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Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • Bob (by sayth on 2014-01-20 09:20:31 GMT from Australia)
Until recently I would have agreed with libreoffice, however it failed to handle proprietary format in excel and word I use at work.
So trying OpenOffice which I hadn't tried in a long time, did actually support them, had a few more features and in general looks better.
2 • Firefox doesn't use Webkit (by ppm84 on 2014-01-20 09:26:03 GMT from United Kingdom)
Still, Firefox looked like the best candidate until I remembered using a Qt-based web browser using the same WebKit engine Firefox uses during a distribution review.
Wrong, it uses Gecko.
3 • @1. (by Joe on 2014-01-20 09:38:57 GMT from Mexico)
I recently had have the same situation. I found a solution exportint to early xls file and later from Excel load the xls, and save like xlsx (the new xml format).
4 • @ Office (by Jacque Raymer on 2014-01-20 10:02:35 GMT from South Africa)
@ 1 • Bob (by sayth on 2014-01-20 09:20:31 GMT from Australia)
You should really try Kingsoft office instead. MakuluLinux distro's, come with Kingsoft pre installed and i have yet to hear someone say anything negative about it, infact ive had alot of comments on how great it is.
5 • Firefox / OpenBSD (by Paraquat on 2014-01-20 10:07:37 GMT from Taiwan)
I agree that Firefox is a great browser, and it has recently had a lot of overdue attention to improve its performance. But most important new feature in years will be found in the next release, Firefox 27, which will support TLS 1.2. This closes a significant security hole in TLS 1.1. Firefox was actually behind its competitors (ie Chrome, Opera, IE and Safari) in this regard, but version 27 brings it up to date. The beta is already available and I look forward to its release.
Only problem is (not Firefox's fault) that many banks and credit card companies are still using older versions of this important security standard. A secure browser is only half the solution, the other half depends on the site you're connecting to.
=============
OpenBSD: I really hate to say this, but I'll almost be glad to see it die. I say that with a heavy heart - I've used OpenBSD in the past, and last year even tried it again after a lapse of 10 years (only to find that nothing had changed). Sadly, OpenBSD has fallen way behind Linux and FreeBSD in terms of security. Yes, the OpenBSD base install is very secure, but as soon as you add in enough apps to make it useful, that security goes out the window. It's nice that they are planning to add signed packages to OpenBSD - years after Fedora, Debian and every other major Linux distro did it. Mandatory access controls (like Selinux in Linux, TrustedBSD in FreeBSD) are not even being considered by the OpenBSD developers - they boast that their system is so secure that it's not needed.
Over the years, lots of people have offered suggestions to the OpenBSD developers on possible improvements, but those suggestions have usually been met with extreme hostility. A typical response has been, "If you don't like OpenBSD as it is, then go use Linux." And so people did. It seems that the (shrinking) OpenBSD team have not yet awakened to the reality that hardly anyone uses their 1990's-style OS, which is why financial contributions have almost entirely dried up.
6 • Browsers (by Reuben on 2014-01-20 10:10:30 GMT from United States)
I guess my biggest problem with firefox is that it often doesn't know the correct application to open a file with. Also worth noting that Chrome is the only way to use the latest flash. Older versions of flash are riddled with security holes.
Also, I'm going to miss the names for Fedora. It might seem like a superficial thing (mostly because it is) but it gave the distro it's personality.
7 • Engine (by Tomm on 2014-01-20 11:23:25 GMT from United Kingdom)
" WebKit engine Firefox uses during a distribution review"
as already noted, Firefox uses Gecko, not Webkit
8 • @Office (by Robin on 2014-01-20 11:23:39 GMT from United Kingdom)
concur with @4 - Kingsoft is cross platform - including Android. You can be editing a document in the time it takes LibreOffice splash to go away. Best of all - it has a Word 2003/2007 like interface option if you like it like that.
9 • @ Office (by sam on 2014-01-20 11:46:14 GMT from United Kingdom)
Kingsoft is closed source and does not support ODF
10 • OpenBSD (by Fritz on 2014-01-20 12:02:22 GMT from United States)
@5 • Firefox / OpenBSD (by Paraquat on 2014-01-20 10:07:37 GMT from Taiwan)
I agree with them: It is your choice. There are many OpenSource OS's and if you don't like OpenBSD choose the other one. But IMO it is the best secure OS and they did and are doing brilliant work!!
11 • what does Ticket 146 say? (by james on 2014-01-20 13:06:51 GMT from Spain)
The link to the fedora name decision just says "TICKET_VIEW privileges are required to perform this operation on Ticket #146" - even if you're logged in - does anyone know what it says?
12 • Mate and torrents (by LinuxMan on 2014-01-20 13:12:24 GMT from United States)
Good news. I've been wanting to try out Mate without having to use a ppa and it looks like I'll be able to.
The torrent search feature is a very welcomed addition to Ubuntu. It should save some time. I do hope that it can be linked to other torrent search sites other than The Pirate Bay.
It looks like Ubuntu 14.04 LTS will be very interesting.
