A must read very important news

[Qqmike]

julek, nice, clear summary of pro's and con's. I was thinking someone should post such. I'm sticking with Kubuntu 14.04 LTS, though I do have Debian 8 installed on a partition. Thanks.

[julek]

On my part I stick with Debian 8. There's almost no difference w/ Kubuntu LTS, however its future is much more foreseeable than Kubuntu's. Anyway I must thank all the contributors on Kubuntu for their amazing work (and the ten years I spent with that distro)

For me here are the pros and cons of Debian stable :

Pros :
- Veeeeeeeeeeerrrry stable, much more than *buntu actually. (I didn't think so previously but now I can confirm) No need for a kernel upgrade every week (avoiding the need of rebooting the machine)
- Much less software installed by default, making the system much easier to customize and actually much lighter and faster.
- In a mid-term, only Wayland, no need to have three different graphic stacks for the same system.
- Very close to SteamOS (yes I'm a Linux gamer) due to Canonical crappy politics. Actually in SteamOS they just updated some packages and suffixed software versions with bsos.

Cons :
- Somewhat outdated software (but partially fixed thanks to backports, and the software is at level of Kubuntu 14.10 for Debian stable)
- Problem with some recent hardware. I had to pin Nvidia 346 blob from SteamOS to make my GPU work.
- Much less out of the box experience. (Notably with proprietary codecs which come from a separate repo and so on)

[MoonRise]

I didn't stray too far. I have my laptop with Netrunner and left my desktop Kubuntu. I'm all Kubuntu now.

[Qqmike]

... which reminded me of the original GRUB material,

Erich Boleyn's Home Page
http://www.uruk.org/~erich/

and the original GRUB documentation, ver. 0.5


GRUB -- GRand Unified Bootloader
version 0.5
by Erich Boleyn


http://www.uruk.org/orig-grub/

[Qqmike]

Reminded me of this, which is still around, since 2005:

(A) One Grub menu that boots 100+ systems

The 100+ systems comprise of
3 Dos
3 Windows
5 BSDs (in Part 2 Menu)
2 Solaris (in Part 2 Menu)
97 Linux including 2 versions of NetBSD

http://forums.justlinux.com/showthre...SD-and-Solaris

It's (obviously) for GRUB Legacy. That's about when I learned GRUB. So I had many OSs on my HDD, many. Many. Experimented. After awhile (like after a couple weeks or so), I never used them, only booted into two OSs: Kubuntu and XP. I only booted XP once a month to get updates and run CCleaner. I maintained XP until about six years ago, then bye-bye, dd if=/dev/zero & out_you_go (I even, still, have the legal XP disk, OEM, got from NewEgg when I built that machine). Right now I have Mint KDE and Debian Jessie 8. I never boot into them. Mint KDE is OK, fine, no problems, but it just ain't got the feel of Kubuntu 14.04 LTS.

[vinnywright]

NOTE: Went back to Kubuntu. Netrunner is good but there was something "off" from Kubuntu. Don't know what, but I'm happy where I am.

I still have my Netrunner (but I have not booted it in some time now) and my Debian-8 (I do boot this one often) and my Kubuntu-14.04 (my main playground) and Kubuntu-15.04 (in this one now) and Ubuntu-14.04(rarely gets booted) I play around but never leave

Nice to see you back in the fold

VINNY

[Qqmike]

Good! Welcome back, MoonRise!

[MoonRise]

NOTE: Went back to Kubuntu. Netrunner is good but there was something "off" from Kubuntu. Don't know what, but I'm happy where I am.

[TiberiusDuval]

I'm running it on hardware directly. Virtualbox tends to be little bit sluggish with every OS compared to running directly on hardware. With i5, PC-BSD is noticeably more sluggish than Kubuntu, but not so much more that it would render system inconveniently slow. Mine does not nag about lacking Virtuoso, maybe your installation hit some snags.

Yes userbase is small, but devs really are dedicated. Community is also welcoming and beginner friendly, especially when compared to FreeBSD community, which on the other hand is very friendly when compared to OpenBSD community.

[GreyGeek]

Out of curiosity I installed PCBSD as a guest OS. It used an install process I haven't seen in years; after the basic system is installed it reboots and then requires user and root information, but no reboot after that is given. The user login appears immediately. I've never used the ZFS system and wanted to explore it sometime, which is the real reason why I installed this OS as a guest.

PCBSD uses the KDE 4.14.3 desktop. On the first bootup it gave a "Virtuoso is missing" msg. After I installed it the subsequent boots did not display that msg. However, each boot is met with a VirtualBox Err but the guest appears to run OK.

Sluggish is being polite. Installing a single app using AppCafe takes an eternity, and starting apps from the menu takes only slightly less time. Visually the OS look nice. The user base is small but the developers appear to be dedicated.

[TiberiusDuval]

My first post here. I have used Kubuntu since 10.04 (various tries in between with PCLinuxOS, and OpenSuse), currently running 15.04. I have triple boot system, Windows 7 for games (soon 10), Kubuntu and PC.BSD for other uses. If worst happens to Kubuntu, I'll probably move entirely to PC-BSD. Yeah it is not Linux distribution as it is based on FreeBSD, but at least for desktop computer it is quite decent.
Pros:
-Rock solid filesystem (ZFS)
-Rock solid update system based on ZFS snapshots and beadm.
-Nvidia blob will be installed automatically if you have supported gpu.
-Pretty decent KDE experience (Though Plasma 4 still, Plasma 5 support is still higly experimental)
-Proprietary codecs installed as default.
-Big running filecopy operations do not render system unusable to other tasks.
Cons:
-Software tends to be older as porting to FreeBSD takes some time, most software is made for Linux first.
-Hardware support is limited, mine works.
-As Linux moves away since SystemD from other Unix-likes there will be problems with various desktop integration tasks.
-ZFS is quote resource intensive.
-System is somewhat more sluggish in certain tasks.

[xennex81]

Test

[xennex81]

Did my post here got removed?

[Qqmike]

Good points. Thanks for your post.

[GreyGeek]

Interesting.

As for options, why do people here not like or mention Mint more than they do? Is it because Mint is too "simplistic," or not challenging enough or not customizable enough, or does it have real issues? I suppose I could d/l and try it, but just curious for now.

http://linuxmint.com/rel_rebecca_kde_whatsnew.php

Linux Mint 17.1 KDE features KDE 4.14, just like Jessie, except Jessie IS Debian.
Mint features its two MAIN desktops: Cinnamon 2, its own desktop using GTK+, and MATE, which is its clone of Gnome2.

Apparently Cinnamon has freezing issues, which the developers have solved by adding an Alt+Ctl+Esc keyboard shortcut, which restarts Cinnamon and restores all open apps just the way they were without logging out or re-starting what ever works as their x-server. I'm sure that if they knew what was causing the desktop freezing they'd fix it instead of kludge it.


Their Linux Mint LMDE is based on Debian but the rest of their releases are based on Ubuntu. So, one has to ask the question "Why move from one distro based on Ubuntu to another also based on Ubuntu?" And, if one chooses their LMDE then why not avoid the middle man and run Jessie? Besides, word is afoot that Mint is going to drop LMDE because it's not significantly different from the Debian version it is based on.
http://www.linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=184