Ubuntu 8.10 (to Josef)

[Matthew A Coulliette]

Josef Lowder wrote:
> On 3/25/09, Matt Graham <danceswithcrows at usa.net> wrote:
>   
>> You know what all this is saying to me?  "PCLinuxOS is buggy.  Don't
>>  use it."  Having a virtualbox install hose X, having LiveCDs lock
>>  up on multiple machines, and so forth are things that I just would
>>  not put up with.  Life's too short, you know?
>>
>>  If you are worried about your /home , the thing to do is to take
>>  that USB drive, plug it in, mount it, then "tar czf /mnt/usb/
>>  backup.tar.gz /home" , so even if your reinstall eats your /home,
>>  you have a backup of everything on that USB drive and can get it
>>  retrieved with minimal fuss.  Just make sure there's enough space
>>  on the USB drive and it should work fine.
>>     
>
> You give very good, helpful, and efficient advice, Matt ...
> and I have sincerely appreciated every answer you've given.
>
> I must say, though, that PCLinuxOS is by far the best distro flavor
> (to my taste) that I have ever experienced.  The 2007 release has been
> rock solid for me for two years on six different computers (until this
> virtualbox fiasco).  I've tried many dozens of other distros and none
> of them have ever been anywhere near as easy and pleasing to use as
> PCL. I've tried a half dozen different releases of Ubuntu and Kubuntu
> and they have all been (in my experience) definitely inferior to PCL
> -- just very awkward and inefficient (to me).  I realize some of my
> preference is probably just due to familiarity -vs- non-familiarity.
> But, to me, PCL is just head and shoulders above anything else I've
> tried.
>
> BTW: I couldn't get an Internet connection to work with the latest
> Kubuntu 8.1 on my thinkpad, whereas everything, even wireless, works
> "out of the box" on my thinkpad with PCL 2007.
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>   
Josef,

I felt the same way about Suse 10.2 as you do about PCLinux, until I
switched to Ubuntu 8.10.  I found that everything I had heard about
Ubuntu was true.  (Not just a bunch of hype.)  It has GUI's for almost
everything, yet you can still get your hands dirty with the command line
if you want to.  It has great community support, including googles
(which I found to have accurate instructions), utube, chat rooms, and
mailing lists.  It is also very bug free.  I have been using ubuntu for
a little over a month now, (on 3 computers, 2 of them have 2 monitors
running nvidia twinview and 1 laptop IBM thinkpad T30 using the
opensource driver),and I am very happy to have switched.  I had to give
up kde (I did not like Kubuntu) and get used to using "sudo" (which I
now feel is an improvement over the traditional su method.  There are 2
bugs that I know of: 1. the edit menu command does not save changes
properly, (you have to edit it, save it, edit it, and then save it again
in order to save the menu the way you want it.  2. There is no way to
add desktops/workspaces.  You are supposed to be able to right click the
desktop switcher and have a gui pop up; although a gui does pop up on my
computer it is missing a lot of the desktop/workspace options that other
people have on their ubuntu 8.10 systems.  I plan on submitting a bug
report on launchpad in the near future.  The only other flaw I know of
is 2 packages I like: pgcalc & cinelerra.  Which I am going to submit a
request for in the near future so that someone can build a ubuntu
package for them.  These are all the flaws I know of on ubuntu which
when compared to other distributions is remarkably few.  I thought SUSE
was great despite it's problems, but Ubuntu is awesome!

MatthewMPP