D&D ( distros and desktops )

[Jerry Snitselaar]

On Sat Jul 26 14, der.hans wrote:
> moin moin,
> 
> The SuSE road tour is prompting conversation about distributions and the
> desktops for them.
> 
> Let's discuss them here, but I have a few requests about posts.
> 
> 1. no slamming stuff  ( no distro trolling )
> Put the emphasis on what you do like. If you need to mention a feature you
> don't like, please do so politely.
> 
> 2. be respectful of others ( no person trolling )
> We have different requirements and workflows.
> 
> 3. it's all FLOSS ( no license trolling )
> someone using a distro you don't like is still better than them using a
> proprietary system
> 
> ciao,
> 
> der.hans

Distros:

I believe my first was Slackware, but not too long after that I had
Red Hat installed. I have mainly used Fedora since it came about. For
a spell I used Gentoo, but with a wife and 2 daughters I don't have
time to be compiling every package on my system these days.

I have played with both Debian and Ubuntu at times, and usually have
them ready to run as kvm guests.  I can't remember which it was of the
two, but the fact that they installed documentation as a separate
package was really annoying when I went to look at something about gcc
while on a flight and info gcc brought up the manpage. The package
management seemed nice though from what I remember.

I've wanted to spend time with Arch, but haven't ever really gotten
further than installing it to a kvm guest.

For work I have been dealing with RHEL based stuff since about 2004.
I tend to run Fedora on my work systems though, and just run kvm guests
with whichever RHEL/OL release I need or grab a lab system with the
right configuration.

Desktops:

Over the years it was probably pretty even split between gnome or kde.
I seemed to like using the kde shell better than the gnome one, but I
left both environments behind a few years ago.

These days I use tiling window managers. The first I used was xmonad,
which is written/configured in haskell, and for the past couple of years
I have been using i3wm. It allows me to do most of my work with just the
keyboard and not the mouse. Most of my time is spent in terminal windows
with emacs, cscope, git, and possibly crash if I am working on analyzing
system crash. Mutt (+ offlineimap/msmtp) for email, and irssi to for irc
chat.

Jerry