OT: "Best" Linux Distro?

[Jules Richardson]

Alexey Toptygin wrote:
> On Thu, 1 Dec 2005, Jules Richardson wrote:
> 
>> Actually, I forgot to mention that I've quite often had people 
>> recommend I try Debian over Slackware before. You still get the 
>> problem of the Gnome / KDE choice though, I suppose.
> 
> There's a lot of window managers out there that don't have the bloat 
> problems of Gnome and KDE. I like WindowMaker, but you can get 
> AfterStep, fluxbox, icewm, etc.; there's tons available out of the box 
> on most distros. The only way to win the "Desktop Envoronment" game is 
> not to play :-)

Heh, sure. :-)

I used to be a fan of both fvwm2 and Afterstep. But it is useful sometimes 
when desktop apps can interact with each other, I just wish Gnome and KDE 
weren't such bloated monstrosities though.

I suspect it's a case of bad design and too many people working on their own 
little aspect of the system, rather than there being any grand plan for the 
desktop environment as a whole - but in the open source world it's hard to do 
a big project to any kind of plan.

I gave up on Gnome a long time ago because it just wouldn't work right in a 
networked environment where you might have a Gnome app running from one system 
but displayed on another (which of course is one of the main benefits of X) - 
KDE at least didn't have the same problems, although it still suffers from the 
bloat factor.

<cynical>
Of course in a few years Microsoft will 'invent' Linux. We'll get a consistent 
desktop (but still a bad one), and a system that's inherently unstable. But 
the Microsoft-buying public will lap it up, thinking how clever Microsoft are 
for inventing something that - unbeknown to them - looks oddly like UNIX. :-)
</cynical>

cheers

Jules