On Monday, 20 January 2014 at 14:53:55 UTC, Chris wrote:
> On Monday, 20 January 2014 at 14:35:29 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
>> On Monday, 20 January 2014 at 12:47:15 UTC, Chris wrote:
>>>> - what is your preferred Deskop Environment / Windows Manager?
>>>
>>> Most distros are flexible. Right now I'm testing Xfce.
>>
>> Theoretically - yes. In practice packaging quality differs depending on how much attention specific DE/WM gets from that distro maintainers. For example, you are unlikely to reliably use Unity anywhere but on Ubuntu and Gnome 3 fans are pretty much limited to Fedora and Arch. For more simplistic environments it is not that much of a concern, at least Xfce should be rock solid anywhere.
>>
>> I am (unsurprisingly) using Arch but can easily imagine perfectly legitimate reasons to not do so :P
>
> I've had a look at Arch. While it seems to be a nice and (c)lean distro, it is a bit of a pain in the neck to install / set up. Also I don't know, if it will be easy to get the hardware support I need. I don't want to spend ages configuring it and tinkering with drivers etc. I prefer UI installers and out-of-the box support (and if the latter is not possible, at least an "easy-to-get-the-drivers-later-system"). The laziest option would be Mint, but Mint is basically Ubuntu (if it's not LMDE). If OpenSUSE causes problems with D (as pointed out above), I'm not sure, if it's a good idea to use it, especially now that I use dub. Little annoyances can sometimes become big annoyances, if they occur at a critical moment.
>
> Maybe I'll give Fedora (+ Xfce) a shot.

Any experience with Manjaro which is based on Arch linux?

Chris píše v Po 20. 01. 2014 v 15:00 +0000:
> Any experience with Manjaro which is based on Arch linux?

Yes, I have installed it a few times with no problem (But only on BIOS + MBR) UEFI and GPT not tested.

HW support has been perfect same as Arch linux.

On Monday, 20 January 2014 at 14:53:55 UTC, Chris wrote:
> Maybe I'll give Fedora (+ Xfce) a shot.

You could try Korora, which is based on Fedora, but includes a lot of convenience. For example, proprietary software like Skype and Adobe Reader is already in the repo. Fonts and Drivers are a little bit nicer.

https://kororaproject.org/

Personally, I switched back from Korora to Ubuntu a while ago, because Ubuntu is better with my laptop battery.

On Monday, 20 January 2014 at 15:26:15 UTC, Daniel Kozák wrote:
> Chris píše v Po 20. 01. 2014 v 15:00 +0000:
>> Any experience with Manjaro which is based on Arch linux?
>
> Yes, I have installed it a few times with no problem (But only on BIOS +
> MBR) UEFI and GPT not tested.
>
> HW support has been perfect same as Arch linux.

Ok, thanks. I'll give that a try (hope it's easy to install D and dub).

On Monday, 20 January 2014 at 15:33:11 UTC, Chris wrote:
> Ok, thanks. I'll give that a try (hope it's easy to install D and dub).

Assuming it has Arch repos available:
pacman -Sy dlang-dmd dub

Chris píše v Po 20. 01. 2014 v 15:33 +0000:
> On Monday, 20 January 2014 at 15:26:15 UTC, Daniel Kozák wrote:
> > Chris píše v Po 20. 01. 2014 v 15:00 +0000:
> >> Any experience with Manjaro which is based on Arch linux?
> >
> > Yes, I have installed it a few times with no problem (But only
> > on BIOS +
> > MBR) UEFI and GPT not tested.
> >
> > HW support has been perfect same as Arch linux.
> 
> Ok, thanks. I'll give that a try (hope it's easy to install D and dub).

just do:
sudo pacman -S libphobos libphobos-devel dmd dtools

or you can use gui (octopi)

On Monday, 20 January 2014 at 15:41:21 UTC, Daniel Kozák wrote:
> Chris píše v Po 20. 01. 2014 v 15:33 +0000:
>> On Monday, 20 January 2014 at 15:26:15 UTC, Daniel Kozák wrote:
>> > Chris píše v Po 20. 01. 2014 v 15:00 +0000:
>> >> Any experience with Manjaro which is based on Arch linux?
>> >
>> > Yes, I have installed it a few times with no problem (But only on BIOS +
>> > MBR) UEFI and GPT not tested.
>> >
>> > HW support has been perfect same as Arch linux.
>> 
>> Ok, thanks. I'll give that a try (hope it's easy to install D and dub).
>
> just do:
> sudo pacman -S libphobos libphobos-devel dmd dtools
>
> or you can use gui (octopi)

Okidoke. I'll try to install it today in UEFI mode and see what happens.

