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I'm a big Linux fan, and some people might find Linux news interesting, too. I'd appreciate it if anyone who wants a Linux vs Windows thread start a separate one.

Steam Machines (still don't understand why they didn't call them Steam Engines) are almost upon us. I'm very interested, though I have to say Valve seems to have lost momentum, and taken an extremely laid back approach to the launch. I think that, at best, they will be a very slow burn. Perhaps Valve accepts this, and is playing the long game - they can probably afford to.

I've just installed the Kaos distro, which is a bleeding edge KDE 5 system. It has some horrible aesthetic choices, nasty font rendering, etc, but it is about the snappiest OS I've ever used. With a bit of tweaking, and switching to their dark theme, it's very nice indeed, and faster than minimal distros I've used. I put a high premium on that feeling of greased lightning responsiveness, and it has that in spades. It boots in two seconds, and it loves an SSD - everything I click on leaps up like it's spring loaded, and I wonder if they made some improvement to disk access. Valve would do well to make their distro so lean and snappy.
 
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If more games did work under Linux I would totally use it more. I had a dual boot system for years until upgrades stopped liking my LAN. I even succeeded in playing a few games under Wine back then (like BG2, even installed mods, lol).

There is one computer in the house that use Linux (Lubuntu distro), it's the guest computer that is mostly used for surfing the web and reading emails. I upgraded it recently and it made me discover boot USB live-CDs…so much faster than the CD-ROM version.

I always preferred KDE, although some experimental window managers looked very hot a few years ago maybe I should recheck them. I might redo a dual boot at some point too. I usually try a bunch of distro under a VM. I'll keep an eye on Kaos.
 
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Yes, there's been lots of interesting, novel desktop environments over the past few years. I've found that most them have come and gone too fleetingly to standardise on, though.

I've always been somewhat disatisfied with all Linux DE's, but I must say that KDE 5 is really closing in on what I want from a desktop, and the KDE 5 development framework seems to be going from strength to strength - a lot of fine German engineering!

Gaming is certainly a key factor for acceptance in the wider market, but for me this hasn't really been a problem - even before I switched to Linux years ago, I started maintaining a separate Windows installation for gaming, because I hacked around with my main OS so much it became a pain to frequently do a fresh install and set up all my games again. Now I maintain a flexible Linux desktop for general use, and just boot into my Windows gaming partition when I need to, and it never really needs to be interfered with.

EDIT: Screenie of desktop, for those interested.

2fNafj1.jpg
 
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I dual-boot with Ubuntu, but I had all sorts of weird problems with it so I almost always end up booting into windows instead... so perhaps I should switch to KDE 5? What would you say is key differences with Ubuntu? ( if you have tried that )
 
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GothicGothicness said:
so perhaps I should switch to KDE 5? What would you say is key differences with Ubuntu? ( if you have tried that )
Click to expand...

KDE is not a distro, it's a window manager. Ubuntu use Gnome as window manager, Kubuntu is the KDE variation. KDE is probably the most "Windows" like in term of look.

Depending what are your "weird" look the idea might be to switch to another distro...there are over 200 of them.
 
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I recently reformatted my Lenovo netbook as a Ubuntu-only machine, which is the most time I've spent with Linux since the 90s ... pretty solid (better performing on that Intel Atom with 1GB RAM than Windows!), need more time with it!

Never really got into Amiga, but I miss BeOS, OS/2 and NeXT (on Intel).
 
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azarhal said:
KDE is not a distro, it's a window manager. Ubuntu use Gnome as window manager, Kubuntu is the KDE variation. KDE is probably the most "Windows" like in term of look.

Depending what are your "weird" look the idea might be to switch to another distro…there are over 200 of them.
Click to expand...

Yes, obviously, KDE 5, theoretically I am sure I could switch desktop manager in my Ubuntu distro also, but it'd kind of defeat the purpose of running Ubuntu I guess. But I guess I should also ask what he thinks of the kaos distro...
 