13 • MATE (by Charles on 2014-01-20 13:45:42 GMT from United Kingdom)
BTW, Ubuntu wasn't the only one to get MATE this week. Arch Linux added mate to their official repos as well. See here: http://mate-desktop.org/blog/2014-01-16-mate-officially-in-arch-linux/
And here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Desktop_Environment#Officially_supported
14 • OpenBSD (by Scotty on 2014-01-20 13:57:29 GMT from United States)
Word this morning is that some Bitcoin guy saved OBSD. Theo da Rat will live to bitch and gripe again! Or at least until next year when the same issue comes up again.
15 • On personal preferences (by Pierre on 2014-01-20 14:03:18 GMT from Germany)
Web browsing For browsing the web I currently prefer Chromium over the others. It has a nice 'store passwords to KWallet'-feature that comes in quite handy and is a good compromise between having all the interesting plug-ins on the one hand side and sill quite a lightweight browser on the other. For my web developing needs there is no way to avoid having Firefox + FireBug and FirePHP at hand. Still I see a few nice features on Konqueror like tiling the window into two browsers what comes in quite handy if you wand to compare two websites. QupZilla looks great and even quite the same on every OS and is both, lightweight and lightning fast. So for every browsing behaviour I see different competitors as a best solution.
Productivity When it comes to productivity and you really need the best compatibility to MS Office formats you have no other choice than to use OpenOffice or LibreOffice. If I am sure I don't need to send the file around or share it with others that are using different solutions I nevertheless prefer Calligra as the most innovative, beautiful and flexible office solution available as open source at the moment.
Audio and video playing For listening to music there are two solutions I really love. Clementine as an Amarok 1.4-like and quite lightweight solution and the new Amarok 2.x, which integrates perfectly into KDE and is defacto the most feature-rich and powerful audio collection managment tool.
E-mail When it comes to E-Mailing I simply see no need for a desktop client any more. Most web clients are as feature rich as the desktop alternatives and have the advantage of being always available. I have set up my very own Kolab Groupware server, so this is all I need as a PIM solution. Thunderbird and K-Mail/Kontact are nevertheless very very nice apps.
Password Manager Since I am using KDE as my main DE (or as software collection in the background when using the i3 window manager) I am using it's password manager KWallet. It has all I need and can interact with my Chromium browser.
Graphics and multimedia editing For edition photos there is simply no better option than GIMP - at least not as far as i know off. I am not so much in editing multimedia, so on that part I'd still make my mind and choice.
Transferring files KTorrent is a nice solution. But for my very limited needs on Torrents a lot easier solution like Transmission-qt is the better option to me. Other file transfers I need to do are most ofter done by me via SCP on the command line. When I see the need for a GUI tool I prefer to use Dolphin, the KDE standard file manager, or Krusader as a very powerful replacement.
Disc burning I don't see any real compatitor to K3b here. Additionnally I do use K3b for ripping my music CDs, too.
Not mentioned, but something what I really care about as a programmer - Text editing Two programs that stand out here in my opinion: (G)Vim and Kate. (G)Vim has the big advantage that I can use it with my plugins and config file on every system, no matter if there is a GUI available or not. Additionally Vim simply is the most powerful text editor I have ever seen. Sure, Vim has a very hard learning curve because you have to learn everything about text edition from the very beginning. But if you start to get used to there is nothing comparable to the power of Vim. Kate on the other hand is a very nice, almost IDE-like editor, that has a very nice Vi-mode included. If not happy with that, you can still use it as a quite powerfull, flexible, classical and graphical text editor.
GNU/Linux distribution My first Linux distro ever was SUSE Linux 7.2 if I remember correctly. So, after distro hopping for quite some while when openSUSE included the absolutely unfinished KDE 4 for the first time, I finally came back to openSUSE with the great 12.1 release. openSUSE simply delivers the best available KDE experience at the moment. Additionally it has become rock solid and stable. Zypper is one of the very best command line package managers available in my opinion. And not to forget about YaST. But it's not only the OS itself I love so much about openSUSE. It's the helpfull and friendly community, the powerfull tools around it, like openQA and the OpenBuildService (OBS). You simply have to love SUSE for it's contributions to Open Source.
16 • CENTOS (by PG on 2014-01-20 15:15:01 GMT from United States)
Seems to me that one of the biggest Linux/stories of the year will be CentOS's "merger" with Redhat. Will be interesting to see if this leads to more CentOS/RHEL based distros.
I'm guessing that CENTOS and RHEL will maintain separate repositories?
17 • K3b (by Jeff on 2014-01-20 15:35:12 GMT from United States)
If only it did not depend on KDE I would try it, but adding hundreds of megabytes that I will never use and keeping them updated means I never will.
18 • Best of Breed (by Serge on 2014-01-20 15:51:30 GMT from United States)
Web browsing Firefox mainly; Qupzilla or Midori when in resource-constrained environments Productivity LibreOffice Audio and video playing audio: moc video: mpv images: feh E-mail browser-based Password Manager none Graphics and multimedia editing images: GIMP audio: Audacity video: Kdenlive Transferring files bt: Transmission (both GTK and Qt front-ends) ftp: FileZilla Disc burning w/e is native to distro or DE I am working in GNU/Linux distribution generally Debian running Xfce; OpenSUSE when I need to use KDE tools (I have a side-job where I do video editing in Kdenlive)
I think this is a fun topic. Hopefully more people will join in.
