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In the last couple of weeks I’ve been experimenting with some different linux distros – “different” as in not Ubuntu or Slackware which I with great satisfaction use on my shuttle pc and server..

The thing is, I feel like using something else on my laptop. Something different and lightweight with easy package management. Arch as I’ve used for a while is great for this but I’m just curious to see if something’s even better.

But let’s get down to business. I’ve tried quite a few different distros. Each one have had its level of interesting to me and the higher that was the more I explored the distro. So what I’m saying is that I’m absolutely no expert in many of these distros. For some of them I just tried the live cd on a virtual machine. This is why I won’t go into details for some distros – and if you want to know more, just check out distrowatch.com.

Anyway, since Arch takes a while to setup I decided to take a backup – an image of the partitions. I found a very useful system rescue disc on http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page based on Gentoo Linux I guess. It’s highly recommendable and maybe one of my most positive experiences in this distro adventure. It’s basically just a live cd that gives you a terminal and a few applications for e.g. partion mounting, ghosting and networking (the apps that I used). So right now I have a couple of image of my entire Arch system on my shuttle pc. Oh yeah.. This is where I started trying the distros. By the way before we start, I love the fact that I could just reinstall my laptop without touching the home folder. That really saved me some backup time. The following is sorted by the amount of time I used on each one – right from about three weeks on Mint to a couple of minutes on PCLinuxOS.

Linux Mint 4.0

Mint is an Ubuntu-spinoff with some added features, for instance media codecs and better looks. It uses Gnome as default DE and I was actually quite taken by the elegance – the motto is “From freedom came elegance”. Sadly I found that it had some XP symptoms. It was slow while stalling not unusual – at least compared to what I’m used to on Arch. It really felt like I was wasting ressources on my laptop. Sounds stupid I know but I wasn’t comfortable with it. On the other hand nearly everything worked out of the box, that is graphics, codecs, wireless, shortcut keys etc. So.. It was overall pretty nice. Especially great for noobs and lazy people.

Simply Mepis 7.0

Mepis looked very promising which is why I decided to install it on my laptop for a while. It’s Debian based and uses KDE. “Debian based” is always a good quality and I’ve really wanted to try KDE for a while. I’ve always used either Gnome, XFCE or some box WM. So this was exciting.. My excitement didn’t last much longer than first boot up though. As I started using the system I repeatedly discovered various shortages on basic functionality – e.g. a command as simple as ifconfig was unknown. Very strange to me. I also experienced som sound and shortcut key problems which I’m not used to – even worse, X decided to restart once in a while without any warning. I gave the distro up before trying to fix the different shortages I found. Either you make it completely out of the box or you don’t. So.. Didn’t like Mepis that much, KDE however was very interesting (when I got rid of the Windows look) – it certainly won’t scare me anymore since it looks great, is highly customisable and has a nice set of apps.

Vector Linux 5.9 Gold

This distro was actually surprisingly delicious. It’s Slackware based and lightweight with e.g. XFCE. It seems really stable and highly configurable. I decided to perminently install it on Feraligator. Some negatives would be the laggy uotb-flash on youtube and of course the crappy package management. However this distro is definitely worth a try for whoever wants to go lightweight – at least I like it.

Fluxbuntu 7.10

Ubuntu with the Fluxbox WM. Even though I respect it’s lightweightness I don’t really like Fluxbox. And this mating with Ubuntu resulted in a graphical disaster. The default theme was too yellow. Know it’s costumizatable but it just annoyed me. Besides from Fluxbox there’s really not that much new in this distro.

gOS

Also Ubuntu based but with Enligthenment which makes it useful on low budget computers. Found this socalled “good OS” a little too childish with a little too many web based apps – know it’s the concept but.. Come on.. Enlightenment was very nice though – definitely something I’m gonna try when their new socalled desktop shell (E17) hits the web.

PCLinuxOS

Had neither soul or uniqueness. Said me nothing. Just one big waste of ressources and reminder of Windows. I almost immediately dropped it.

To sum up I obviously had no luck with any of these distros, that is none could satisfyingly replace Arch. A common issue is that the distros that want to be out of the box aren’t. Either you make it completely out of the box or you don’t try to. To be fair though I know it’s a working process and it could just be my hardware. But what’s up with the apps? They generally had way too many apps installed. Mepis actually had like four email clients preinstalled. Come on.. Do the user a favor and install either no apps or one app per task.

For me I’ve found out that I want to costumize my own distro – choose the DE, WM and apps myself. The system just becomes too unpredictable when not set up by myself.

Luckily I still have a few more distros to try on my list. Next I’m gonna try Debian, the netinstall.. This require me to exactly figure out which packages I want.. A bit like on Arch which is why my expectations are high on this one..

Also have Gentoo, Slax and Frugalware on my list. More on those soon.

EDIT: Well, not more on those soon. I’m sticking with Arch Linux.