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lost_soul

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lost_soul

lost_soul

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I've been using Ubuntu since 2005. I am becoming less happy with it as time goes on. From unnecessary bloat/anti-features like notify-osd, to an audio subsystem that I have to constantly work around to enjoy my games, it is time to go somewhere else. A first choice was Arch, because of the extreme customization. You only get what you want. It does require more maintenance though and I'd rather be playing TDM than doing that. :)

 

My new choice is Debian Testing. I installed it today to an ESata hard drive and it is great! I started with just a command-line and installed a base gnome environment. The memory usage in GNOME is less than 150 MB! You also don't have to use PulseAudio, so there won't be latency issues. Do any of you use the testing branch? Have you had the system break from time to time as a result?

 

So far, the plan is to plug this hard drive into my main system and run from it for a day or two to see how Debian's performance compares with my current system. Then I can make the call whether or not to format and reinstall with Debian. It is also nice to have an external HDD with a ready-to-go system so I can show it to a friend who is interested in Linux, or use it to recover data from the next toasted Windows system I get called to look at. :)

 

There were some packages I used in Ubuntu, which were not readily available for Debian, so I took them and installed them anyway. :) Am I asking for trouble by doing this? I once changed my Ubuntu sources.lst to point at a newer version of Ubuntu and then installed a new kernel. T'was not a pretty sight! The C runtime library was updated along with the new kernel, and was no longer compatible with the rest of the software that was on the machine. This resulted in a whole lot of segfaults. :) oops

--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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Ladro

Ladro

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Great thread :laugh:

 

I'm using more and more Ubuntu. On netbook (a Dell mini) i use Lubuntu, and/or the remix version, it's pretty fast.

At home i have also a Debian testing too that i use as Desktop, but for maintenance and to have working stuff, it's better his derivative (Ubuntu), IMHO.

On my home server (sites, fileserver, backup, KVM, etc etc) i use Debian too. Debian it's rock solid, and it's the ultimate barrier to mantain the freedom on FOSS world, and using Ubuntu, anyway we legitimate his mother, so Debian too.

 

I don't like too some things that happened to Ubuntu in recent past (some relation in decisions with community that i don't liked), but as i see it remain the best choice as real big community based distro, with the enough mass to evolve and have some competition with the proprietary software world.

 

I like a lot testing other distros (i liked in past Gentoo, but now i explore sometime Arch too, really a very good distro), but after all if you have to use fundamental software for some tipical desktop task, it's a littlbe bit too complicated (see "time consuming") have all working. I like to do that when i have my time to experiment or to explore and/or obtain exactly my customisation, but normally Ubuntu, IMHO, it's a good balance between a "geek" and reference working OS, also with some failure (as you right said, sound system, IE, or other minor problems).

 

To play with TDM, or generally speaking, to play modern games on a Linux Box, i've seen that with Ubuntu i have a lot of success with minor efforts.

In TDM i have some problem with the Menu GUI on installing mission, but rather then that, it's, IMHO, a lot better then working TDM on Windows.

IE: on the same machine i have more fps on Doom3 (played with same graphic settings) working on Linux then Windows (about 5-6 fps more on Linux). On Linux i have the power of bash to tweak and/or find problems.

The real problem to play TDM on Linux, IMHO, rest Graphic Drivers, if you use Ati cards. Now it's always better and better, and in the future we'll have a very good opensource driver (Ati opened a lot of source under NDA to Kernel developers) but in the (also recent) past closed Ati driver was really a NIGHTMARE

Edited by Ladro
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nbohr1more

nbohr1more

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I used to be a Vector Linux junkie. I recall that there weren't many native packages so I had to find Slackware compiled equivalents or RPM's (I learned what dependency hell meant :laugh: ...). I guess they've got a package manager now but Ubuntu is so dominant that it's not worth the extra speed of Vector.

 

I should try a newer Live CD to make sure I'm not missing something...