19 • On personal preferences (addition) (by Pierre on 2014-01-20 15:54:19 GMT from Germany)
I forgot about video players: VLC is a nice GUI option. Dragon Player and Kaffein are ok, too. Nevertheless, especially when I am using the i3 window manager instead of the full KDE I tend to prefer mplayer(2). :)
20 • Firefox (by Jesse on 2014-01-20 16:25:58 GMT from Canada)
@2,7: Thank you for pointing that out. Don't know where my head was when I associated Firefox with WebKit. As you pointed out, Firefox uses Gecko, WebKit is/was used by Chrome Safari.
21 • Qupzilla (by Mark E on 2014-01-20 16:48:53 GMT from United Kingdom)
Jesse, thanks for introducing Qupzilla, which I hadn't seen before; initial impressions are it looks good and is nice and fast.
Re. email clients, Thunderbird is good quality and full featured but, like Firefox, I find it slow. I must admit for one of my email accounts I still use (al)pine! I know all the keys and it's really fast... :) Something in between those two would be good.
22 • Best of the breed (by Kazlu on 2014-01-20 17:15:02 GMT from France)
Well, this is a very trollable subject, but since we are clear that this is only and simply a matter of personal opinions, here I go:
*Web browsing* I tried quite a few to test resource consumption. Midori is nice, crashes very less often for a few versions, but eats a lot of my CPU's power on some web pages. Qupzilla still crashes too often. Chromium works well, I use it when a recent version of flash is needed, but since non-google based solutions exist... Chrome is of course out of question. All in all, I always come back to Firefox, which performance has greatly improved, with the best stability/resource consumtion ratio on my machine. Hell, I cannot hold the browser for responsible of taking 500-600MB of RAM when I have 20+ tabs opened! Firefox is the one that handles the load the best.
*E-mail* Thunderbird is a must-have. I have several mail accounts for different purposes and I want to have them gathered on the same place to manage them, so I won't use webmails (only when I'm on another computer). Copy the Thunderbird profile on another computer and using IMAP allows me to easily manage my accounts on several computers. I tried Evolution, I find it horrible. I can't find my way in its options. Claws mail is nice but the features of Thunderbird are totally worth the slightly higher RAM occupation. I also tried Seamonkey. I find it nice to have a single application gathering mail client and web browser, especially for resource consumption purposes. Sadly, the comfort of use does not match the one of the Thunderbird/Firefox combination in my opinion.
*Productivity* I have used LibreOffice (OpenOffice before it) for several years. Libre, fully featured, it is perfect for me. I find it slow to launch as a portable app in Windows, but on GNU/Linux it is not longer to start than Abiword or Gnumeric, which lack many features and are less stable. The only drawback is MS format compatibility, but Kingsoft Office dit not performed better when I tried to open my horrible test.doc file, so LibreOffice is still the best solution in all aspects for me. I did not consider trying OpenOffice again, Bob (#1) makes me think I should.
*Audio and video playing* When I use a music player I need it to do one thing: play music. My music is arranged in my folders, no need for a player to manage a custom library. Somtimes it may be easier, but not worth the weight of an application like Rhythmbox. I tried Amarok on a live CD, I find its interface too complicated for a music player, I couldn't find my way. I don't want to have to learn to use a complete software when I just want to listen to music. So I use Audacious, which plays music and handles playlists. That's all I need. I sometimes still wonder why I bother use a music player when a video player can do it. It is redundant. For videos, I like to have several ones at my disposal, just in case one is failing and I don't know why, or handling is slightly different. I use VLC for its universality and its handy keyboard shorcuts (subtitles/audio delay for example) and Totem which behaves well by default.
*Password Manager* My brain. I prefer having a good password policy to manage my many passwords and be able to remember them than risking a hard disk failure and losing all of them. Although I must admit it is easy to have efficient backup solutions today, I may reconsider.
*Graphics and multimedia editing* I do not know any other answer than Gimp. If only it had a tool to draw simple geometrics like circles and squares. Audacity is nace too, I have had trouble with it but I think my sound card was responsible after all.
*Disc burning* Brasero fits me here. I do not use it very often and when I do my needs are very basic. Burn this iso on that disc. Burn this as an audio CD. Period. Brasero, with its few buttons at startup, is so simple I do not have any questions.
GNU/Linux distribution The most troll-magneting item :) For me, Xubuntu is a very efficient and flexible distro that answers most of the needs I meet, concerning me or other people close to me, beginners to enthusiasts. The speed of Xfce, the ease of use and hardware support of Ubuntu. Manjaro is also really nice, but right now I have not enough time to handle a rolling release distro *properly* and to risk a failure. I must also mention Trisquel and salute people behind it: their GNOME 3 yet traditional desktop is very well done and makes for an excellent 100% libre distribution. I must admit I still need some non free gadgets like Flash or others, but it is good Trisquel is out there and I will keep an eye on it.
