The Corpus Callosum

It amused me today to see two blog posts, both about users switching from Gentoo to *buntu.  

Why I Am Making The Switch From Gentoo To Kubuntu
Bye Gentoo... Welcome Ubuntu

Gentoo is the most complicated version of Linux, but also the most customizable.  It enables the user to squeeze the greatest performance out of their machines.  

Like the authors of the two posts, I recently switched.  I had been using Sabayon, a version of Gentoo.  It is a little easier to use than plain Gentoo, but retains the customizability.  

Sabayon also was one of the first versions of Linux to get Compiz working reliably.  

The two authors I mentioned above gave up on Gentoo because of persistent problems with the package management system, Portage.  That I could live with.  Besides, Sabayon is developing its own package management system, Entropy, which looks highly promising.  

What got me go make the switch?  

A new computer.  One incentive for using Sabayon is that I wanted the flashy desktop effects, but had an older machine that wouldn't give the level of performance I wanted without a lot of tweaking.  

It never was important to me to be able to get the absolute greatest performance, but it was important to be able to get decent performance without spending a lot of money.  This is a matter of personal compromises.  Different people might have approved the problem differently, coming up with different solutions.  That is obvious, but the reason I mention it, is that I am not saying the way I went about it would be the best for anyone else.

The new machine is not a speed demon. In fact, the main design factor was that I wanted it to be quiet.  The necessitated a balance between the desire to not spend a lot, with the desire have a quiet machine that is reasonably fast, and reasonably upgradable.  

Specs, for those who care, are: Intel E8400 processor, Asus P5KSE motherboard, Giagbyte GV-NX86T512H  (8600GT with 512MB, and a large heatsink with no fan), Zerotherm BTF90, 2GB Kingston KHX8500D2K2 RAM, Samsung SH-S203B optical drive, and a Seagate 160GB hard drive (from the old machine).   This all goes in an Antec Sonata-3 case.  The power supply is an Antec Earthwatts 500, with 80+ efficiency.  For what it's worth, I also got a Corsair Padlock 4GB flash drive, the kind with a hardware combination lock.

The video card is kind of on the low end these days, but I have no reason to burn a lot of electricity for graphics power, and the thing is completely silent.  Similarly, the E8400 is a very power-efficient part.  The Zerotherm cooler is almost silent. It usually runs at ~950 RPM, and keeps the CPU running at ~35 degrees Celsius in typical use.  The Samsung DVD burner is the quietest optical drive I've ever had.

Back to the software.  Kubuntu initially had problems with power management.  Now it uses Kpowersave effectively.  Both of my cores are usually running at just under 2GHz.  The suspend mode works, too.  KDE4 is available.  It works OK, but is still a little feature-poor.  My only little gripes are that NVu is not in the *buntu repositories; Iceweasel isn't either.  But after dinking around with Gentoo for a couple of years, I'm not going to gripe too much about installing software the "hard" way.  

The other things like MP3 support, Acrobat Reader, etc, are installed easily with Automatix.  

Kubuntu is very simple to use and maintain.  The kernel is not the latest, but frankly the Linux kernel has gotten to be so mature, that I don't feel any need to use the latest one all the time.  Another reason I liked Sabayon is that the Sabayon folks are really good about updating the kernel.  Earlier on, various bits of hardware were hard to use unless you had the latest kernel.  That isn't much of an issue anymore, which makes some of the more simpler varieties of Linux feasible for everyday use.  

I know it's still an uphill battle, trying to get more people to use Linux. What I've tried to illustrate, though, is that Linux is getting to be much easier to use, but it still is incredibly versatile.