"Since CP has their own Debian distro, people won't have to wonder if their are Linux drivers for the hardware found in the system."
What a bizarre thing to say. Do you really think that if you buy an Ubuntu netbook from Dell, System76, or Zareason, that they won't include drivers for the hardware? Seriously??
I've used Linux for about 10 years now, starting with Mandrake (the original Mandriva) back in the "RPM Hell" dark ages. For the past several years I've used Ubuntu (since 6.06, I think) with Gnome, but have watch KDE 4 mature with some interest. Having recently started playing with Virtual Box, this story gave me the motivation to compare Kubuntu 9.10 to Mandriva 2010 from my own personal Gnome-tainted perspective, since KDE 4 enthusiasts keep posting that Kunbuntu doesn't do KDE 4 justice next to a "real" KDE distribution like Mandriva. This was a highly biased, what-I-care-about perspective. Your mileage will most *definitely* vary.
I installed Kubuntu first, and was underwhelmed (to be polite). Just finished playing with Mandriva 2010, and
Kubuntu was *much* easier to install, very similar to the trademark ease of Ubuntu. Mandriva was what I remembered from many years ago - scores of screens asking me the most trivial details ("How should we display time?" Well, pick something and if I really hate it I'll change it! Geesh! "Do you have any other repositories?" I have no earthly idea. "Which desktop would you like - KDE, Gnome, or other?" Other? Really? And didn't this used to have a "Both" entry?).
Once installed, however, Kubuntu left me cold. No Firefox (I launched the Konquerer thing, and it crashed on my second tab and took me to Bugzilla, which listed more "similar" Konquerer bug reports than I had heart to even skim). Few tools pre-installed. No games at all. And a weird sliding K-Menu thingy that took four clicks just to launch an application. I was left with a sinking "*now* what do I do?" kind of feeling, which is unusual in my experience in the rich world of free software.
Mandriva looked great on first boot (though it really wanted me to complete a detailed questionnaire, which I started and then abandoned). I didn't like having to log in (if someone I don't trust is accessing my console, I have a much bigger problem than computer security - like, how did this person get in my *house*!), but once in, the menu was pre-populated with all the comforting old favorites - FireFox, OpenOffice.org, GIMP, Aramok, Okular, Scribus (hadn't looked that one in a few years!), and on and on - and so many games they had to have sub-categories to fit them all on the comfortingly normal menu. And a "starter quick launch bar" in the lower left, next to the Mandriva Star that acted like a K-Menu. I have no idea what a "Diff Check" is (a notice keeps popping up in the lower right to assure me that nobody has tampered with my computer - is this a common problem???), but thus far it all seems... comfortable.
Not sure I'll be switching to KDE 4 any time soon, but certainly Mandriva presents a very convincing case that it's ready to this Gnome-oriented user. Kubuntu doesn't seem to quite be there yet, but since Ubuntu is so nicely polished, I'm sure given some time they'll produce something I like. But now I see what KDE enthusiasts mean when they complain that Kubuntu unfairly tarnishes their reputation.
Just my $0.02, and a "Well done, Mandriva!" to the nice folks on the continent. I fondly miss you guys.
Posted from my Mandriva VM...
closeminded traditionalists without understanding of relevant issues keep their mouths shut when those issues are being discussed.
So you're willing to discuss how you want to change the constitution, as long as those who disagree with you aren't allowed to talk? I don't think it's the constitution that's the problem here...
Seriously? So how did Rush and Hannity and such keep their jobs? They were merciless in criticizing Bush over a long list of lunacy, including the Medicare expansion, the attempt to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants (*again*), and the idiotic 700 *billion* dollar TARP spending bill (inadvertently labeled a "stimulus plan", as if any country can spend its way into prosperity).
Or do you only listen to people with whom you agree?
Y'know, this got me thinking. I'm a digital pack rat, so I looked for the oldest file on my computer. It's COSMIC.WP from 1989, the rules for a game my friends and I created in college, in WordPerfect 4.2 for DOS format.
Just to watch the meltdown, I double-clicked the file. OpenOffice.org opened it without a problem. Even the ASCII-formatted tables look right.
Wow.
I'm of your generation, apparently, as I related to almost everything you wrote (and well-written it was, too).
But "Slide rules were frequently used by engineers and scientists to perform addition, subtraction,..."?? Since when did slide rules do addition and subtraction? And I say that while looking at my old slide rule...
I was a UM Freshman in 1992... We learned binary by drawing 8x8 grids, writing "256 | 128 | 64 | 32 | 16 | 8 | 4 | 2 | 1" over them
I was a Mississippi State freshman in 1979, and we still could only fit "128 | 64 | 32 | 16 | 8 | 4 | 2 | 1" above an 8x8 grid. I hope to God that your UM was Ole Miss!
Precisely. I'm at a class reunion (never mind which one...), and the obituary board showed that a friend of mine from high school had died. Nobody knew what happened.
So I went to his hometown newspaper's website to search for the obituary. The chumps wanted to charge me $2/article for "archived" stories. The obvious problem is that I needed to sort through dozens of obituaries to find the right one (he had a fairly common name, and the date was "sometime in the past 5 years").
To heck with them - I just called his old phone number to ask his wife. He answered.
Glad I didn't pay all that money for nothing...
Actually, that was when many Americans volunteered to fight with the British against Nazi Germany. The American government, however, "didn't want to invade anybody", so they simply provided a variety of "lend / lease" supplies to the Allies and hoped everybody else would like us. You know, the policy recommended by the Anon Coward to whom I was responding.
Didn't work then. Won't work now.
You have to remember, this thing is more underpowered than the cheap netbooks that will barely surf the web on anything that has Flash.
Really? I received a System76 Starling netbook ($360 complete) for Father's Day this year. I normally have 10-15 tabs open in Firefox, while running Pidgin IM, a couple of OpenOffice.org documents (our spreadsheet budget and whatever I'm writing at the moment), and a couple of other programs. With all that, running a video on YouTube (for example) is acceptably smooth and quite watch-able. Not anti-aliased and scaled in real-time, of course, but perfectly fine for relaxing in my recliner.
Have you ever tried anything other than Windows XP on a netbook? Not trying to slam Microsoft, just curious.
Much of the OLPC software was written in Python to make it accessible, not to make it fast - that was the whole point of the "Show Source" button and the versioning file system with roll-back. Well, it was a nice dream...
The OLPC I played with at PyCon was acceptably fast. If only I knew more math, I'd own one.
Software production is assumed to be a line function, but it is run like a staff function. -- Paul Licker