And, if I may:
*Desktop environment* Xfce is, in my opinion, a great balance between weight and functionnality. Besides, its modularity does not make it an aberration to replace an appplication with another. Special mention to Whisker menu (not part of Xfce though) which really changes the Xfce experience for the best. Cairo dock fits also well in it, I discovered it recently and am happily surprised. The only thing I am missing is tabs in Thunar (I use Ubuntu 12.04, so I won't have to wait long till it comes!). I tried PCManFM that is lightning fast but crashes surprisingly often. Too bad for an LTS version of Ubuntu. PCManFM is perfect in Manjaro.
23 • OpenSUSE (by Andrew on 2014-01-20 17:15:53 GMT from United States)
I've tried OpenSUSE several times over the last few years. Yes it does offer one of the best KDE experiences of all the distro's I've tried and it looks and feels very professional with it's installer. The issues that always end up turning me away is it's lack of codec's installed by default, constant repo issues and the 1ClickInstall (which is more like 5-6ClickInstall). The package installation is never straight forward and I've always had to search through the website for answers. I would have thought that installing packagers should be intuitive and user friendly especially for such a main stream distro like OpenSUSE.
24 • @21 mail client (by Kazlu on 2014-01-20 17:16:22 GMT from France)
You may be interested in Claws Mail, it is fast and does the job well !
25 • @ 4-5: office (by Alecon on 2014-01-20 17:32:00 GMT from Italy)
kingoffice is closed source. for me is a deal breaker, some may not care though. considering that most of the limit of LO arise from dealing with closed source standard I'm more inclined toward a long term solution of this issue.
26 • Seamonkey (by technosaurus on 2014-01-20 17:34:46 GMT from United States)
For those of you who have become disenfranchised with Firefox and Thunderbird, I would recommend trying Seamonkey (just grab a Puppy Linux image to test it out). It uses the same layout and javascript engines as Firefox, but has kept a much nicer experience.
27 • password manager (by Mark E on 2014-01-20 17:40:20 GMT from United Kingdom)
Those who want to manage passwords might want to give gpg-vi a look, as it's just a simple bash script utilising the gpg packages. I use it to manage a text file with passwords in it. Useful if you don't want to rely on a dedicated program for managing passwords. URL here: http://www.cespedes.org/code/gpg-vi
And thanks @21, I'll check out Claws for email.
28 • oops (by Mark E on 2014-01-20 17:42:25 GMT from United Kingdom)
I mean thanks @24 (not 21, i.e. myself) recommending Claws!
29 • Best of Breed (by Vukota on 2014-01-20 17:47:31 GMT from United States)
I found that Firefox is the best browser for everyday browsing and development. WebKit is a memory hog when u have 200+ tabs open. Even though people are choosing sides for browsers, I use several of them for very specific purposes. In example I do not use same browser for banking as I do for everyday browsing (it is safer that way).
About Video playing, I found that under Linux (even Windows) you can not rely on a single player, as it will not be sufficient for all videos that can get under your hands. Yes, VLC will play most of them, but potentially with rendering/audio issues. I appreciate here that there are different rendering/coding/decoding engines and usually one of them will work best for particular video at hand (you just have to figure out which one).
For Video editing, I prefer AviDemux, though OpenShot will suffice and you may have to use a different tool for a different video (format) you are dealing with.
About distributions, it is hard to stand your ground what ever you pick, so I am not going to even try. Personally, I like OpenSuse (as it is a best balance for MY everyday needs), but was perfectly happy with Fedora, Debian, Mint, Ubuntu, FreeBSD and many more, and use other specialized distros for a very specific needs on everyday base.
30 • Statistics... (by Vukota on 2014-01-20 18:02:00 GMT from United States)
I understand all numbers, except KNOPPIX. Can someone (maybe Jesse in one of the next DWW) shade some light on why is KNOPPIX so popular on osdisc.com? I used them at the time because they were among the first all around usable live disc distributions, but since then, others evolved and now there are many other better distros (IMHO) for any purpose. Maybe I am missing some particular need that this distro fulfills better than others, or they just have better marketing channels?
31 • Best of the Breed (by windsnake21 on 2014-01-20 18:14:09 GMT from United Kingdom)
Let me start by saying that I am a Linux hobbyist. My choices of software are going to be pretty atypical and niche in comparison to what most people use.
Web browsing - I use Firefox with Vimperator here. Vimperator gives Firefox Vim-like key bindings, allowing the browser to be controlled with the keyboard if you wish to do so.There are also specialized browsers which are designed with this kind of keyboard-driven usage in mind, the easiest of which to configure being dwb, but I personally use luakit more for the built-in custom per-webpage user style sheet support (I believe dwb only supports one custom style sheet for all web pages). I also use w3m for a minimal command-line browser with image support, which is great for browsing pages where you don't need (or want) JavaScript, while making them look relatively attractive by using your personal terminal theme.
Productivity - It's hard to talk about productivity seriously if you use Linux mostly as a hobbyist home desktop, but surely the it needs to mentioned that you can write documents of various types using a LaTeX suite combined with the text editor of your choice?
