Other Distros (NOT A FLAMEWAR TOPIC!!)

[Gary W. Swearingen]

I've recently tried installing Debian, Ubuntu, Kubunto, Fedora, and
Mandriva (all amd64 versions), trying to find one that will run the
realplayer (32 bit, of course) tolerably well.  (None of them will;
the menus and the streaming both seem to update at several second
intervals.  But that's a different thread.  I plan to try a pure 32
bit OS and then complain to the Helix project in any case.  Then it's
back to the BSD world until there's a new realplayer to try.)

One thing I noticed was a huge difference in the speed at which one
program ran.  The Shisen-Sho game has a "^N" function to start a new
game, where it draws a new sort-of-random layout of 24x12 Majong
tiles.  On Debian (testing/etch) I could hold that key down and it
would draw new layouts something like 10 times per second.  On the
other OSs, it was more like once per second.  Strange.


As far as the install experiences (all done with one full or partial
CD only), my main complaint is that few (Mandriva?) allow one decent
control over partitioning.  They're all scary, not letting you say
"hands off disk X", except Fedora, which then didn't ignore one of
them and was too stupid to ignore my BSD partitions and got confused
and wouldn't install at all.  No doubt about it -- Mandriva's got the
best installer.

As for software installation tools, I found kubuntu's "adept" to be
the best.  Mandriva's (GUI) was nice, but contained poor descriptions
and didn't add the new software to the main toolbar menus.  Mandriva
DID have the big advantage of not needing a chroot to run 32 bit apps
like realplayer in, apparently having both libxxx and lib64xxx
libraries.

IIRC, Debian was the only one for which I _had_ to mess with X config
and sound config.


Finally, a non-OS complaint: Too many programs (>1) don't honor the
standard (since before Win3.1, IIRC) X11 select/cut/paste scheme.  On
one OS (Ubuntu, maybe, after I managed to find the relevent repo) the
cut and paste was even messed up within xemacs.

And I might as well add a KDE (and maybe GNOME) gripe: I miss the
standard window manager function of forcing the window behind all
others.  (I'm still trying to decide whether to learn how to wrangle
KDE or return to my beloved fvwm2.)