PDA

View Full Version : What's the big deal???



blfamily
February 23rd, 2005, 07:50 PM
Hi y'all,

ok...for some time now I've been a very happy little Mepis user. Much to the dismay of some I'm sure I've been using KDE as my desktop manager. I belong to several LUG groups and have been innundated with posts about Ubuntu...therefore I took an old laptop of mine and installed Warty on it. It seems very stable and detected all my hardware (including a PCMCIA Modem that Mepis never picked up) Apart from that however I haven't seen a huge difference or great selling point for me to switch over completely...I'm not knocking the distribution here...it seems very solid...but what are some of the reasons you folks made the switch in the first place and in hindsight are you happy with the switch you made? Why?

I know that some of this would be covered in other threads but hey...since I'm new here I can be forgiven for being lazy! ;-)

Thanks in advance,

Brian
Toronto, ON

poofyhairguy
February 23rd, 2005, 08:32 PM
ok...for some time now I've been a very happy little Mepis user. Much to the dismay of some I'm sure I've been using KDE as my desktop manager. I belong to several LUG groups and have been innundated with posts about Ubuntu...therefore I took an old laptop of mine and installed Warty on it. It seems very stable and detected all my hardware (including a PCMCIA Modem that Mepis never picked up) Apart from that however I haven't seen a huge difference or great selling point for me to switch over completely...I'm not knocking the distribution here...it seems very solid...but what are some of the reasons you folks made the switch in the first place and in hindsight are you happy with the switch you made? Why?

I made the switch because I wanted a Gnome desktop that didn't take forever to get working. I wanted a distro with no custom GUI tools cause Gnome's are good. I wanted thousands of packages and to not have to learn how to compile things from source.

The true selling point is if you love Gnome but:

Fedora lacks something for you(for me it was certain software packages)

OR

You like Debian but you don't want to hammer the world's best server OS into a desktop.

wallijonn
February 23rd, 2005, 08:35 PM
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=423 will probably answer most of your questions.

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=240&highlight=desktop will illustrate our love of Ubuntu.

I first switched because of the 2.8 GNOME. How many other distros have it? The second most important reason was that it is one of the few distros that got my ATI 9800 Pro to work correctly.

If you are a satisfied Mephis user I see no reason to switch to Ubuntu. If you are a satisfied KDE user, again there is really no reason to switch to Ubuntu. If you do not like to "tweak" your system then Ubuntu may not be for you. There are literally hundreds of distributions for one to choose from...

I switched to Ubuntu because I wanted to start with a solid base and add on functionality rather than start with a bloated distro and remove functionality. But most of all I wanted a distro that has an 18 month life cycle rather than 3 months, like Fedora Core. I wanted a distro which I knew would be supported into the future. I wanted a distro which pretty much works out dependencies for me, so I found Debian's 'apt-get' (SPM) to my liking.

fizgig
February 23rd, 2005, 08:39 PM
Greetings Blfamily,

I'm new here too as you can see by my post count. I had been using Mepis up to about 2 days ago but I've now switched to ubuntu. I've seen a couple of differences between ubuntu and mepis installed on my HP laptop:

with ubuntu:
-ATI card detected and installed right out of the box (1500+ fps in glxgears). Ubuntu even knew to set my screen res to the correct (but unusual) 1280x800.
-I absolutely adore the Gnome interface over KDE now that I'm comfortable with it. (For example, the multimedia keys are super easy to setup in gnome vs. what I had to do with KDE... (small example but the overall feel is great))
-USB memory card insertion automounts and presents the contents of the thumb drive. With mepis I had to mount it myself.
-I can install the 2.6.10 kernel easily. In mepis I compiled it myself since I needed it badly for my sound card (unless I wanted to compile the ALSA drivers myself separately which I did do originally)
-Xorg package support. Absolutely no trouble installing it.

These are just a few. I like Mepis and will only say good things about Warren and his product but I think Ubuntu's for me. The fact that the Gnome environment is completely free (no dual-license) as well as using a completely free distro of Ubuntu only makes it that much sweeter for me. I just donated $20 to the ubuntu cause in thanks.

=D>

ember
February 23rd, 2005, 08:39 PM
Well - actually it's pretty much the same things that made me switch.

a) I like Gnome
b) I wanted a productive desktop right from the start
c) I wanted a debian-based distribution

So I actually tried Ubuntu just for the fun of it and decided to completly switch to Linux after I had tried.

blfamily
February 23rd, 2005, 09:07 PM
Here is a little bit of my history with it Linux....

I started out in Linux in about 1996 when it was still very new and not exactly user friendly (or Linux was just very selective as to who it considered friends ;-) ) Off and on switching between Slackware and ******* I kept fiddling around until about 2001 when I went to RedHat 7.x. Again though I never completely switched over as I always had a ******* box floating around somewhere. In 2004 I decided to take the plunge on my 3 systems and installed Linux on all of them...Fedora (server) Mepis (desktop) Mepis (laptop) Since I'm new to the gnome environment I've decided I'm going to work exclusively with it on my older laptop now running Ubuntu (warty) for at least a month to get comfortable. It is obvious by the fact that in the last two days I've seen an enormous amount of user level support for Ubuntu and that can't be said for some other distros.

