RR in Wine

[Peter Alcibiades]

Mikey-3 wrote:
> 
> I'm fascinated that Ubuntu is that much different than Debian.  I've
> only used a few distros (I'm currently screwing around with HH in
> Ubuntu, so I haven't played that much with some of the lesser-known
> ones.
> 
> So Do you use KDE instead of Gnome?
> 
> 

No, I do still use Gnome some of the time, but Fluxbox a lot of the time,
usually with Geany as editor and xfe as file manager in both cases.  I use
many KDE applications in preference to the Gnome ones - Kmail and Korganizer
in preference to Evolution.  Kjots in preference to Gjots.  K3b for CD
burning.  I also use WDM as the display/logon manager in place of KDM or
GDM.  Fluxbox just gets out of your way when you want to do something.  KDE
is OK, and I've installed it for people.  I find the number of mouse clicks
to get anything done, at least as it comes out of the box, rather
irritating.   It is however considerably less dumbed down and more
configurable than Gnome, which seems to make a fetish lately of taking
useful functionality out in case it confuses some 5 year old someplace and
causes him emotional damage.  But they are both a bit too prominent pieces
of the environment for my taste.

The essential difference between Debian and Ubuntu is continuous upgrades
versus named releases.  Do you get all your apps updated in the rolling
updates of a package like the current Etch or Lenny?  Or do you only get
security releases, and then have to do a staged version upgrade to get the
lastest version of Open Office?  Debian, you will always get the apps
updated, and then you move from version to version by doing apt-get
dist-upgrade.  This is why Woodford took Mepis to Debian and away from
Ubuntu as the base.

http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS6170488551.html

A reasonable way to approach Debian is, use the testing version only when it
is at least 6 months old.  Otherwise use stable.  Lenny is currently nearing
moving to Stable.  I've been on Lenny now for about a year, and will  stay
with it for at least 6 months, maybe longer, but at some time after that
will upgrade to the then Testing version.

You see the uprade problem in its most acute form in Mandriva.  Mandriva is
nice to install for naive users since it has a great GUI driven admin centre
and it comes with a proper user manual.  But, you put in Mandriva 2008, and
now out comes 2008.1, and what do you do?  You can change the urpmi
repositories and do a net upgrade, but its risky.  Do it half a dozen times
and you are just about guaranteed one disaster.  Or, you can do a clean
install, assuming you put /home on a separate partition.  I've done it, but
don't like it, and certainly don't intend doing it every six or nine months
for a bunch of people.  Still less turn them loose on DIY!  So you end up
treating it like Windows, and leaving in 2008 for a couple of years and only
doing the 2008 updates, which are going to be security only.  That is not
very satisfactory either.

Debian is the way to go.   If you really want to learn Linux, Slackware is
also worth considering.  Fast, though not I think much faster than Debian,
and very bare bones.  Slackware stopped supporting Gnome a while back,
though.

There is a big difference using nothing but Linux, and using it on native
hardware, and having many different desktop environments available at the
click of a mouse, and using one distro as it comes out of the box
occasionally through a VM.   It changes your concept of both usability and
look and feel.  

If you do install Debian, by the way, put in the i386 version, not the 64
bit version.  I am running amd64 Debian and 64 bit is not worth the trouble. 
At this point I would also install Lenny rather than Etch, it is almost
finalized as Stable, almost certainly will be by the end of the month. 
However Debian's motto is 'no wine before its time', so you can't be sure.

Peter
-- 
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/RR-in-Wine-tp19763770p19792647.html
Sent from the Revolution - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com.