[ILUG] Which Desktop Distro?

[Brendan Minish]

On Sat, 2007-09-29 at 11:27 +0100, Conor Wynne wrote:

> 5. FC7, I ran FC7 (or was it 6) on my ibook g4 this summer during our
> 3 weeks camper van holiday in France. I was initially impressed with
> the performance of it, but after three weeks it started to annoy me --
> biggest gripe was it ran the system way way hotter than OSX, and the
> battery drained much more quickly as a result. I could not even see
> the reason for it. The mouse worked perfectly, and all of a sudden it
> would start to behave erratically. FC on PPC is just not right yet.
> This would be installed on X86, so no such worries.

I am a Fedora fan and prefer KDE to GNOME. I think the choice of which
desktop you run will have as big an impact as anything else on your
eventual choice. 

If you are running on a laptop I would favor a distro that runs very
recent kernels, Fedora7 scores here. There has been a lot of work done
recently on power management and with a 2.6.22 Kernel on my Leonvo
thinkpad I was able to get runtimes that were at least as good as the
run-times under XP ever were. 

It can take a little tweaking to optimize your power settings but it's
well worth the effort, even on a desktop.

Kpowersave (kde dunno what the Gnome equivalent is) is a very useful
tool.

If you are on Intel, powertop is fantastic for identifying where your
power is being consumed and optimizing runtime on laptops  

http://www.linuxpowertop.org/

> I know esx (vi3) very well, but do not get as much exposure to xen et al.
> I would like to install beryl aswell, 

Things like Beryl will probably require non GPL graphics drivers and
these can do unpredictable things to power management 

> and although I have a perfectly
> functionning rhel4.5 box, I really do not want to be modifying kernels
> etc, or moving away from rpm/up2date/yum based package managers.

FC7 uses yum. you may wish to add a couple of repositories if you want
support for non GPL stuff like MP3's and proprietary graphics drivers 

> FC7 is currently torrenting - slowly, so it looks like rhel5 will
> finish downloading before FC7 does. Which would be better? DISTRO
> WARS...
> 
> Q: Is there any point in using xen with a 32-bit CPU? The box is a P4,
> 1GB, 250GB, Radeon XT850, so its a decent enough system.

Yes, if you want to virtualise on a server. There are other options too
of course. If you just want to virtualise on occasion then QEMU may
cover all your needs and of course Vmware server is free too.

> p.s.: I have valid subscriptions for rhn, so no worries from that. I
> really do like rhel4, its mature, stable and a decent performer.

Then you will like fedora too, it's to some extent the beta platform for
RHEL with lots of toys thrown in and is more than stable enough to be my
primary desktop and laptop os