Saturday, June 28, 2014

kubuntu's cousins

Links to a couple more reviews done by Arindam Sen:

Netrunner 14 "Frontier" Review: Looks and feels awesome to use with new animated wallpapers!

Linux Mint 17 "Qiana" KDE Review: Better than Kubuntu with pleasant aesthetics and superb performance

Sen clearly prefers both of these distros over Kubuntu. The most recent Kubuntu release I've run here is 12.04, which I still have installed, and I haven't tried Netrunner 14 or Mint 17 KDE. I figure that Sen's correct in saying that Netrunner 14 and Mint 17 KDE are better, overall than Kubuntu 14.04. For my purposes, however, Kubuntu 12.04 is good enough that I haven't found any reason to bother with Kubuntu 14.04, Netrunner 14, OR Mint 17 KDE! Whatever -- they all pull from the Ubuntu repos, anyway...

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

impressive

Arindam Sen likes it: Manjaro Linux 0.8.10 KDE and XFCE Review: Bang on target release after release!

Note the opening paragraph:

I have used a lot of rolling release distros in last 5 years, but, for production purpose, till recently, I mostly relied on only a few - Linux Mint, Debian and Ubuntu LTS. Primarily because the so-called "install it once only" promise hardly worked for most of the rolling release distros and they inevitably break or become unbootable after a couple of major upgrades. However, my experience with Manjaro Linux and Chakra Linux in the past 12 months have successfully changed that impression. These two Arch based distros survived 4 major upgrades and still running great, even with a whole lot of customization and niche packages that I installed.

What impresses me about this is that I've had a great experience with Arch Linux so far, and I consider it to be the best, most "stable" rolling-release distro that I've spent more than a few months with. Manjaro brings Arch packages into their (Manjaro's) own repos, so there's a bit of a buffer there that should make Manjaro even more "stable" than Arch. Makes sense, although this means (as Arch purists would say) that Manjaro is not Arch.

Sounds like a great distro. I may eventually install Manjaro here.