[Discuss] The T61p meets Kubuntu

[Michael]

On Tue, 2007-11-06 at 11:44 -0800, Chris Hennessy wrote:

> >
> > So why don't you try an older version of Ubuntu?  Or an earlier RC?
> >
> 
> Or you could just stay with Mandriva.  I am a fan of Mandriva because most
> of the time it just works with "different" and newer hardware. About a year
> ago I decided to get off XP and tried a bunch of different distros.
> Everything from Fedora, many of the *buntu's, Saybyon, and others.  Mandriva
> won.  It just worked.  I even bought a copy of Mandriva 2008.Now I just
> fight with my ATI vid card, but even that is getting better quickly.
> 
> I now have 2 Mandriva MythTV boxes, a file server and my desktop.
> 
> Chris

    At this stage that's a very real possibility. I have used Mandriva
since 8.1 when it was Mandrake, and I actually quite like the distro.
Problem is, I have on many occasions found the company to be a bit on
the lame side when it comes to actually keeping their repositories (or
even their software) working. That, and they somehow manage to bork
their RPM system every release. Generally I like Mandriva because they
have the best installer of anyone out there, no question, but their
distro feels ... how can I say it ... like they spent too much time
getting coffee. It just seems to be full of annoying bugs, most of which
challenge the knowledge of a guy like myself pretty heavily. I am no
comp-sci grad, my skills are mostly wysiwyg ... in every sense. :-)

    As an example, 2008 installs compiz fusion by default. Cool, right?
Well, go into the KDE "Look and Feel" and click on "Display". I've done
it three times, and each time required a hard reboot to get my system
back. trying to restart the xserver did nothing, and the three finger
salute was just so much wasted effort. So I leave my display at the
extremely high resolution it set it at, because any effort to reduce it
creates a brick. Granted, that might well be nVidia's fault, but if it's
an issue, why set it as the default? I won't mention what my screensaver
is doing ... OK, maybe I will. Have you ever seen a system that starts
the screensaver, but only on the bottom right corner? Aside from being
pretty funky to look at, it also requires a hard boot to fix ... so now
the screensaver is set to blank screen.

    Kubuntu will probably not be much better, but I am tired of trying
to solve Mandriva bugs by myself. Ubuntu has a big community, and the
knowledge base they create makes bug fixing a much easier task. An
important thing when time is at such a premium.

    Ranting done, I found it interesting how you ended up using
Mandriva. It parallels my experience almost exactly. Used 98, then
upgraded to XP. After the 200th penis enlarger ad pop-up ... remember
that? ... I decided that I wanted a computer again, not a T.V. So after
much research I went down to Future Shop and bought their one and only
Linux distro, Mandrake 8.1. The rest is history. Oddly enough, Future
Shop no longer sells any boxed distros ... thanks Bill.