Yesterday's setup of Linux Mint 12 KDE Edition went very smoothly.
From running the system via a live USB boot disk through to complete installation; the problems were few and the impression has been largely positive particularly in comparison to the Gnome 3 edition of Mint 12. It has been so much better in fact, that the boot of the system via the USB stick was significantly faster than the boot of the old installed OS. I think that says a lot about the speed of the Gnome system.
I was particularly pleased to discover that dual screen support exists without issue and without needing proprietary drivers from NVidia. Little features like independent wallpapers for each screen are a nice touch. I'm also quite the fan of KDE's widgets system. To the best of my knowledge there is no equivalent in Gnome and if there is, it wasn't as obvious as here where a right-click on a panel or desktop is enough to reveal their presence.
So far - and it has been less than 24 hours since the installation, so it's hardly a thorough test - I've had no major issues on my desktop machine. The only very minor niggle is the appearance of Firefox which visually, doesn't sit as well in KDE as it does in Gnome. It really is a minor issue though and doesn't affect the usability of the browser. If it really starts to bother me, I can always use Chromium as an alternative.
Following such a success, I decided the netbook should also be upgraded. I like to run the same systems where possible just for consistency so I downloaded the 32 bit version and went through the same process of installing via USB.
This was more tricky. At the moment, I'm not a particular fan of netbook versions of traditional interfaces. I didn't like Unity and I don't like Plasma-netbook that KDE used by default on my machine. Not being particularly familiar with KDE, I had to research how to revert to the traditional interface which took some time and some clicks but I got there.
Oddly I've also experienced a few crashes, one of which resulted in a Kernel Panic requiring a battery pull to resolve. That was during my configuring phase though and now I've settled down on that front, I'm hoping it'll be fine.
Assuming the desktop machine remains stable, I think I'll be keeping this for a while. My last experience of KDE was right after the launch of version 4 and I remember being less than impressed. Now is a different story. It's come on a long way.
For the netbook, if it doesn't seem stable enough then I'll have to investigate other options. One of which is a minimal Linux OS designed purely around using the internet. I can't recall it's name but it only takes something like 100MB and considering the netbook is mainly for internet use, it could be fun to try.
From running the system via a live USB boot disk through to complete installation; the problems were few and the impression has been largely positive particularly in comparison to the Gnome 3 edition of Mint 12. It has been so much better in fact, that the boot of the system via the USB stick was significantly faster than the boot of the old installed OS. I think that says a lot about the speed of the Gnome system.
I was particularly pleased to discover that dual screen support exists without issue and without needing proprietary drivers from NVidia. Little features like independent wallpapers for each screen are a nice touch. I'm also quite the fan of KDE's widgets system. To the best of my knowledge there is no equivalent in Gnome and if there is, it wasn't as obvious as here where a right-click on a panel or desktop is enough to reveal their presence.
So far - and it has been less than 24 hours since the installation, so it's hardly a thorough test - I've had no major issues on my desktop machine. The only very minor niggle is the appearance of Firefox which visually, doesn't sit as well in KDE as it does in Gnome. It really is a minor issue though and doesn't affect the usability of the browser. If it really starts to bother me, I can always use Chromium as an alternative.
Following such a success, I decided the netbook should also be upgraded. I like to run the same systems where possible just for consistency so I downloaded the 32 bit version and went through the same process of installing via USB.
This was more tricky. At the moment, I'm not a particular fan of netbook versions of traditional interfaces. I didn't like Unity and I don't like Plasma-netbook that KDE used by default on my machine. Not being particularly familiar with KDE, I had to research how to revert to the traditional interface which took some time and some clicks but I got there.
Oddly I've also experienced a few crashes, one of which resulted in a Kernel Panic requiring a battery pull to resolve. That was during my configuring phase though and now I've settled down on that front, I'm hoping it'll be fine.
Assuming the desktop machine remains stable, I think I'll be keeping this for a while. My last experience of KDE was right after the launch of version 4 and I remember being less than impressed. Now is a different story. It's come on a long way.
For the netbook, if it doesn't seem stable enough then I'll have to investigate other options. One of which is a minimal Linux OS designed purely around using the internet. I can't recall it's name but it only takes something like 100MB and considering the netbook is mainly for internet use, it could be fun to try.
A few months back, the latest release of the popular Linux distro Mint was released. Since then, I've been running it on my two machines - a 64 bit desktop and a 32 bit netbook.
Linux Mint 12 was a significant release as it was the first time that the distribution adopted Gnome 3 as it's GUI. This latest version of the interface has itself been controversial because of its significant departure from the its traditional experience.
Mint's release did a reasonably good job of trying to tame the new beast by incorporating theming and extensions in an attempt to try and retain some familiarity but I don't think it's quite worked yet. The repositioning of the taskbar, duplication of functionality (with Gnome's launcher and the Mint Menu) and the noticably slower performance have left me with a poor impression. Not of Mint necessarily - moving on from Gnome 2.x was a necessity - but of what Gnome 3 is at the moment.
Since installing the new system, I've experienced a number of bugs and annoyances from a slow boot, laggy Gnome Shell, GEdit lockups, full system crashes and difficulty with shutdowns and restarts. For this reason, I'm now downloading the release candidate for the KDE edition of Mint 12.
I've used Gnome since I adopted Linux back in 2007 and although have briefly played with KDE; I've never settled down with it always preferring the simple interface of Gnome 2. Now though, I wonder if things will be different. KDE 4 is well developed compared to the recent release of its rival. Perhaps I'll find it a better option. If not though, my third option is to try the Debian edition of Mint - or something else altogether!
Linux Mint 12 was a significant release as it was the first time that the distribution adopted Gnome 3 as it's GUI. This latest version of the interface has itself been controversial because of its significant departure from the its traditional experience.
Mint's release did a reasonably good job of trying to tame the new beast by incorporating theming and extensions in an attempt to try and retain some familiarity but I don't think it's quite worked yet. The repositioning of the taskbar, duplication of functionality (with Gnome's launcher and the Mint Menu) and the noticably slower performance have left me with a poor impression. Not of Mint necessarily - moving on from Gnome 2.x was a necessity - but of what Gnome 3 is at the moment.
Since installing the new system, I've experienced a number of bugs and annoyances from a slow boot, laggy Gnome Shell, GEdit lockups, full system crashes and difficulty with shutdowns and restarts. For this reason, I'm now downloading the release candidate for the KDE edition of Mint 12.
I've used Gnome since I adopted Linux back in 2007 and although have briefly played with KDE; I've never settled down with it always preferring the simple interface of Gnome 2. Now though, I wonder if things will be different. KDE 4 is well developed compared to the recent release of its rival. Perhaps I'll find it a better option. If not though, my third option is to try the Debian edition of Mint - or something else altogether!