Re:An interview with Derek Sivers
by thaumaturgy on Tuesday December 06, 2011 @01:30AM
(#3318277)
As a nice alternative to Ubuntu or Arch, I'd like to recommend a little-known distribution called Chakra Linux (http://chakra-linux.org/). It started out as an Arch distribution, and gradually has moved to focus on being a KDE4 distribution.
Upsides: a beautiful, modern, easy-to-use, not-glitchy graphical environment for everything. A decent built-in package manager with rolling updates. Support for most of the basics.
Downsides: No easy rollbacks (yet) on the package manager, so if an update breaks something, you'll have a hassle. Hardware support still lacking (my laptop's trackpad isn't detected; I haven't had time yet to see about porting drivers for it).
I set mine up with Chrome and the built-in terminal and a few other basics in Linux, and then installed the VirtualBox package and (after massaging it a little bit) got it running a Windows 7 environment where I have my preferred text editor of choice and a few other goodies. A shared drive is set up between the two that allows me to, for example, run a local web server on the Linux side and edit the files in the current project in the Windows VM. I really really like this setup.
I love OpenBSD too, and have used Debian a lot, and we use Ubuntu (and other Linuxes) in the shop for various things, but this is the first distribution I've been happy with for regular desktop use.
If you want to give it a serious try and have any questions, drop me an email and I'll see if I can help.
Upsides: a beautiful, modern, easy-to-use, not-glitchy graphical environment for everything. A decent built-in package manager with rolling updates. Support for most of the basics.
Downsides: No easy rollbacks (yet) on the package manager, so if an update breaks something, you'll have a hassle. Hardware support still lacking (my laptop's trackpad isn't detected; I haven't had time yet to see about porting drivers for it).
I set mine up with Chrome and the built-in terminal and a few other basics in Linux, and then installed the VirtualBox package and (after massaging it a little bit) got it running a Windows 7 environment where I have my preferred text editor of choice and a few other goodies. A shared drive is set up between the two that allows me to, for example, run a local web server on the Linux side and edit the files in the current project in the Windows VM. I really really like this setup.
I love OpenBSD too, and have used Debian a lot, and we use Ubuntu (and other Linuxes) in the shop for various things, but this is the first distribution I've been happy with for regular desktop use.
If you want to give it a serious try and have any questions, drop me an email and I'll see if I can help.