Sabayon 5.4 KDE

I have not been able to mess around with my linux box for a while. Work has been dreadful of late, so I decided to try Sabayon 5.4. This is really terrific.
The 64-bit version is the one I use, and it works very nicely. I heartily recommend it to all you cheap-o folks who don't want to pay for software.

Naw, openSuse is the One (Gnome, even)

Kubuntu has been working fine, but I have began to notice enough little annoyances to make me wonder if the whole free software thing was a dead end.

After reading this review of openSuse 11.2 Gnome I decided that perhaps I've been too infatuated with all this KDE4 stuff.  After all, Novell offers a business desktop that's a gnome desktop, so perhaps there's something in openSuse that I have overlooked.

So here I am on a nice, stable install of openSuse 11.2 using Gnome.  If you have been hopping from distro to distro looking for something that enables you to just get things done, perhaps this is it.  Banshee simply makes Amarok look ridiculous as a music player.  YAST, the openSuse control panel, seems quicker than in KDE4.

Kubuntu x64... Really?

Lately I have been searching for a good KDE distribution of Linux for my home system.  A majority of the posts I have seen recommend openSuse 11.2, so I've tried several different installations of it to check it out.  Not bad, but not exactly great either. To have some of the softwares I wanted I added repo after repo until, sure enough, I had conflicts. Great. Although YAST, the system settings control panel for openSuse, is full-featured, I looked everywhere trying to get decent directions on how to correctly have Windows sharing work. I'm not a linux expert, but i'm not exactly a novice either. I should have been able to figure out the right way to use the silly controls to make that work.

Sabayon 5.1 was next. These guys have a great thing going, and I really wanted to keep it on my system. I can't explain what was really the problem other than some of the more up-to-date software available in Kubuntu, and the close link between the KDE developers and Kubuntu making me think it would be a safer way to go. I may change to Sabayon once more just because of the incredible way they have full multimedia set to go from the start, as well as all the great games... although I really don't play computer games. Or video games.

Mandriva is not at all what I want. It simply looks and feels cheap to me.

PC-BSD is not linux, but BSD... a more secure and organized unix operating system that is really amazing. It utilizes a very Windows-like package installation scheme that avoids all the "dependency hell" that can occur in linux when different applications need to call upon different versions of system libraries. Usually this is never a problem in Linux, but I have had this happen in openSuse on several occasions.

The latest news from PC-BSD is version 8, which is due sometime soon. I'm downloading the beta of it now just to check on their progress. My concerns are a lack of up-to-date software and decent multimedia on the web, since they must use Flash for Linux as there is no version for BSD. Hopefully Google will use HTML5 for YouTube video soon, thus eliminating my need for Flash at all.

So I tried Kubuntu 9.10. So far, so good. I have Nvidia drivers installed and have full suspend/hibernation working well. Network printer is up, Samba (Windows network) is configured to work from the get-go. Fonts are clear. Loads of available software is available.

The second part of my little experiment is going back to Windows7 from time to time to see which I like best. The only reasons I have to going back to Windows would be:

• Video Editing- Kdenlive is so close
• Music- iTunes is so very convenient. Still, I am ripping my entire CD collection into OGG-Vorbis on linux just to see if I can live without it.
• Music Notation- This is the big one for me. Sure, I can just use my MacBook Pro to do this, but it would be so great to actually learn how to use Lilypond.

So why use one of these strange systems at all? Freedom and security. We are losing more of our liberty every day, and I get immense satisfaction from using a no-cost solution that I put together myself. Sure is cheaper than tinkering around with a car, too.