WTF IS NOVELL DOING!!!

[dann]

Also the creator of Ubuntu was on the moon so thats gotta count for something

Where did you hear this? He was the first African in space and did some scientific experiments on the International Space Station. To the best of my knowledge, he did not go to the moon, yet.

http://www.firstafricaninspace.com/

[CptnObvious999]

woops thats what I ment. Sorry

[snarkout]

Interesting points in this thread -- some thoughts in no particular order:

Kaffeine is awesome. It is *exactly* what I want from a player, and no other player I know of offers de-interlacing approaching as good. It's an example of F/OSS stuff that is by far and away better than any of it's for-pay rivals.

Ubuntu is different because it's an approachable Sid snapshot that is optimized for desktop use. It also adds some of it's own stuff, some of which is very slick. It also has a fairly large number of bugs that never seem to get ironed out that do not exist in other distros. Overall though, I think it's a fairly decent distro -- I just think it's very confused about what its target market is. I believe that Shuttleworth is trying very hard to do a good thing with linux though, and have a lot of respect for hime as a (I can't believe I'm about to say this) human being. Personally, though, I have not the faintest clue how warty garnered so much media attention -- I suspect a payed-for blitz of some type. IME, warty was a pile of sh!t. Hoary and breezy have been very good follow-ups, though. I do insist that their release cycle sucks. That, and Kubintu's KDE is a lot more fragile that it has been for me in most other distros. I think the Kubuntu devs have done some great work in some areas, but I have a constant feeling of two steps forward one step back when using kubuntu. Still, until I find a distro that suits my tastes/needs better, it's going to be what I use, and probably will always be what I use on my lappy.

Flash sucks on kde no matter what browser you use, and the same goes for the stand alone flash player -- it's the fault of artsd as far as I can tell. I am a verified homestar runner freak, and it's depressing how bad either Konqueror or Firefox are at playing flash in KDE. In gnoe, using ESD, the same 'toons are fine. IIRC Aaron said they were working on a new framework to replace the devil that is artsd -- I really hope this is the case.

Konqueror is very nice in some ways, and is a total PITA in others. First off, it's java and javascript appear to be completely broken, since I can't get K to do anything with it in any distro I've tried. Look at the frappr site as an example. Secondly, the KDE devs really haven't figured out a good way to separate the internet browser behavior from the file browser behavior. I run into strange situations when switching from one to the other fairly regularly. This isn't insurmountable, and perhaps it's my lack of experience with the browser, but it's something I notice fairly frequently.

The PRs of 3.5 I've installed haven't been much different than 3.4 -- the major things I noticed were that there are more of those annoying popup balloons - now not only panel buttons get them, but the pager does as well. They've also implemented drag and drop windows from desktop to desktop in the pager (something that is really sweet, and one of the things I really, really liked about the gnome pager). Other than that and a few different appearance tweaks, it seems more or less the same. I'll wait for the final release to make any real judgments though.

[Tsuroerusu]

Ubuntu is different because it is supported by an actual company but is given away at a cost to them. Also Ubuntu has a refined look unlike most distros that don't bother to change the default themes. Also the creator of Ubuntu was on the moon so thats gotta count for something

Well, I still don't find it eaisier to use than Debian, and most of the people I know who've tried it felt the same way. Support from a company? Well SUSE is supported by Novell, how's that for a company? Well, you can always refine the look but is that gonna make the distro eaisier to use, and I find GNOME very very iratating to work with.

I'm not saying flash does not work in Konqueror; but I have had more problems with it than in Firefox. That's just my limited experience.

When did konqueror pass the Acid 2 test? Is this a development version because when I take the test in konqueror, it does not pass.

Flash worked out of box for me in SUSE 10, no problems at all.

I thnk I need to sleep more so I can explain stuff better, anyway, Konqueror 3.5 should pass the Acid2 test, you can see that right here

Ubuntu is different because it's an approachable Sid snapshot that is optimized for desktop use. It also adds some of it's own stuff, some of which is very slick. It also has a fairly large number of bugs that never seem to get ironed out that do not exist in other distros. Overall though, I think it's a fairly decent distro -- I just think it's very confused about what its target market is. I believe that Shuttleworth is trying very hard to do a good thing with linux though, and have a lot of respect for hime as a (I can't believe I'm about to say this) human being. Personally, though, I have not the faintest clue how warty garnered so much media attention -- I suspect a payed-for blitz of some type. IME, warty was a pile of sh!t. Hoary and breezy have been very good follow-ups, though. I do insist that their release cycle sucks. That, and Kubintu's KDE is a lot more fragile that it has been for me in most other distros. I think the Kubuntu devs have done some great work in some areas, but I have a constant feeling of two steps forward one step back when using kubuntu. Still, until I find a distro that suits my tastes/needs better, it's going to be what I use, and probably will always be what I use on my lappy.

I'm not saying that Ubuntu isn't optimized for desktop usage, but that's something that SUSE and a lot of other distros has been doing for years.
When I look at this picture I just always fail to understand it, because if you give my mum Ubuntu 5.10 and SUSE 10, which I've done, she'll pick SUSE, because she does like it's look better, but also because she find it eaisier to use, when you compare with Kubuntu.