Audio and Video playing - For audio I use moc. Were you expecting MPD here? Maybe I will feel like setting up MPD one day for the search features it has, but for actually playing music, moc is fine for me. As for video, I always prefdrred MPlayer(2). It plays pretty much everything you throw at it, Is highly flexible, usually running with only an absolutely minimal interface, but there are frontends for both GNOME and KDE if you want a GUI. You can even use it to play YouTube videos without having to use Flash.
Image viewing - sxiv. An extra minimal and light image viewer which uses vi-like key bindings by default. Just how minimal? So Minimal that you have to modify and recompile the source if you want to change the default key-bindings. However, it's super fast and light as a result, and can be used to browse entire directories of images with ease.
Email/Password manager - i never really use either of these, so no comment here.
Graphics editing - The GIMP is clearly one of the best in this category, but Krita is also an option for those who use the Calligra Office suite. They have slightly different end goals, with Krita aiming to be more of a digital painting program, while The GIMP is a more general-purpose image editor.
Transferring Files via torrent - I use Transmission here. It's light and reliable. I don't really think there is much more to say here.
Transferring files via FTP - I don't really use an specialist prgram I here, but I did, I would probably look into aria2 if I wanted a download utility for the FTP protocol.
Disc burning - I don't burn a lot of discs, so I generally use what requires the fewest extra dependencies to install.
Text editor - I use both Vim and Nono. The former for working with any kind of code and also for larger plain-text files, but sometimes, Nano's more simplistic approach works better, particularly in shorter documents where all of Vim's mode-switching probably consumes more time than it saves with other features.
GNU/Linux Distribution - Well, I am on Gentoo at the moment, and I like it enough to keep it installed. The other distributions I like to use are Arch Linux and Debian, generally via a lightweight spin-off such as Crunchbang or AntiX. They all have their perks and disadvantages, but it's the contrast between of a Distro like Debian compared to one like Arch that makes Linux as rich and varied as it is.
32 • OSdisk numbers (by dbrion on 2014-01-20 18:17:36 GMT from France)
There are some interesting things with OSdisk's sales: * Knoppix has a very high ranking (3rd: in DW HPD, it is 30 th) : perhaps it is because it is recommanded by many satisfied people (and , as people remain satisfied and because it is unpossible/very difficult to add extra packages, no curiosity about it occurs in DW)
*Fedora is slowly losing parts; maybe it is because they make installing more and more difficult (if possible : they made huge efforts for it!);
maybe it is because they make **using** more and more unpleasant- this is much worse than installing: I use FCs for 15 months, until I choose a new one; installing is a matter of unpleasant minutes/hours- : new desktops are meant for "smart" "phones", but they manage to ship LXDE - I bet from rapsbian qemulations that XFCE would remain usable, too- (before, one could choose between 4 DE; now, only two usable DEs remain: if something works, break it)
*CentoS (3.1->2.9) and Scientific Linux(.6->.5) are slowly losing parts, too : as (at least I hope) people may be very satisfied with existing software, they do not need to buy a new CD (or their downloads sites are getting better, making buying not such necessary-). I hope there are no other explanations.
*Mageia is slowly losing parts: they started with Mandriva's fame, but had to rebuild every thing, with less people (I tried Mageia, and prefered Fedora).
33 • Opera replacement (by Charles Burge on 2014-01-20 18:18:06 GMT from United States)
I've been using Opera since 1999. I even paid for a cross-platform license back when they sold it as shareware. So it's with a lot of sadness that I read about its impending demise. In searching for a replacement, the primary consideration for me is: will it support the mouse-gestures that I'm so used to? Opera lets me hold down the right mouse button and then click the left one in order to go back one page instead of reaching for the "back" button, and it's such a useful feature that I can't even contemplate giving it up. Do any other browsers have mouse gestures?
34 • @31 Joe's Own Editor might be better than nano. (by dbrion on 2014-01-20 18:28:28 GMT from France)
"Text editor - I use both Vim and Nono"
Well, that might be nano (nono means breast in malagasy!) .
Joe is better, as it allows syntax highlighting (10-20% of my developping time is in finding /making other typos if I do not have a syntax high lighter) and is less ressource consuming than viM... http://joe-editor.sourceforge.net/ compares a lot of editors;
As qemulated ARMs platform may be very slow, and need good editors, adding joe to their editors list was felt very comfortable http://www.armadeus.com/wiki/index.php?title=User:DenisB
35 • @31 - Image Viewer (by Serge on 2014-01-20 18:46:02 GMT from United States)
windsnake21, looks like you and I have similar tastes (my selections were in #18). Have you used an image viewer named feh, and if so, how do you feel sxiv and feh compare against each other?
I have found feh to be vastly faster and superior for my needs compared to the big graphical ones like Shotwell / Gwenview / Ristretto etc., but I was not aware of sxiv until I saw your post, and am now curious to try it out for myself.
36 • Firefox UI (by M.Z. on 2014-01-20 18:51:50 GMT from United States)
I agree that there have been some annoying & stupid changes made to the Firefox UI, but it is still highly customizable and it's easy to change the theme. The 'tabs on top' thing does drive me nuts & I really can't understand the idiotic herd mentality that drove them to change it in the first place, and then even worse to reduce the ease with which the tabs can be configured; however that can still be changed. If you put about:config in the address bar, promise the browser to be careful not to break anything, & scroll down to where is says browser.tabs.onTop and click it you can switch the tab behavior to the old default look.
