Manjaro: Why I hate Fedora XFCE spin

Recently I bought a new desktop. It is a lowend desktop, with a Pentium CPU (not the i7 I am used to, at all), dual core, 8 gigs of RAM (more than enough for Linux, though not Windows), and a shitty old GeForce card (we are talking 200 series here).

New media desktop: Linux Mint 18.1

I have recently moved, and found my self in need of a computer outside of my gaming station. So I set to build a desktop for light browsing and music. Now my requirements were actually quite light, it should be able to run Netflix and Spotify, as well as an optical out for my audio. It also helped a little bit that I had a 120GB SSD laying about unused, so I didn’t have to invest in that. In the end I decided for an Intel build, simply cause I am a Intel / Nvidia kinda guy, don’t ask me to explain it. After the break, we will reveal the specification.

Why I hate/love Ubuntu

A while ago I got my Dell XPS12, which have been my linux box for about a year now (too much of a gamer to use my desktop to Linux). Since I have gotten, I went with the comfortable route and installed Ubuntu, mainly because with no CD Rom, Ubuntu was the easiest one to create a Live USB with. Since then I have a USB DVD Rom, which I can boot from, and almost every time I use Ubuntu I think it is time to make a jump.

Ubuntu 14.04

Been a while since I updated here, but I have not had the time to play around with my XPS to really come with some feedback. But once 14.04 I immediately updated and have been running it for a while. One thing I only recently noticed is that now the touch screen support is much much better. It now supports drag to scroll, like you do on a mobile device, which really saves you time. I have not really played too much around with the touch screen to tell of any other improvements (most importantly the freezing issues if you use it too much).

Ubuntu 13.10

I have been using Ubuntu 13.10 for a while, so I can finally sum up my thoughts on how well the Dell XPS was performing on this release. In terms of hardware, it is pretty much well supported, everything more or less works out of the box, except the multi touch on the touch pad, at least I can not get any of the gestures to work properly. It also seems to have a bit of a sweet spot in terms of right clicking, which I struggle to hit at times. In terms of the touch screen, it works, but Ubuntu is not made with this in mind, so it is a limited functionality. For example, there is no multi touch zoom, and a touch is only registered as a left click, nothing more.

Mageia 3 on XPS 12

In part of my newest acquisition, I tried out Magiea 3 on a XPS 12. As I only went for the live experience, I never got to try the full experience as I never decided to install it. The reason? Basically a lot of the hardware was not working, unfortunately. The touch screen was not working out of the box, but to me that was not really a big deal, as no Linux distro so far have been able to use that efficiently. The touchpad was not working at all. As it is basically a multitouch pad, you need the multi touch functionality enabled to make it work, as you cannot click it if it doesn’t work. This did not work, which was the biggest deal breaker for me, especially since a quick Google resulted in a forum post recommending to submit to the bug tracker. 

Ubuntu 13.10 on XPS 12

I recently got my laptop, after over 2 weeks of waiting. Immediately I removed Windows 8 in favour of Ubuntu 13.10. As the XPS 12 does not have a built in CD drive, I had to make a live USB and in that process I bricked 2 USB sticks which I luckily had gotten for free. Anyway for installation there were a few minor annoyances. I had to turn off SafeBoot in BIOS and for good measure I turned off UEFI as well. I never did try to boot in UEFI mode, but the BIOS never recognized my live USB as a UEFI disk, so I figured it was just as well not doing it that way.

Why liveCD is bad for your weekend

Last weekend I was feeling a rush for a switch, so I went looking for a new distro. I ended up going for Chakra, cause I downloaded the liveCD just to take it for a spin. Problem is when you are feeling the itch, you are very excited for everything new, which in some cases make you forget why you dislike KDE in the first place.

This pretty much resulted in me spending half my saturday downloading different systems (Mageia GNOME Live and ZenWalk 7.0 Live), figuring out why they won’t work, then redownloading your original distro, having 3 botched installs due to incompatibilities between the dbus version, which result in you having to format your home partition to freaking solve it. Total time wasted: Saturday evening + sunday morning until afternoon. Be smart about it…

Why I want / won’t to jump to Sabayon

I have been using Xubuntu 10.10 recently, mostly because Arch Linux absolutely refuses to connect through wireless on install CD through cli. So I have been feeling the itch to switch it up, mostly because my wireless card is so unstable in Xubuntu right now (constant time outs is annoying). So I downloaded the live DVD of Sabayon XFCE, and gave it a spin. 

Fedora 15 XFCE Spin

After using Xubuntu for a while, I noticed some hardware issues with my wireless keyboard and mouse. Mostly, it would not recognize keystrokes and mouse clicks. Annyoing as this was, I decided to jump to another distribution, thinking it was a (X)ubuntu problem. As Fedora 15 just had released, and I have not had a go at it since 8, I figured it was probably the best bet (also because I could not really connect to my wireless network using Arch Linux, which was my number 1 choice).