Flash sucks on kde no matter what browser you use, and the same goes for the stand alone flash player -- it's the fault of artsd as far as I can tell. I am a verified homestar runner freak, and it's depressing how bad either Konqueror or Firefox are at playing flash in KDE. In gnoe, using ESD, the same 'toons are fine. IIRC Aaron said they were working on a new framework to replace the devil that is artsd -- I really hope this is the case.

Well, Flash work great on my system

Arts can be a pain in the ass I agree with that, what I've done to kind of work around that is to use a soundcard that will do hardware mixing, in this case I use a Soundblaster Live 5.1 which is about 20 bucks , that way I can run as many sound apps at the same time as I want, I've tried using both KDE and GNOME, which used arts and esd, apps at the same time worked fine.

Konqueror is very nice in some ways, and is a total PITA in others. First off, it's java and javascript appear to be completely broken, since I can't get K to do anything with it in any distro I've tried. Look at the frappr site as an example. Secondly, the KDE devs really haven't figured out a good way to separate the internet browser behavior from the file browser behavior. I run into strange situations when switching from one to the other fairly regularly. This isn't insurmountable, and perhaps it's my lack of experience with the browser, but it's something I notice fairly frequently.

Regarding GMail and Google Maps not working in Konqueror, I blame Google for that more than I blame Konqueror. From what I've heard, the javascript that GMail uses is quite distant from what "standards" specify after what I've heard.

The PRs of 3.5 I've installed haven't been much different than 3.4 -- the major things I noticed were that there are more of those annoying popup balloons - now not only panel buttons get them, but the pager does as well. They've also implemented drag and drop windows from desktop to desktop in the pager (something that is really sweet, and one of the things I really, really liked about the gnome pager). Other than that and a few different appearance tweaks, it seems more or less the same. I'll wait for the final release to make any real judgments though.

Well those balloon popups do help some people, I'm talking about you and myself, I turn them off because I don't need them, but my mum actually like to have them because then she can eaisier figure out what things do, that's what she told me.

In KDE 3.5, Kopete will have a lot of new features, it should support MSN webcam conversations, Skype support and a few nifty features like buddy icons on the contact list itself.

[snarkout]

Well, Flash work great on my system

Arts can be a pain in the ass I agree with that, what I've done to kind of work around that is to use a soundcard that will do hardware mixing, in this case I use a Soundblaster Live 5.1 which is about 20 bucks , that way I can run as many sound apps at the same time as I want, I've tried using both KDE and GNOME, which used arts and esd, apps at the same time worked fine.

Ok, what's the trick? I've tried every sound daemon I can think of, and have tried disabling software sound all together. It's still a kludge and a complete mess IME. I have an audigy, myself, so this isn't related to my sound card being a cheap POS.

Turning off software sound mixing does help things, but then system alerts don't work, and I really like to have a audible clue that I have new mail, since I'm more or less responsible for reading mail from work 24/7. There are workarounds for that too (asound <soundname> as the action for new mail, for instance) but these are all sh!tty workarounds IMO.

As far as (kubuntu) go, one of the main things I like about the distro (and I'm no zealot, trust me) is that it's fairly slim by default. I personally don't care one way or another about debs vs. rpms, so that's not an issue for me. I do like the "debian way" of only essential services running by default.

My main problem with SuSE is that when I recently installed 9.3, it a) took nearly an hour and a half of feeding it CDs, b) installed a lot more stuff than I usually want on a system, and c) I hate YAST. Ok, C is kind of silly, but seriously, with both me and my little bro googling for answers, we came up dry. We found little or no info on how to change repos suse uses, and how to get suse to use something other than yast. All either of us could find is that packman is what you want to get your packages from if you want selection. I'm sure there isn't much to it, but the combined google-fu of two semi-adepts failed in this case, and that meant that it was quickly removed from my testing box. I used to really like suse in the redhat 7 days though -- I have boxed sets of suse7.3 and 8.2 in this room here.

[Tsuroerusu]

Ok, what's the trick? I've tried every sound daemon I can think of, and have tried disabling software sound all together. It's still a kludge and a complete mess IME. I have an audigy, myself, so this isn't related to my sound card being a cheap POS.

Turning off software sound mixing does help things, but then system alerts don't work, and I really like to have a audible clue that I have new mail, since I'm more or less responsible for reading mail from work 24/7. There are workarounds for that too (asound <soundname> as the action for new mail, for instance) but these are all sh!tty workarounds IMO.

Well, I don't disable Arts, I leave it running but I run stuff like XMMS directly to ALSA instead of going through the Arts daemon. System alerts work and all that stuff, so far I havn't had any issues with sound daemons.


Well if you need help with YaST just ask me, I've been using for over a year now, and I'm using 3rd party repositories and all that good stuff. I also use a few other packages manager for fun, Smart is a really great GUI package manager. Did you really not figure out how to add extra repositories on Google? You may need to change your keywords because I can find that in about 2 mins.

To defend SUSE a little on the fact they install more than say Slackware do, they aim at both experienced users and newcomers, and the point where Linux really has had a sad history is installing new software because you're pretty much bound to your package manager and if you try installing RPMs from Red Hat on SUSE, you're dead if it's a critical package, I like the fact that SUSE include a lot of stuff so that I don't have to go out and get it, and come on they don't install that much stuff, for my taste they've been pretty good on their default package selections.