Distrohopping

**malspa** · September 23rd, 2012

Originally Posted by BigSilly

I'm using Gnome Shell on openSUSE 12.2. I recognised a while ago that Shell wasn't that good on Ubuntu. Personally I much prefer openSUSE's Gnome to Fedora's, it just feels more solid and polished to me. And I prefer the tools (YAST is more sensible in Gnome than KDE, which already hosts a lot of the tools YAST has). I have used Shell on Ubuntu in the past but it doesn't feel loved in the same way, often missing a lot of features as you say. Maybe that will change with the new Gnome Shell remix, but I think it may take some time. In the meantime, I'm happy to stick with openSUSE, and I'd recommend it to anyone looking for high quality Gnome Shell experience.

I'm using GNOME Shell in Ubuntu 12.04 and in Fedora 16. No complaints, but I appreciate this tip about GNOME Shell in openSUSE 12.2 (although I'm happy running KDE in that one).

Originally Posted by Bazon

The worst thing in Fedora were really the fonts.

Fonts in Fedora haven't been an issue here. Maybe I just don't pay much attention to that sort of thing.

**robtygart** · September 23rd, 2012

I started off with Mint 10 KDE, then I went to Kubuntu, I also use Puppy.

**vexorian** · September 23rd, 2012

GS in 12.04 is lacking mainly because it is an old version. Getting the PPA updated version improves most of it.

**Cheesemill** · September 23rd, 2012

Which PPA would that be?

Precise comes with gnome-shell 3.4.1, the only version I can find for Ubuntu that is higher than that is the Quantal version which is the 3.5.92 dev version (3.6 which is the next stable version isn't out for another few days).

Even my Arch setup which uses the latest available stable version is only using 3.4.2

**mamamia88** · September 24th, 2012

I started out with ubuntu, used mint, and debian, but think i have finally found my home with arch. The documentation is so good and anything i can't get from the official repos i can get from yaourt. The first time i installed it took very long because i was using my phone as reference and the screen kept timing out. If you use gparted live to format your partitions and have a us keyboard you could get up and running very quickly. just did it again today and it went super smooth with the beginners guide open on my ps3

**ratcheer** · September 24th, 2012

I am a pretty bad distro hopper. I currently have five installed on my PC.

I have been using Ubuntu the longest, something over three years. I am currently on 12.04.1 64-bit and Unity. Ubuntu is so solid, it gets kind of boring. So ...

Next longest on my PC is Arch Linux, 64-bit rolling release. I keep it up to date on a daily basis.I use it with an Openbox desktop and tint2 panel.

Then comes Sabayon 10, a Gentoo-based distro. It is very solid and stable, but it's on kernel 3.5.4. I am using LXDE, but I also have Gnome 3 and gnome-shell installed and available. Although, they keep increasing the release numbers, it is also a rolling release.

Next is Siduction Linux, a derivative of Aptosid which is a derivative of Debian. Another rolling release, also on Linux 3.5.4. I'm also using LXDE on this one. This may be my favorite distro. It and Sabayon are my top two. This is the only one of all my distros that automatically detects and mounts my btrfs data filesystem. Ubuntu and Sabayon handle it pretty well, and Arch requires manual intervention every time I boot it.

Finally, over the past few days, I have installed Gentoo Linux and LXDE. I originally installed E17 on it, but I couldn't get E17 to run, even though the install seemed to be successful. Arch and Siduction are some pretty hands-on distros, but Gentoo takes the cake. Everything you do is pretty difficult. As soon as I get through learning what I can learn from it, I will probably wipe the partition. But I must say, it was very interesting installing it from a tarball, chroot'ing into the extracted files, and configuring it from the kernel on up. In fact, it's a lot like Linux From Scratch.

Tim