Most of the other issues I have can easily be changed with various addons, although I'll admit I've never liked how the default theme looks in KDE. The only really great theme for KDE that receives any updates at all is 'Oxygen KDE', but unfortunately it's updates seem to be very slow compared to the Firefox release cycle, meaning it's only good for the distros that use the ESR versions or for the 'Iceweaseal' version of Firefox on Debian. I think Firefox still beats any other browser hands down, although I would still like a slightly better theme on KDE.
37 • Preferences (by David McCann on 2014-01-20 18:55:02 GMT from United Kingdom)
I use CentOS because it has more security and configuration features than Debian. I hope Opera is not dropping Linux, because Firefox is just too slow on my hardware: I'm actually using it now, though, because this comment system won't work with Opera. My other must-have applications are Claws-mail and OpenOffice.
38 • @23 - openSUSE - lack of codecs by default (by Andy Prough on 2014-01-20 19:07:40 GMT from United States)
@Andrew - As I've said on here before, openSUSE is NEVER going to give you restricted proprietary codecs at installation "by default". See here for an explanation and a work-around: http://software.opensuse.org/codecs
I'm not sure why Jessie in his reviews and various users keep complaining about this issue on this board. openSUSE is very clear and upfront about their policy, and as far as I know it's never going to change. In fact, I believe their policy is almost exactly the same as Fedora's and Debian's.
39 • Choices, choices (by Zhymm on 2014-01-20 19:08:47 GMT from United States)
Web browsing: Firefox (Iceweasel). I usually have one or more additional browsers installed, but Firefox seems to be my 'go to' browser. Currently on Iceweasel because I'm using a Debian (testing) based distribution.
Productivity: I'm retired. Abiword suffices for the odd letter/document I have to compose. Otherwise it's whatever comes with the distro I'm using.
Audio and video playing: audio - I try many but always seem to revert to using Exaile. Maybe because I'm used to its interface and behavior. video - vlc. vlc is one of the first packages I get (if it's not included already) anytime I install a new DE. And I often use vlc to play audio files, too.
E-mail: Thunderbird (Icedove). Same reason Jesse gave above. I can copy my current .thunderbird folder into my home directory after a new install and I'm good to go. Icedove for the same reason I gave for Iceweasel above.
Password Manager: don't use one other than my brain or the odd slip of paper on my desk.
Graphics and multimedia editing: not into graphics or video editing. I do use Audacity to record my singing and guitar playing.
Transferring files: whatever client comes with the distro. Currently using Transmission as my bit-torrent client.
Disc burning: Brasero is my favorite. I usually install it if it isn't the distro default.
GNU/Linux distribution: I still 'distro hop' some, though not as much as I did when I first dipped my toe into the linux pool 8 years ago. I prefer lxde and openbox, so gravitate to distro's that feature them. I've been using SparkyLinux for the past few weeks. #!Crunchbang is my fallback if something unpleasant pops up in whatever lxde/openbox distro I'm currently flirting with. LXLE is the current install on my daughter's desktop and my wife's laptop.
40 • Best of Breed (by bobtruth on 2014-01-20 20:00:05 GMT from United States)
Firefox for noscript, ghostery, and sync.
Libre/Open Office and Not Kingsoft for ODF.
K3b for managing power and user-friendliness tradeoffs.
Special awards...
PLATINUM AWARD, for DEs that work: LXDE and XFCE.
GOLD AWARD, for long support cycles: Ubuntu, Debian, Cent
41 • EDitor (by lutz on 2014-01-20 20:19:05 GMT from Germany)
ed(1)
42 • Chrome and Qupzilla (by Ron Buckman on 2014-01-20 21:22:57 GMT from United States)
in 2013, Google and the Chromium developers forked WebKit and renamed the Chromium version "Blink". I have strong disagreements with Google, therefore I seldom use Blink browsers which use extensions from Google.
QupZilla is a promising project. The one problem is that nobody has publicly backported a still updated version of the QtWebKit backend to LTS versions of major distros. I am using Ubuntu Christian Edition based on Ubuntu 12.04 Precise LTS. The only currently supported version of UCE is based on that 2012 version of Ubuntu. The version of QtWebKit (libqtwebkit4) in Ubuntu 12.04 is 2.2.1 with no later version available in a PPA for Precise. That version of WebKit hasn't been updated since March 11, 2012. As mentioned in launchpad.net. The latest version of QtWebKit on Qt4 is 2.3.3 which is available in Fedora 20 and Arch Linux. In contrast, supported versions of Firefox are backported to fully supported versions of all major distros, and this includes Ubuntu 12.04 and CentOS 5.x which was first released in 2007 with it's last updated point release in May 2012 using the old glibc 2.5. I know Firefox is slower to open than WebKit browsers. But, I know it will be supported on 12.04 until it goes end of life in April 2017.
