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Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu? Ubuntu-Flavored Linux A Big Hit at Castolon LLC

Tue, 02/20/2007 - 00:04 — lee

We've been playing with Linux and BSD distributions for several years now, searching for that perfect distribution. (I have a tough time calling them "distros", not just because it sounds bad, but because there's no "o" sound in distribution. It should be "distris", not "distros".)

We've also played with Mediawiki and some other wikis.

When I say "played with", I mean "installed, configured, tested, experimented on, and (usually) deleted". Work is fun here at Castolon.

I hope the good folk of the city of Castolon--population 1 last I heard--will forgive me for not repeating "LLC" every time I say "Castolon". I'll try to make it up to you with some historical pages in the future. Suffice it to say that there is a town, of sorts, called Castolon. It's on the west side of Big Bend National Park. This company was named in honor of the town and Cerro Castolon, the nearby mountain of the same name. Anyway, back to the "distros". (ick!)

So far, I've tried:

I've had successes and failures with all of them, installed most of them multiple times on multiple computers, installed Apache, MySQL, PHP on most of them, used them as desktop operating systems, and so on. I've really worked with these.

I really wanted the BSDs to come out on top. I like the way they're organized and documented. OpenBSD is my favorite. But, when it comes to day-to-day work, I need an operating system that will make installing and updating software easy; and, I need software to be available, regardless of its licensing philosophy.

(What I'm eluding to there is that several distributions don't make some software available because of the software license in use. Sometimes they can't make it available for legal reasons, but other times it's a disagreement over philosophy. Sure, I'd like to go along with Richard Stallman and the belief that software should be free, but, like the gunfighters of the old west, he who has the best tools, wins. So, I install the .pdf viewer provided by Adobe instead of the philosophically free one provided with KDE and GNOME--it works better.)

Anyway, to avoid further rambling, I'll just come to the point. I like Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Xubuntu. They have the biggest repositories I've ever seen (drawing on the Debian repository).

Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. I'm working in Kubuntu at the moment. There seems to be more functionality built into KDE, but more bugs as well. At least, I seem to run across KDE bugs more often than in the other front-ends. But, the bugs are minor and the strength of the features built into the system makes it worth putting up with them most of the time.

I should point out that upon initial installation, KDE may annoy most people with its non-Windows way of doing things. That's easily fixed by running kpersonalizer (KDE Personalizer is a wizard to configure the KDE gui.), but I fear that most Kubuntu users won't find kpersonalizer, and so are stuck with windows that don't behave the way they want and don't respond to traditional hot-keys. (I'm fond of using Alt-Space to bring down the corner menu, then hitting "c" to close, or "x" to maximize. This functionality doesn't seem to be available until you run kpersonalizer.)

Ubuntu, with its Gnome interface, behaves more like Windows upon initial installation, but that's part of the problem. It's too much like Windows. Where KDE will let you maximize most dialog boxes, including the always-too-small "file open" box, Gnome insists on behaving exactly like Windows here. You'll be scrolling for days through the tiny "file open" boxes Gnome provides.. just like in Windows.

Otherwise, Gnome is very nice, and I can see why many distributions are switching.

But, I'm also enamored with Xubuntu. I installed it on an old computer here that I'd wanted to press into service as a web testing server, but, I wanted to install a GUI front-end to make life easier when I was working on this computer. But, KDE and Gnome are too much for it. Given one of those front-ends, it becomes too slow to respond. And, there are so many bells and whistles installed with any KDE or Gnome front-end that it's more difficult to administer. (e.g. It requires more security updates, and more time to download, install, and configure them.)

So, Xubuntu, while lacking a few of the bells and whistles I'd like, is adequate for the occasional direct login, and seems clean, simple, and fast, even on an older computer. So much so that I may someday install an Xubuntu partition on my favorite laptop and try working in Xubuntu for longer periods of time.