DetroitLibertyPenguin
October 7th, 2008, 04:51 AM
So over the weekend I "upgraded" from Mandriva 2007 Spring Edition to Xubuntu 8.04. There were several reasons for me to do so. First, although I've always been a fan of "if it ain't broke don't fix it" I was learning that Mandriva was not keeping up to date the repositories of the apps and such on the old distro, and although I love messing around in terminal I was finding that I was breaking more than I was fixing trying to upgrade certain components to get them to run better (like getting Opera to sync with my Blackberry and then breaking Firefox in the process of trying to get java and flash to work on Opera).
Secondly my machine is over 10 years old and although Mandriva-KDE is still much faster than XP I heard a lot of good things about XFCE and how fast it was. I had heard that the new version of Mandriva had a "mini" version that I seemed to have misinterpreted to be running the xfce desktop, at least the 2009 RC_2 I tried to install first this weekend didn't do that. So instead of giving up I decided to try xubunutu.
Even though I've been using Linux as my primary OS for over a year I still feel very much like a newbie. I'm one of those guys who thought I knew a lot about computers, I knew I didn't know everything, but I felt I know more than most, as I used to say "I know just enough to mess your machine up real good" Now anytime a computer problem comes up at work my first response is usually "install Linux, problem fixed" but in all honesty the first time I ran Knoppix, and certainly the first time installed mandriva, i learned how little about computers I truly knew.
I had used Ubuntu a few times right off of the Live CD, and although it took WAY TOO LONG to load compared with other Live Distors' I had used I was actually quite impressed at well "stuff just worked" such as my printer. So i figured give xubuntu a chance. Well, in some ways it truly has "just worked" in less than 3 days since my install and all of my hardware is working just like how I want it to. Which has its ups and downs in and of it self. First of all certainly there is less frustration, but there is also much less satisfaction then writing various commands to configure a printer diver. Overall Xubuntu seems less like Linux, if that makes any sense. Though part Of what I've grown to recognize as Linux, like those cool bouncing icons, I know is what made my system slower than it could be. (IF you have a fast computer and you haven't checked out mandriva's sweet 3D desktop effects, its certainly worth a look, I never got to use it much though). It may just take some getting used to my new system, and I'm going to try really hard to give ubuntu a fair chance and not download mandriva as soon as 2009 is officially released.
xfce does not seem to be incredibly faster than any other desktop environment I've used, and am still not really able to tell any real difference at all between it and GNOME like I've used on the Ubunut live CD. I mean I guess its faster than KDE?, and everything is faster than *******, but its certainly no DSL (Damn Small Linux) heck if I could ever get my old Dell Monitor to look right on DSL I'd probably use it a whole lot more.
I'm greatly disappointed that my user NEEDS to have a password. This is incredibly inconvenient. I would like to be able to hit the power button on my machine and walk away and do something else and when I get back its ready to go, not have to log in with a password partway threw the setup. Not only that, but it makes the user password and the super user the same? Its only asked me to make one password and when preforming functions were I should need root, i just enter the same password. What's the point of that? Doesn't that go against the who reason for having a password, if you know the regular password to get into the machine, you have the password to make blanket changes? What's up with that?
I did get my Logitech marble mouse to almost work right, which I never did to in a year of Mandriva, but just a quick edit of the Xconfig file. An exact edit that I had tried several times on Mandriva and never worked at all, granted it was some code I had found on an old Ubunutu forum, but X is X, isn't it? Oh well.
What I am surprised on is that I can't seem to access my Bluetooth dongle at all, I work for a bluetooth company, so even in my spare time I"ve become sorta bluetooth nerd, and how much everything else "just works" I"m surprised I can't seem to get it to do ANYTHING with bluetooth, even though I've installed all the Bluetooth protocols that aren't dependent on the KDE libraries. I digress, I think I will address my Bluetooth issues in its own post.
Anyway I know there's been a lot of rambling here. I'll finish off by saying one of the things I liked best about Mandriva was how quickly and politely any post I ever put on the forum was resounded to. I guess this is my first post and I will see how you respond, Ubuntu community.
Secondly my machine is over 10 years old and although Mandriva-KDE is still much faster than XP I heard a lot of good things about XFCE and how fast it was. I had heard that the new version of Mandriva had a "mini" version that I seemed to have misinterpreted to be running the xfce desktop, at least the 2009 RC_2 I tried to install first this weekend didn't do that. So instead of giving up I decided to try xubunutu.
Even though I've been using Linux as my primary OS for over a year I still feel very much like a newbie. I'm one of those guys who thought I knew a lot about computers, I knew I didn't know everything, but I felt I know more than most, as I used to say "I know just enough to mess your machine up real good" Now anytime a computer problem comes up at work my first response is usually "install Linux, problem fixed" but in all honesty the first time I ran Knoppix, and certainly the first time installed mandriva, i learned how little about computers I truly knew.
I had used Ubuntu a few times right off of the Live CD, and although it took WAY TOO LONG to load compared with other Live Distors' I had used I was actually quite impressed at well "stuff just worked" such as my printer. So i figured give xubuntu a chance. Well, in some ways it truly has "just worked" in less than 3 days since my install and all of my hardware is working just like how I want it to. Which has its ups and downs in and of it self. First of all certainly there is less frustration, but there is also much less satisfaction then writing various commands to configure a printer diver. Overall Xubuntu seems less like Linux, if that makes any sense. Though part Of what I've grown to recognize as Linux, like those cool bouncing icons, I know is what made my system slower than it could be. (IF you have a fast computer and you haven't checked out mandriva's sweet 3D desktop effects, its certainly worth a look, I never got to use it much though). It may just take some getting used to my new system, and I'm going to try really hard to give ubuntu a fair chance and not download mandriva as soon as 2009 is officially released.
xfce does not seem to be incredibly faster than any other desktop environment I've used, and am still not really able to tell any real difference at all between it and GNOME like I've used on the Ubunut live CD. I mean I guess its faster than KDE?, and everything is faster than *******, but its certainly no DSL (Damn Small Linux) heck if I could ever get my old Dell Monitor to look right on DSL I'd probably use it a whole lot more.
I'm greatly disappointed that my user NEEDS to have a password. This is incredibly inconvenient. I would like to be able to hit the power button on my machine and walk away and do something else and when I get back its ready to go, not have to log in with a password partway threw the setup. Not only that, but it makes the user password and the super user the same? Its only asked me to make one password and when preforming functions were I should need root, i just enter the same password. What's the point of that? Doesn't that go against the who reason for having a password, if you know the regular password to get into the machine, you have the password to make blanket changes? What's up with that?
I did get my Logitech marble mouse to almost work right, which I never did to in a year of Mandriva, but just a quick edit of the Xconfig file. An exact edit that I had tried several times on Mandriva and never worked at all, granted it was some code I had found on an old Ubunutu forum, but X is X, isn't it? Oh well.
What I am surprised on is that I can't seem to access my Bluetooth dongle at all, I work for a bluetooth company, so even in my spare time I"ve become sorta bluetooth nerd, and how much everything else "just works" I"m surprised I can't seem to get it to do ANYTHING with bluetooth, even though I've installed all the Bluetooth protocols that aren't dependent on the KDE libraries. I digress, I think I will address my Bluetooth issues in its own post.
Anyway I know there's been a lot of rambling here. I'll finish off by saying one of the things I liked best about Mandriva was how quickly and politely any post I ever put on the forum was resounded to. I guess this is my first post and I will see how you respond, Ubuntu community.