43 • Correction to last updated point release of CentOS 5.x (by Ron Buckman on 2014-01-20 21:27:07 GMT from United States)
Actually the last updated point release of CentOS 5.x was in October 2013 not in 2012.
44 • Best of breed et al (by MikeF on 2014-01-20 21:40:00 GMT from United States)
Good to see some press for Qupzilla, a promising browser that I find essential for maintaining my Google Maps - the Chrome devs refuse to fix known interoperability bugs! If it could only use Firefox extensions .....
Also thanks for pointing out that the GNOME DE in CentOS is still the classic 2.28 version. Too bad the Upstream Vendor is blinded by gnome-shell and won't support the more user customizable XFCE in the enterprise product.
My curses based editor of choice is the hard-to-search-for, Xedit compatible 'THE' (Hessling) editor. Multimodal operation that isn't stuck in the 1970s glass-TTY era.
@39, I always rip out the neglected, dysfunctional brasero. The GNOME project devs won't even update it to burn R/W media!
45 • openBSD (by tuxtest on 2014-01-20 21:47:27 GMT from Canada)
The problem with OpenBSD and several other BSD system (dragonfly, netbsd) is that they don't want to simplify the system for the end user. In 2014 the console mode for install and some many simply task is completely overwhelmed. On the other hand, PC-BSD is a good example of the work that remains to be done to make the system simple to use for end user. The PC-BSD team must develop and add a lot of overlay to make a system function. This also heavier use.
My conclusion, BSD is perhaps not designed for the desktop. Maybe BSD should remain on the server only.
But I would be sad to see OpenBSD disappear.
46 • Pear OS sold for real? (by Wolf on 2014-01-20 21:52:34 GMT from Germany)
David Tavares made an announcement:
Pear OS is no longer available for download. Its future is now in hands of a company who wants to remain anonymous for the moment. The concept has pleased them it and now wants to continue and improve the system for their own products. I can not give a name but it is a very large company well known ... I want to thank all users, moderators and other developers who have made Pear OS it is today, that without this adventure would not have been possible. I'm going in another direction. Another big thank you to all and I hope to return to the scene of open source very quickly. Cordially. David
I'm shocked Back to Distrohopping
47 • @46 (by jaws222 on 2014-01-20 22:17:34 GMT from United States)
Interesting. I'm curious to see how this plays out.
"I'm shocked Back to Distrohopping" If you're looking for a replacement Ubuntu-based distro I recommend either Bodhi or LXLE. Both are pretty lightweight and extremely reliable.
48 • The RHEL world; mouse gestures (by :wq on 2014-01-20 22:22:55 GMT from United States)
@16 "Seems to me that one of the biggest Linux/stories of the year will be CentOS's 'merger' with Redhat. Will be interesting to see if this leads to more CentOS/RHEL based distros." Obviously a different set of circumstances, but the initial announcement stirred my memory of the merger of the fledgling Red Hat Linux Project and the Fedora Linux Project. I personally have no worries about the CentOS/Red Hat relationship, but for others that might, there are developments like https://github.com/gooseproject/main/wiki/Migration-proposal - http://gooseproject.org/proposal-goose-project-to-join-ascendos.html, and of course other reasonably vibrant RHEL derivatives such as Springdale Linux and Scientific Linux will still be around. I think the CentOS variants proposal might prove to be an opportunity for CentOS derivatives like Stella, though time will tell.
@33 "Do any other browsers have mouse gestures?" Mouse gestures for at least Mozilla Firefox, Chromium, Midori, QupZilla, Web/Epiphany, Konqueror, and rekonq should be available via either extensions, KHotKeys, Easystroke, etc.
@44 "Too bad the Upstream Vendor . . . won't support . . . XFCE in the enterprise product." Xfce should be available from EPEL (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL) for 7, but I wish it was officially supported as well.
49 • Popularity contest (by Eddie on 2014-01-20 22:43:11 GMT from United States)
Web browsing: For years I used Opera and wondered why not everybody did, but once I started using Firefox for more things (wider compatibility, the lovely It's All Text! extension), I had to admit that Opera was sort of unredeemably ugly. The interface is grouchy, and the page rendering was often a bit off in vaguely annoying ways (and getting moreso the last couple of years). To me, the Chrom... interface is just impenetrable. So Firefox by a long ways, though I'll try QupZilla when I get a chance.
Productivity: I wish I had great quantities of wealth to kickstart an open-source imitation of WordPerfect. Barring that, I have to go with OpenOffice; it's more stable than its more glamorous fork. And Calc is just wonderful.
Email: Claws Mail does everything I want, and I have found it much easier to customize to my requirements than Thunderbird. Not appearance; Claws Mail is functional and nothing more. But it works perfectly.
Distro: I'm currently using Mint 16 Cinnamon and enjoying it, but when the Ubuntu/Mint LTSes come out in the spring, I expect to go back to a mix of Mint KDE and Kubuntu. Those two have been delightfully solid and versatile ever since I installed the 2012 LTSes.
50 • @49 (by jaws222 on 2014-01-20 22:55:44 GMT from United States)
"but when the Ubuntu/Mint LTSes come out in the spring, I expect to go back to a mix of Mint KDE and Kubuntu. Those two have been delightfully solid and versatile ever since I installed the 2012 LTSes."