My experience installing Warty was fairly straightforward and easy. I agree with what some of you wrote above that a great benefit is having a productive desktop right off the bat. It took me a while to figure out the intricacies (sp?) of apt-get when I first started using Mepis and obviously I hadn't figured out everything yet but I was able to add some new sources to my list and get some familiar apps that I've been using in the past. (call them security blankets if you will)

One funny thing was that when I finally did boot up for the first time and tried to su to root....well there are about 1000 threads here asking about how to su to root....so I found that rather quickly...but there were a few moments of sheer terror when I couldn't do it...LOL

Anyway, thanks for everyone's input and I'm already starting to enjoy gnome so I see Ubuntu in my future on a much more regular basis....now if someone can convince my better half to give up her ******* ME machine I'd be forever in your debt! ;-)

Brian

jdodson
February 23rd, 2005, 09:17 PM
thats a good question. ubuntu has been getting tons of hype lately. though from some reviews you might not see it. check here (http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=9793) to see what i mean.

what keeps me using it? simple. it is easy to use. now don't get me wrong i love to tweak and hack. but seriously sometimes i just want the whole thing to work well. ubuntu seems to do just that. apt-get is a god send in a rpm world. i came from fedora, but you are used to mepis which is apt centric too. also i like the focus on gnome. i really like the gnome desktop. even if feature for feature kde might have more. personally i don't mind gnome catching up in a few areas as gnomes usability shines compared to kde imo. another reason is the community and corporate backing. i am sure mepis has something similar, though i have not checked. it comes on one cd, which is really nice. i also like that it does not bundle non-free software on the main cd. some people see this as a hassle, but i dont really mind. adding a few apt lines is pretty simple anyway. plus the commitment from ubuntu to always releasing the distro for free apeals to my budget:) not sure what cycle mepis is on but ubuntu has a 6 month cycle, which is nice if you always want the latest. it was the first distro i have ever used that did everything i wanted it to.

dickinsd
February 23rd, 2005, 09:34 PM
Hi y'all,

ok...for some time now I've been a very happy little Mepis user. Much to the dismay of some I'm sure I've been using KDE as my desktop manager. I belong to several LUG groups and have been innundated with posts about Ubuntu...therefore I took an old laptop of mine and installed Warty on it. It seems very stable and detected all my hardware (including a PCMCIA Modem that Mepis never picked up) Apart from that however I haven't seen a huge difference or great selling point for me to switch over completely...I'm not knocking the distribution here...it seems very solid...but what are some of the reasons you folks made the switch in the first place and in hindsight are you happy with the switch you made? Why?

I know that some of this would be covered in other threads but hey...since I'm new here I can be forgiven for being lazy! ;-)

Thanks in advance,

Brian
Toronto, ON
I'm a new to Ubuntu, but more than that, I am new to Debian.

I have no experience of Mepis, I mainly use FC, and love it.

I tried Ubuntu for 2 reasons, 1 I mentioned how much I like Knoppix as a live CD, so someone told me to get a free Ubuntu Live CD to try, and 2, I want to try other linux distros.

When the live CD came, I did not think much of it, although it does have the much nicer Gnome desktop rather than KDE, but it was REALLY slow on every machine I tried it on, and did not have as good hardware detection for wireless cards (in my opinion)
I quickly wrote a very short review of it and did nothing but slate it, I really thought very little of it. About 2 weeks later I passed the CD onto someone else, they tried it whilst I was there, and it worked perfect, perhaps the hardware was more suitable, I don't know.

I had an almost complete second system, I bought the components that I needed and installed Ubuntu as a test OS, and as an installed OS I think it is excellent, I have tried a couple of other distro's since then, but Ubuntu always goes back on, it is something special.

I will be honest and say that I still prefer Fedora C3, it just seems to have that 'x factor' that something special, something I can't quite put my finger on, but its sure got it what ever it is! BUT Ubuntu is a very close second!

I guess everyone to their own, we all like different things.

I do wonder if one of the things I like Ubuntu for is the Gnome desktop, it is so easy to move from fedora to ubuntu and vice versa. (excluding certain packages - but most things can be found for both distro's.)

I tell you I really want to try SuSE, I have heard some great things about SuSE, I wonder if that distro could topple FC from my personal top spot?

Dave

Buffalo Soldier
February 24th, 2005, 12:57 AM
...but what are some of the reasons you folks made the switch in the first place and in hindsight are you happy with the switch you made? Why?

After reading an excellent review about SimplyMepis atThe Best Free Desktop Linux . . . and how to make it better (http://www.desktoplinux.com/articles/AT3135712364.html) I decided to get re-acquainted with Linux after too many years of using WinXP.

SimplyMEPIS simply rocks and it served me well. Found and ran all of my hardware (except for Logitech Quickam Messenger). But something about the interface bothered me. So I went on a distro-hunt (or distro fever as some called it) and found Ubuntu.

My reason for staying with Ubuntu:

1. Ubuntu philosophy of not including non-free in CD
2. GNOME (especially the Human theme)
3. sudo (was a bit bothered by it at first, but now I appreciate not having login to root)