[Discuss] Ubuntu 17.10 / Gnome first impressions

[slitt at troubleshooters.com (Steve Litt)]

On Wed, 20 Dec 2017 14:08:27 -0500
David Kramer <david at thekramers.net> wrote:

> I've been focusing mostly on Ubuntu because I want my skills to be
> with something very popular that I'm likely to run into elsewhere.
> Maybe I should focus more on something for power users, as you say.
 
[snip]

> Any other distros I should consider?

Void Linux (https://www.voidlinux.eu/). I've been using it nonstop, on
a daily basis, for 2.5 years, and it's wonderful. I've used Mandrake,
Mandriva, Ubuntu and Debian on a daily basis, and Void is the best
yet. It's almost completely a-la-carte: No GUI unless you want GUI,
choice of over 10 wm/de's.

Instead of that piece of vendor lock-in masquerading as an init
system, Void uses a simple and understandable and easily useable init
system called runit. No more systemd vendor lock-in. No more 200 line
sysvinit init scripts. Life is good, life is easy.

Void has a very nice installer to make it easy, but Void is very at
home with chroot installs, and there are directions to do just that.
Void is the easiest and best distro, for somebody understanding Linux
who doesn't want layer upon layer of junk to make it easier for those
who don't understand Linux.

I kinda like it.

> 
> Thanks. I was really seeing this as a Gnome vs KDE thing but you're 
> right, the problem may be partly with the distro.

It's worse than that: Gnome vs KDE is a false choice: There are tens of
wm/de's out there, and most of them are good,  all of them are more
respectful of resources than Gnome or KDE (or that frankenstein Unity).
Here are just a few I really like:

ULTRALIGHT:
* ctwm
* IceWM
* Openbox
* fvwm
* jwm
* i3

SEMILIGHT
* LXDE

NOT LIGHT BUT NOT PIGS
* xfce

Those are just the ones I KNOW to be good because I've used them. By
reputation, I hear a lot of great things about Trinity, Enlightenment,
mate, twm, fluxbox, blackbox, and all the tiling window managers like
Awesome and Ratpoison.

For all of the above, if you add in via a convenient hotkey Suckless
Tools' dmenu program, you get wild and crazy productivity, and your
need for a panel/taskbar is greatly reduced. See
http://troubleshooters.com/lpm/201406/201406.htm#use_faster_tools_dmenu

HTH,

SteveT

Steve Litt 
December 2017 featured book: Thriving in Tough Times
http://www.troubleshooters.com/thrive