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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Serpentine

Serpentine

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Never understood GNU/Linux really, specially distros that expect you not to want to change anything. Arch is an exception but that's also its niche.

If it cant be rebuilt from the ground up using system source and has a package manager capable of source builds easily, it sort of excludes itself from being taken seriously.

 

Debian/Gentoo do well in this regard.

 

Resources and speed are really the last of my worries, I don't play games on nix and I don't really see the attraction to do so, unless you are one of those "oh god closed source is killing the world, anti-microsoft fanboys" which should no doubt be cleansed from existence. Caring about memory usage from your DE seems quite strange at the end of the day. KDE4 might be slightly heavier on resources but it makes up for it in so many ways, most of all just being damn nice to use and having many features nicely integrated (apart from the PIM stuff which is annoyingly integral).

 

However at the end of the day I don't use GNU/Linux. I far prefer to roll my own and FreeBSD allows me to do that and to follow the development nice and easily which is something that interests me (as I like to break and fix things to learn, not break and reinstall)

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lost_soul

lost_soul

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Tonight I nuked my Ubuntu install and "dd"d the debian image over it from the external hard drive. Now I don't have that annoying sound latency problem in TDM with the ALSA driver. True, you can just use OSS to work around it, but then your system can't play other sounds while TDM is running. I like to be able to hear people sign onto IM and stuff via text-to-speech while I am in a game.

--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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PranQster

PranQster

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AAAAAARRRRRGGGH!!!

 

I just was finishing typing up a bunch of stuff and my mouse batteries went dead. I replaced the batteries and came back to post and my browser went back to previous page! I must have hit a side button on the mouse. Crap!

Oh well, here's a recap:

uname -a
Linux mjollnir 2.6.35-rc6 #1 SMP Sat Jul 31 22:58:37 CDT 2010 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

Mandriva/Mandrake since 2003.

Currently running Mandriva Cooker 2011.0 (alpha) with KDE 4.5.0

Very, very Happy.

Love hardware support and system config with Mandriva Control Center (PCLOS users have the same exact thing).

Awesome, awesome assortment of packages in the 'driva rpm repositories (plus the extra goodies, codecs, etc from PLF).

Had probs with PulseAudio / Solved probs by compiling PA from source (Hercules Game Theater XP audio uses rear speaker output instead of front, though... no biggie for me).

Never any audio lag in games or elsewhere.

Very much like the urpmi package installer (I use in console, rarely run the rpmdrake GUI).

urpmi is much, much better nowadays than a few years ago.

Nvidia proprietary driver, java, and flash all auto install from Mandriva One or PowerPack disks.

No issues running WoW with Wine, except that 2.6.33-x and 2.6.34-x kernels require rebuild with a patch... 2.6.35-rc6 has no issue with WoW.

 

That was about it.

Oh yeah, trust me... no matter how tempting it may be, do not install kdepim 4.5 and kmail 2.0 yet. Lol, trust me when I say they are not ready for regular use yet. Thunderbird is my friend right now.

 

Oh yeah, almost forgot... any and all problems I have had with pulseaudio have been with the audio card in my desktop machine. Laptop and netbook have had no issues whatsoever with PA and Amarok, etc.

Edited by PranQster

System: Mageia Linux Cauldron, aka Mageia 8

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PranQster

PranQster

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Posted

Tonight I nuked my Ubuntu install and "dd"d the debian image over it from the external hard drive. Now I don't have that annoying sound latency problem in TDM with the ALSA driver. True, you can just use OSS to work around it, but then your system can't play other sounds while TDM is running. I like to be able to hear people sign onto IM and stuff via text-to-speech while I am in a game.

 

Interesting, I never once had Doom3 work at all with ALSA. I always had to use OSS, else I'd get utter silence. That probably explains my lack of audio lag in TDM/doom3. But no audio lag elsewhere with pulseaudio either.

System: Mageia Linux Cauldron, aka Mageia 8

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