[svlug] I hate Ubuntu Unity. I am soliciting suggestions.

[Ivan Sergio Borgonovo]

On 05/07/2016 07:06 AM, Jesse Monroy wrote:

> So, again I want to put Linux on it, but I might go
> to FreeBSD. I'm looking for something like
> the classic Gnome, but I'm will to cobble something
> together rather deal with a crappy windowing system.

I was a long time user of KDE, KDE stopped to work reliably enough. I 
moved to xfce4. I miss some of the things KDE was doing better or by 
default compared to xfce4 but apparently not enough to switch back.

KDE has become more stable recently (debian sid) but is still takes 
double the time before I can use my PC adding around 10 sec and this 
makes me reluctant to go back.
Probably disparity of memory consumption between KDE and xfce4 doesn't 
make that much difference these days and at least on my box performance 
were not appreciably diverse (AMD FX 6300, 8Gb RAM, ATI 6570).
At traits KDE can even be more responsive than xfce4.

But I still haven't understood how to restore the application I left 
open last session with xfce4 and this presumably add more than 10sec.
And yeah those 10sec may come from loading the previous session.

I admit I tend to be pretty conservative about DE simply because they 
don't make that much difference and I hate wasting the initial time to 
set them up comfortably.

So I'm mostly lazy and my trust in KDE stability has not completely 
restored.

The qt based apps I may miss are amarok and kaddressbook.
For different reasons I don't.

If I had to write software with a GUI I'd chose qt and I'm surprised KDE 
has been a constant mess in the past years even if it built on top of 
such nice libraries.

But that's not a problem, I don't write GUI for my desktop, I 
occasionally write them for embedded systems and it is still a pain and 
I'm happy it is not the center of my work.

I'd stay away from BSD for hardware support.
The box seems old enough that unless it has some really peculiar piece 
of hardware you shouldn't have problems.

Unfortunately these days surfing the Internet with a browser is going to 
suck a lot of resources especially if you're a bit too liberal with 
noscript and 2Gb of RAM may be a bit too few for a comfortable experience.

There is a chance I may have to buy a new notebook and while I generally 
would be happy to buy mature cheap hardware, this time I may need 
something faster and I already feel the pain to find something that will 
just work.
If I had to spend 400$ on a notebook I wouldn't be bothered too much 
that something didn't work perfectly immediately, but the things I need 
are more in the 1500$ price range and that's annoying.

That's somehow is counterintuitive. I'd expect that manufacturers would 
put a bit more effort in trying to see their expensive hardware 
supported by Linux.

BTW yeah dealing with Realtek is/was no fun. But I haven't seen any new 
model around so they should be reasonably supported now.
I'd say they are considered crappy hardware mostly for their software 
support but they shouldn't be inherently crappy or not enough crappy 
unless you had to use them in a very constrained environment.

To put it in another way... now most of their old hardware is reasonably 
supported and it is very cheap. If something came with one of their old 
nic I wouldn't be concerned but I wouldn't be happy either.
I'd prefer to give my money to someone that contribute to the mainline 
kernel with better drivers, but realtek are so popular it may be hard to 
avoid them.

I've some around my lan and with newer kernels they became less and less 
problematic eg. one was *rebooting* my server, others where slow to come 
up but now they simply work and I guess not thanks to realtek developers.

-- 
Ivan Sergio Borgonovo
http://www.webthatworks.it