Fedora 7 & PCLinuxOS 2007 - Quick Review

[linuxviolin]

With PCLinuxOS I used Google Desktop, but I prefer FOSS like Beagle.

I am for the complete suppression of Mono and its components (Beagle, Tomboy, F-Spot and so...)

mintInstall -- pretty cool. Maybe someday it will replace synaptic

especially not!

(Except I miss Karamba and Nautilus should have a way to type the location of a directory as well as to navigate to it!)

Nautilus does already that.

Very impressive. I think Mint will definitely continue to grow in popularity.

Yes, sure!

One of my favorite control center utilities from PCLinuxOS is the GRUB editor. I can change all my GRUB settings without editing any text files. (By the way, I love the xorg.conf editor in Mint's Control Center. Nice touch!)

Hum...editing a file is not more difficult than open a text file by exemple

K3B - I know I can't D/L it from the repos, but I consider this standard software. I'd love to see this included with the distro install CD.

especially not! K3B is very dependent on KDE and to use it in Gnome amount almost making turn the two desktops at the same time! Brasero for example is a replacing good for Gnome

Klipper -- Love this! Why not include Glipper in Mint?

Glipper? Why not, it is true that Klipper is a good thing in KDE also why not its Gnome version?

P.S.= I am sorry if my english is not completely correct, I am French and my english is not very developed. I used a translator of the Web sometimes…

[srturner47]

--I am for the complete suppression of Mono and its components (Beagle, Tomboy, F-Spot and so...

I'm honestly not sure what Mono is. But, I like having a desktop search available.

----mintInstall -- pretty cool. Maybe someday it will replace synaptic
--especially not!

Synaptic is a great program, and I am sure it will never go away. But, the more user friendly an OS can be for the masses, IMHO the better.

--Hum...editing a file is not more difficult than open a text file by exemple

Most people are not comfortable manually editing a text file. IMHO, for Linux to be a viable alternative for the masses, virtually everything should be configurable using a GUI. Luckily, almost everything is! GRUB is a rare exception, and PCLOS Control Center resolves this.

--especially not! K3B is very dependent on KDE and to use it in Gnome amount almost making turn the two desktops at the same time! Brasero for example is a replacing good for Gnome

I didn't know that about K3B. I'd still like to see a good CD Burner included in Mint.

[linuxviolin]

Mono is the application of .NET of Microsoft in Linux by Novell. While being a little provocative one can say that Mono is a way Microsoft wins in the Linux world...

A desktop search? Hum...why?

virtually everything should be configurable using a GUI

Maybe but if you want to open Grub for example as root it is enough to install the package "nautilus-gksu" from the synaptic, then re-start your session and with a right click you have:"open as administrator" and a GUI opens: the text editor Gedit. It is very easy. I think that even a beginner coming from Windows can use a text editor. But I did not test PCLinuxOS...

I agree for the CD Burner. I vote for Brasero (or maybe GnomeBaker?)

[Caraibes]

Hey Clem, you should test-drive Pardus 2007.2.

I dual-boot it now with my good ol'Fedora, and it seems very nice !

Interesting project : it is not commercial, it is backed by a non-US government... And also it is not based on another distro

[newW2]

Caraibes wrote:

it is backed by a non-US government

Being backed by a government (any government) is supposed to be a good thing?

[Caraibes]

Caraibes wrote:

it is backed by a non-US government

Being backed by a government (any government) is supposed to be a good thing?

Well, by that I was meaning it is not backed by a commercial entity. For instance, one can argue Red Hat & Novell release Fedora & OpenSUSE as testbeds for RHEL & SLED... I don't agree as I am a very happy Fedora user.

My point was that the development of Pardus seems not be be motivated by the desire to make money out of it, since it is funded by a government, far away from the USA and its restrictive laws. (no offense to my beloved friendly USA).

Then again, it is only my personal view, and I understand it takes us back to the sempiternal debate between left & right, or Democrats vs Republicans : -"is it better to leave the world to regulate itself with business & big multinationals, or do we need governments to babysit us a bit with regulations ???"

[newW2]

Yes how we allow our government(s) to intervene and or regulate is a very slippery slope to walk. And ...

I had similar thoughts about commercial entities. I was actually thinking of the way the 3000 pound patent gorilla props up governments anywhere, by giving gifts, that in the long run, are only just a means to self promote and monopolize free and non free markets. Oh and can't that tangent off into a discussion about a governments ability or inability to affectively regulate and assure that the private sector has choice?

We will not solve any of the worlds problems here for sure. However, I must say that I really enjoyed reading your response. Very well said!

[Caraibes]

Hi all, just a quick follow-up since my post on Pardus 2007.2.

Despite being a very interesting project, it can absolutely not measure up against Fedora. Therefore, it can't neither measure up against Mint, PCLOS, Debian, *Buntu etc...

I am not saying it is bad, but that Pardus still needs to fill its repos, especially when it comes to internationalization. OOo & FF locale were missing...

I'll keep on following its releases, because Pardus KDE was very fast & nice, and the choice of the fonts for FF was much nicer than any other distros...

[2112]

I'm a Red Hat veteran, and while I've used their products as my server OS and desktop OS since pre-RH7, I have to say that I was not terribly impressed with FC7. Yes, the artwork is nice. However I have yet to install it on a computer and have it configure xorg correctly without my (in-depth) intervention, which after a few times just became plain maddening.

A friend of mine who is a devoted Ubuntu fan suggested that I may enjoy Linux Mint, and I have to say that so far he's correct. I absolutely love the clean interface and menu, and since I'm a huge fan of green, the color schemes are fantastic. Out-of-the-box functionality has been better than any Fedora Core I've used (all of them). And here's the big one: historically I have despised Gnome, and have *always* used KDE. Somehow the Mint Gnome DE is much faster, and doesn't annoy me like it once did.

I have loved yum as my updater for a long time, but I have to say that Synaptic beats the pants off yumex. I've always been a command line junkie, but once I used the former as a front-end for apt I'm finding it hard to turn back. While Mint is a slim distro and may not have everything one wants on install, Synaptic makes it remarkably easy to add those missing items.

Your suggestions are great, Clem - in particular being able to view boot details (the lack of which is the one thing about Mint that drives me absolutely batty), and including integrated SELinux and firewall.

The conclusion so far: Linux Mint on the desktop, but RHEL or CentOS are still the winners on the server side.