Thursday 25 November 2010

I've just tried a couple of new distros.

PCLinuxOS and Linux Mint KDE (9, not 10, unfortunately).

PCLOS is looking likely to become my next OS. From the CD it was fast, generally clean and is running KDE 4.5.3, Digikam 1.50. It felt as snappy as openSUSE, which was a good thing.

Mint is interesting in KDE 4.4 (possibly better in 4.5) with better font display than the gnome variant (which is pretty stinky, nearly as bad a Unbuntu, and similar to Fedora). It also came with Wine ready to run direct from the CD, which will be interesting as I'd like to start trying Windows apps on Linux. They even had the windows style font down pretty well, which was surprising.

Why look at other distros?

There was a Sabayon update last week, and my Sabayon drive is now inaccessible. Apparently because it's a logical volume, rather than partitioned conventionally I cannot see the small number of unique files I had on there (just a few images and emails). It might be possible to rescue the OS by editing the PAM file but I don't know enough command line stuff to do it and no-one on the Sabayon forum appears interested in helping. I could try to learn CLI and then attempt it, but frankly life is too short, and that OS is going to be toast shortly.

I really liked it while I used it: the best, crispest fonts this side of Microsoft, generally quick and responsive. It wasn't flawless, with an odd diminished volume issue forcing me to turn the amp up really high to hear DVDs, and printing was a bit skanky, though reliable once I'd sorted out HPLIP. I also had to reinstall VLC to get DVDs to play.

So another day, another OS by the look of things.

*edit*
I'm posting from Mint 9 now - the fonts ARE too fuzzy, and this OS won't make it onto my hard drive.

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