LinuxJedi's /dev/null

Most major Linux distribution vendors are trying to push the Linux desktop harder than ever, in my opinion this is mainly due to the new hugely popular subnotebook craze (such as the EeePC).  There is however one major problem to this and that is most open source alternatives to proprietary solutions are not release read yet.

For example, anyone who has wanted to go out and by a wifi dongle for their Linux desktop has had to proceed with caution...or use ndiswrapper with the Windows driver.  If you want flash there are 2 open source solutions, both good but neither support everything.

So vendors have had 2 choices, try and assist development of these open solutions and push a distro that does x, y and z but not a, b and c.  Or do deals with the devil.

Fedora appears to have gone one way (only open source), openSUSE the complete opposite (evil deals with MS) and Ubuntu appears to be somewhere in the middle (including some proprietary drivers and codecs).

My worry is the massive explosion of proprietary additions into a Linux distro to get competitive edge over other vendors could cause the original end goal for Linux to be lost complete.

The question is this:  When does proprietary additions into a Linux distro become evil?

I have been following KDE 4 with interest since before the early alpha releases.  I have seen it evolve and even tried it out as my main desktop for a few days.

My verdict? (it that is worth much):

Its pretty damn good.

I am all for usability, KDE3 is quite...cluttered in my opinion.  Gnome has gone too far the other way, for example if I want to change the text on a text screensaver I have no hope.  KDE4 is a great middle ground.

I know a lot of things have caused controversy in the KDE community but I believe a lot of it had to be done.  Dolphin is great, a bit buggy still in 4.0.3 (it crashed a few times for me) but really goo at what it does, and I think the tagging and ratings are a really good idea in a Web 2.0 (and Desktop 2.0?) world.

There are still things I'm not so keen on yet, there are big bugs still, gaping holes where packages are missing (ie. no replacement for KDE3's Kontact yet) and using the launcher to find what program I want can be a bit fiddly.  But this is all being addressed at an incredible pace, most will be sorted by KDE 4.1 this summer.  I do personally think that KDE 4 will be the future of the desktop, and may well be using it as my primary desktop with OpenSUSE 11.

Me being the fickle person I am when it comes to a Linux distro I have snuggled back up with Ubuntu Hardy.

After a month of playing with OpenSUSE 10.3 things were going great, then I needed a package or 2 which were non-standard, which needed dependancies, which broke other dependancies and before long I was in depandancy hell!  It was at this point I thought "This crap doesn't happen with a DEB package manager".

I had a quick play with OpenSUSE 11 alpha 3 (with pain) and after about an hour formatted my Linux partition again, it is noway near usable on this laptop yet.

So I re-installed Ubuntu Hardy (using a MacBook pro I needed a version that would support all hardware out of the box), this time the Beta version.  Boy was I suprised at the change in such a short time.  Everything that had been a show stopper for me was fixed.  Not only that but there was an update today for Open Office 2.4 and it is fantastic, the font rendering is much better and I can't even remember any of the other reasons why I was put off.

I can have Compiz and suspend on this MacBook Pro!  This hasn't happened on any distro so far!

My only bugbear, and this is with all current distros, is that Evolution is very buggy with the Exchange connector.  At the moment I will find once a day it just refuses to work anymore saying it that Evolution has lost connection with the Exchange connector.  Killing every evolution spawned process doesn't seem to fix this either, I need to reboot.  I believe the libmapi library may well be used in Ubuntu Intrepid which should solve most of these problems.

All in all I am very satisfied with Hardy, and will be keeping it on this laptop, I'm even considering flattening the MacOS install from this laptop, as I can't remember the last time I booted it and its eating around 60GB.

There were a few things that annoyed me with Ubuntu a couple of weeks ago, yes I was using Hardy, but I think I would feel the same if using Gutsy (Gutsy is PITA to setup on my MacBook Pro).

So, I tried several different distributions, and have stuck with OpenSUSE 10.3.  It has a feel of 'just works' for me, despite the problem getting GRUB working on a MBP (which is documented) I have had no problems with it.

OpenSUSE is not without its problems, but they are more minor to me for day-2-day stuff, the package manager is relatively slow for example, but that doesn't really affect me post-install.  I have had a quick play with OpenSUSE 11 Alpha 3 as well, it is too unstable for me at the moment, but there are massive improvements to the package manager.  I am really looking forward to this becomming a final release.

Compared to Ubuntu it is much more asthetically pleasing and I am one of those freaks that actually likes SLAB (the OpenSUSE replacement for Gnome Menu).

One thing that does kind of annoy me for some really strange reason is no one seems to be able to pronounce SUSE, even Linux veterans, and I would imagine this would annoy Germans more than me.  The closest the English can get to pronounce is is 'soo-zuh', not 'soose', 'suzy' or 'sooz'.