Comments on: 8.04 might be your best bet

By: devl547

devl547 — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 15:20:58 +0000

Well, I’m one of developers and never had this problem.
About missing dependencies sometimes – most of receipts were made by pankso himself, so he may missed something. Just report and it will be fixed.

By: spc

spc — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 22:09:58 +0000

Take ubuntu and add K at front -Kubuntu – that’s bloat.

http://www.infoniac.com/uimg/fattest-man.jpg

KDE 4.* kills every sembalnce of lightness.
With Kde one can throw out the window pitch line: “Linux can run on older equipment”
Apropos Xubuntu, wanna see it made properly – get youself zenwalk.

By: steve

steve — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 09:52:15 +0000

I don’t think the feature bloat etc are the fault of Debian. ubuntu take the packages from Debian and modifies them for itself, with its own special brand of ‘improvements’, so IMO this is where the bugs crop up. The packages they use are from Debian sid and soon to be testing. This is beta grade software and trying to get a stable distro from those sources has to be a difficult thing. I applaud them moving to a strict testing-based distro. Ubuntu seems to inherit a lot of bugs that Debian seems to patch at the last minute. I remember when Lenny went stable there were about 5 minor issues I had that just disappeared in the final stable release, much to my delight. With Debian the emphasis for stable releases seems to be on quality.

Debian can be made very slim and fast. I’ve used Arch and I didn’t see any improvements over a minimalist Debian install. Debian takes a bit of cli config to keep it slim but after that it’s usually good sailing

By: Zoev

Zoev — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 23:02:50 +0000

As a Slitaz user I can tell you the #1 reason is that the package manager is broken, which leaves users having to look up dependancy trees so they can get non-terminal-based programs working.

By: ajlec2000

ajlec2000 — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 23:01:40 +0000

I’ve only been playing with computers since 2001 and have never been a developer or IT professional, so my thoughts on this are strictly from a hobbyist. Once I find an OS that works the way I want on a particular machine I am loath to remove it. I see it as the same thing as keeping an old machine so long as it works. So if a distro bloats with each release I won’t know unless its pointed out to me.

Ubuntu is the distro that sold me on Linux and though I don’t use it as much as I do Puppy I think I’ll always have it (8.10 that is) on hand. I do believe that Ubuntu developers are focusing more and more on glitz and shine and this is accelerating the increase in girth.

When it comes to Ubuntu and Debian related Puppies I believe they are more like offshoots or forks with the “official” Puppies being more traditionally designed. (There are so many Pups I can’t keep up with details of all of them. In my opinion that’s Puppy’s only fault.)

By: James

James — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 17:13:52 +0000

“8.04, which will be around for a very very long time to come”

Are you expecting a Microsoft-like extension to its life? I believe Hardy has less than a year to EOL[1]. For anyone who is worried about security, Hardy is useless without updates from Canonical.

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

By: mulenmar

mulenmar — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 15:15:55 +0000

I’m not saying that Ubuntu’s desktop experience isn’t slower than it used to be, just that Phoronix’s benchmarks don’t take a lot of things into account.

By: gullars

gullars — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 13:41:50 +0000

>Why shouldn’t bad graphics cards or drivers have impact on performance?

I say again as I did in my last post. unless you do graphics heavy stuff it really doesn’t, I don’t play games, and so a graphics card has no effect on the performance.

Neither did you explain how this test would be different if they used a nvidia card in the testf

>Anyway what I mean to say is that the benchmark is helpful on deciding if >you don’t want to move to the newest ubuntu if any of the parameters >apply to you (like the ati thing).

and with this you say that the tendancy that we see with this hardware won’t be the same on another machine, why?

what we see here is a test about the changes in one machine, not how it works on one machine, so I don’t get what you mean with your hardware thing…

By: koleoptero

koleoptero — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 13:25:21 +0000

I’m saying they should do just that: Use drivers that are known to work well in linux. Why shouldn’t bad graphics cards or drivers have impact on performance? In the article it mentions that in a couple of places and applies for some of the benchmarks.

Anyway what I mean to say is that the benchmark is helpful on deciding if you don’t want to move to the newest ubuntu if any of the parameters apply to you (like the ati thing).

Also it said that in a test 8.04 performed worse because of ext3. Why didn’t they use ext4 instead? I bet the 8.04.4 works fine with ext4.

By: gullars

gullars — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 12:10:20 +0000

I do agree with you, And it’s all about choice so it might be important again to say that what I think that at least I take as a given, that when I criticise ubuntu, that is just in my point of view, obviously when we look at statistics and polls we see that ubuntu probably is the best thing to a lot of people, and I’m not trying to convince people just putting in my 2¢ and say what I think, and that might not be appliccable for most or maybe even anyone else, a downclocked pc with puppy and ratpoison and colemak keyboard is obviously something that would just fit to some excentric people, and I’m not saying that this is in any way better than a tricked out box with wonderful effects and doohickies, but it is what fits me the most. well, I’m in rant mode again.

About your point with bloat, I think that is a truth with modifications, we see with projects like slitaz. ratpoison, wmii, hnb, vim, e3, jwm, uzbl and so on that if speed and non-bloat is something that you are aiming for it will be lean, but it’s way too easy to just try and please people with putting in their stuff, here again is where we can help with our choice, just use what we like. The only versions of firefox that I can use are the old, the new ones feel bloated.
Basically, we have to find a way to promote non-bloat as a feature, like suckless.org is doing