BillW50 wrote:
On 8/16/2014 5:42 PM, Roderick Stewart wrote:
On Sat, 16 Aug 2014 12:41:34 -0400, Silver Slimer
wrote:

OS war! -)

There's no war, GNU/Linux has already lost. I'm generally very
open-minded about other operating systems but GNU/Linux is so
destructively awful that I have to advocate staying away from it
completely. There's no excuse for the same system and the same game
screen tearing when played in GNU/Linux, there's no excuse for a very
standard computer refusing to shut down or sleep in GNU/Linux, there's
also no excuse for one of their main desktop environments to run slow on
an i3 with 8GB of RAM.

You must simply be unlucky with the particular machine on which you've
tried to install it. I have Mint Cinnamon 17 installed on several
computers on SSDs and it boots up in seconds runs nice and smoothly.
On some I have both Windows and Linux installed as a dual boot, and on
these computers Linux always boots up and loads applications faster
than Windows.

Really? I have done the same and I found the opposite. Although I am
running Ubuntu and Puppy. Why is Mint Cinnamon 17 magic?


Some people don't like the Unity interface, so they
take a gander at the Mint site for an alternative.

I still download and do a quick test of Ubuntu, but
my UBB flash key has Mint on it. And that's what I boot
when I want a non-Windows environment.

*******

The people in the Ubuntu group, seem to relish installing
alternate desktops using packages, so if you have the time
or stomach for it, that's another route.

The only thing I don't like about Mint, is the packages
aren't as highly polished as a Ubuntu release. I've found
things in Mint, that have apparently never been tested.

When it comes to distros, you either need a single gifted
individual, a jack of all trades, to whip together and QA
the thing. An example would be Klaus Knopper. Some of his
early distros were amazingly good. Otherwise, you need a
small army of individuals good at this or that aspect of
building a release. And some distros no longer have the
critical mass and hours of work put into it, to make a
quality product. And the only way I know of to judge
that, is test for yourself, and see.

As an example, the first time I installed Gentoo, followed
the standard recipe, the whole thing was flawless. I was
impressed. Fast forward three years, I try to do a new
install, follow the usual recipe, and it was a disaster.
All sorts of broken dependencies. No clue as to what
to back out to fix it. What does that tell you ?
Some sort of QA issue, a loss of staff, or something
along those lines.

No single install, is a guarantee a "distro is here to stay".
You can't expect the people building the distro, to have
paying jobs, and invest an extra 8 hours a day, making
a distro for you for free. There has to be staff turnover.

Paul