On Monday, 20 January 2014 at 14:53:55 UTC, Chris wrote:
> On Monday, 20 January 2014 at 14:35:29 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
clip
>
> I've had a look at Arch. While it seems to be a nice and (c)lean distro, it is a bit of a pain in the neck to install / set up. Also I don't know, if it will be easy to get the hardware support I need. I don't want to spend ages configuring it and tinkering with drivers etc. I prefer UI installers and out-of-the box support (and if the latter is not possible, at least an "easy-to-get-the-drivers-later-system"). The laziest option would be Mint, but Mint is basically Ubuntu (if it's not LMDE). If OpenSUSE causes problems with D (as pointed out above), I'm not sure, if it's a good idea to use it, especially now that I use dub. Little annoyances can sometimes become big annoyances, if they occur at a critical moment.
>
> Maybe I'll give Fedora (+ Xfce) a shot.

Likely whatever you end up using will be fine.

I didn't mean to scare you off OpenSUSE.  My D experience has mostly been positive.  Just a small hiccup or two getting it set up (one of which was my fault), now it runs smoothly.

On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 12:30:26PM +0000, Chris wrote:
> At work we use Ubuntu, however, I'm not at all happy with it and don't want to use it on my private computer. Which is the best alternative (I've been looking at OpenSUSE; Mint is based on Ubuntu/Debian but only shares the repository with Ubuntu (right?); Fedora has bad reviews at the moment and might be a pain to set up (drivers etc.)). I'm also considering FreeBSD, a completely different beast.

As many have said, it really depends on what you're looking for.

I myself use Debian/unstable (in spite of the 'unstable' moniker it's actually very stable, as far as OSes in general go). I'm extremely CLI-biased, so my particular setup of Debian is probably far from typical, but here's exactly why I like the way Debian is setup: many packages actually go out of the way to support non-default configurations. You can install the base system without X11 or LibreOffice or any of the "big fat" packages, and even if you decide to install those packages, they are broken up into core / optional pieces so that you can control exactly what you want. At the same time, the dependency system automatically manages what to install when you wish to just install an entire package suite without further ado. When you upgrade, packages are very careful not to overwrite any custom config files.

In a nutshell, Debian is a tinkerer's paradise, where you can customize the system to your heart's content, without some organization somewhere deciding how things ought to be. There *are* reasonable defaults provided, but non-default customizations are explicitly supported.

But again, my use case is probably extremely different from yours, so YMMV, take this with a huge grain of salt, etc..

(P.S. Now I know Ubuntu is based on Debian, but the one time I had to deal with an Ubuntu system directly I noticed that they were not as friendly to customization. But I didn't spend too much time actually using it to say this for sure -- I switched apt/source.list to the Debian repos and apt-get'd the system into Debian/unstable within a day, so now the system is no longer Ubuntu. :-P)


T

-- 
Recently, our IT department hired a bug-fix engineer. He used to work for Volkswagen.

On Monday, 20 January 2014 at 16:22:15 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 12:30:26PM +0000, Chris wrote:
>> At work we use Ubuntu, however, I'm not at all happy with it and
>> don't want to use it on my private computer. Which is the best
>> alternative (I've been looking at OpenSUSE; Mint is based on
>> Ubuntu/Debian but only shares the repository with Ubuntu (right?);
>> Fedora has bad reviews at the moment and might be a pain to set up
>> (drivers etc.)). I'm also considering FreeBSD, a completely
>> different beast.
>
> As many have said, it really depends on what you're looking for.
>
> I myself use Debian/unstable (in spite of the 'unstable' moniker it's
> actually very stable, as far as OSes in general go). I'm extremely
> CLI-biased, so my particular setup of Debian is probably far from
> typical, but here's exactly why I like the way Debian is setup: many
> packages actually go out of the way to support non-default
> configurations. You can install the base system without X11 or
> LibreOffice or any of the "big fat" packages, and even if you decide to
> install those packages, they are broken up into core / optional pieces
> so that you can control exactly what you want. At the same time, the
> dependency system automatically manages what to install when you wish to
> just install an entire package suite without further ado. When you
> upgrade, packages are very careful not to overwrite any custom config
> files.
>
> In a nutshell, Debian is a tinkerer's paradise, where you can customize
> the system to your heart's content, without some organization somewhere
> deciding how things ought to be. There *are* reasonable defaults
> provided, but non-default customizations are explicitly supported.
>
> But again, my use case is probably extremely different from yours, so
> YMMV, take this with a huge grain of salt, etc..
>
> (P.S. Now I know Ubuntu is based on Debian, but the one time I had to
> deal with an Ubuntu system directly I noticed that they were not as
> friendly to customization. But I didn't spend too much time actually
> using it to say this for sure -- I switched apt/source.list to the
> Debian repos and apt-get'd the system into Debian/unstable within a day,
> so now the system is no longer Ubuntu. :-P)
>
>
> T

I'm kinda torn between the two sides. On the one hand I don't want to do too much manual configuring and tinkering (especially for basic things), on the other hand I don't want big fat apps I'll probably never use installed by default. I'll give Manjaro (Arch Linux) a try and see, if I can build up my own custom configuration as I go along. The only fear I have in this regard is that it might be hard to get certain apps i like or need, if they are not in the repository. But things will improve and I like to give new things a try. I can always come back to the bigger distros.