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Just to keep the terminology straight - Gnome and KDE are desktop environments, not window managers. The window managers for Gnome and KDE are Metacity and KWin, but it's not something you'd generally need to worry about.

The majority of distros are built on top of one of the major Linux systems - Debian, Arch or Redhat. They choose a desktop environment to put on top of the base system, and configure the programs and look to create their own experience.

Kaos is a bit unusual in that it is not built on top of a pre-existing system, but built from scratch from the kernel up. This probably helps to explain its speed - they have eliminated anything unnecessary for their aims.

As I mentioned, it is very bleeding edge, and a bit rough in places. It's using the very latest update of KDE 5, and KDE 5 itself is very young. I would not recommend it yet for someone who wants zero hassle, and isn't comfortable tweaking Linux. By all means try it out, but don't judge it on the expectation of a trouble-free experience. I would say that by the time KDE 5 is mature enough for the major distros, probably quite soon, we'll see some excellent desktops for the general user.

@Gothic

I would say that the main differences to the Ubuntu desktop are the performance and responsiveness, the more Windows-like layout, and that KDE is far more geared to a 'power user'. Their motto for KDE 5 is "Simple by default, powerful when needed", and I think they're doing a good job on that.
 
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Ripper said:
Just to keep the terminology straight - Gnome and KDE are desktop environments, not window managers. The window managers for Gnome and KDE are Metacity and KWin, but it's not something you'd generally need to worry about.

The majority of distros are built on top of one of the major Linux systems - Debian, Arch or Redhat. They choose a desktop environment to put on top of the base system, and configure the programs and look to create their own experience.

Kaos is a bit unusual in that it is not built on top of a pre-existing system, but built from scratch from the kernel up. This probably helps to explain its speed - they have eliminated anything unnecessary for their aims.

As I mentioned, it is very bleeding edge, and a bit rough in places. It's using the very latest update of KDE 5, and KDE 5 itself is very young. I would not recommend it yet for someone who wants zero hassle, and isn't comfortable tweaking Linux. By all means try it out, but don't judge it on the expectation of a trouble-free experience. I would say that by the time KDE 5 is mature enough for the major distros, probably quite soon, we'll see some excellent desktops for the general user.

@Gothic

I would say that the main differences to the Ubuntu desktop are the performance and responsiveness, the more Windows-like layout, and that KDE is far more geared to a 'power user'. Their motto for KDE 5 is "Simple by default, powerful when needed", and I think they're doing a good job on that.
Click to expand...

It sounds like exactly what I would want from a linux distro. Did you experience any compatibility issues with common applications? ( I guess you haven't tried that many yet) How big is this distro and where to download?
 
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GothicGothicness said:
It sounds like exactly what I would want from a linux distro. Did you experience any compatibility issues with common applications? ( I guess you haven't tried that many yet) How big is this distro and where to download?
Click to expand...

You can download from here: http://kaosx.us/ 1.6gb download.

No compatibility issues that I've hit yet. All of the KDE applications have been updated to KDE 5. Firefox is a GTK app, and that runs perfectly.

My biggest initial concerns were the bizarrely awful graphics for the login screen, and the poor default font setup, resulting in some hideously rendered webpages. All of this can be remedied quite quickly by tweaking the theme setup, and installing some better font packages. Also had to fiddle around with desktop rendering settings to get things perfectly smooth.
 
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ilm said:
Nah, just use opensuse tumbleweed. Best trade-off bleeding edge vs stability and has the best kde integration.

If you're adventurous try http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
Click to expand...

Tumbleweed used to have complications with proprietary GPU drivers - do you know if that's still the case?
 
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Good question, my old pc had a nvidia card and I often had to install the nvidia driver manually after kernel upgrades. No problem for me, other people might dislike that.

My last two laptops had an intel GPU though, of which the drivers are included in the kernel, so I don't know how often nvidia or ati repo's are updated these days. If you mean stability problems of some sort, never had an issue with it. These days the factory repos are the same as tumbleweed and quite stable.
 
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