCE on Arch Linux. Also, the Openbox window manager seems to be the rage in the screenshots on the Arch Linux Forums so I really want to try it out.

Next, I might just summarize my KDE 4 RC2 experience. Later then.