I'm especially looking forward to Ubuntu with the Mate desktop. It'll remind of the good ol' Ubuntu days of Gnome 2
51 • PearOS (by tuxtest on 2014-01-20 23:07:12 GMT from Canada)
For my part, I don't think PearOs has been sold. I think than One man show the main developer came to an end. The energy devoted to developing PearOS is huge even if it's a respin buntu. Alvarez invented this story to close the shop.
Any interest in a supposed Great Entrepise known to buy a respin Buntu.
Good luck M. Alvarez in your future
52 • @Best of Breed-audio/video (by TuxKnight on 2014-01-20 23:27:59 GMT from United States)
http://getnightingale.com/ This a fork of Songbird audio/music player, when Songbird dropped Linux support. Songbird is gone. Nightingale, still IMO needs a few things, maybe as addons/extensions: Cd ripper (although Linux already has tools for this), audio file converter and podcasts. This is a open source and cross platform project. Nightingale uses the Gecko engine, reference Mozilla Firefox. It supports addons or extensions, similar to Firefox. It has what is called "Feathers", to change the look of the player (themes).
There was just an updated release, a few days ago. IMHO, a worthy project and worth the support. Enjoy. Cheers. :)
53 • Best of Breed; GNU/Linux distro (by Col Payne on 2014-01-21 00:13:57 GMT from New Zealand)
I agree with Jesse with regard to Kubuntu being a great distro. Recently however I have installed Netrunner 13.12, a Kubuntu based distro with a few tweaks. It's a very good makeover and I recommend it, especially to Linux newbies.
54 • Why purchasing pearOS may have been an appealing prospect (by bubba on 2014-01-21 00:55:51 GMT from United States)
Why? Well, pearOS had acheived a considerable "following" sourceforge.net/projects/pearoslinux/ indicates 11,000+ downloads per week. (and that tally misses additional dls performed via softpedia and other dl mirrors) and Tavares had built out, and provided to users, several distinctive "cloud" components
Interestingly (to me), with so many downloads... the relative lack of inactivity in the pearOS forum suggests the users have been either well-satisfied, or remarkably "much less needy" than most other groups of OS/distro users. This detail might convey a huge "plus" in the eyes of a prospective purchaser.
Tavares' indiegogo campaign last fall, for a tablet edition, bombed. With pearOS, he successfully executed a vision, and (although pearOS is not my cuppa tea) I applaud his achievement.
55 • Best of the breed according to taste.. (by Bill on 2014-01-21 01:14:25 GMT from United States)
Web Browsing - I use Firefox, simply because I have been with them since I discovered Netscape as an alternative to IE.
Productivity - I followed the gang over from OpenOffice to LIbreOffice. I use the spreadsheet quite alot for medical records on our foster children, and sometimes just to write a letter.
Audio - When I discovered Linux had progressed so far, I found Audacious and I was able to port my favorite skin from winamp, naturally I am still using Audacious. However, I am in the process of saving 50 year old spiritual talks on Reel to Reel's by digitizing them into mp3's. So I use Audacity and Lame quite a bit now. I have saved over 300 talks.
Video - I just use VLC for convenience sake. But I am really excited to find that I can watch Netflix streaming videos in Linux. That is so cool. This allowed me to give the Satellite company the boot after 10 years. (I live in the mountains).
Email - Coming from outlook I found Thunderbird to be easy to learn and have been using it for all my emails for 7 years now. I looked at Claws, but it was too much work for me so I just use the familiar.
Password Manager - I've never used one. I have an uncanny ability to remember very long and complicated passwords, so I don't need a manager and I don't write them down. Oh well.
Graphics - The learning curve for Gimp is very high up for me, so I just use it to scale pictures for blogs and log in pics and that kind of thing. I also use MTPaint to crop pictures for my desktop wallpaper. Other than that, I don't do graphics.
Transferring Files - I bought a download manager years ago called Getright, and I use it under WINE, I did not like the Linux equivalents. I love Deluge for scheduling Torrents.
Disc Burning - Well, I'm sure most folks won't like this, but when I first came to Linux I bought Nero for Linux and have used it ever since. I like it, it's easy and in the early years it would see my optical drives when Linux versions would not. I DO like Brasero for iso's though.
Linux Distribution - Well, I started with Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 and was happy until Unity and Gnome 3 came out. Since then I have supported Mate and Mint and Solas OS and Point Linux, also donated to Xfce Majaro, and used Debian for a while. But one day I thought, with my new Nivida card, let me see what I liked about Gnome 2. I re-installed Mint 9 Isadora and found that I really liked the old gnome 2 the best. Oh yeah, I play with dozens, everything from Zen to OpenSuse, but I like my Isadora quite well and I can do all of the above easily with the aps above.
Hey, I just turned 60, I deserve a little eccentricity. And for me, it puts the fun back into my computing.
56 • Torrent search in Mate-buntu (by Linadian on 2014-01-21 02:05:59 GMT from Canada)
Yet more info to report to who knows? I wouldn't search anything, nevermind a torrent. Mark says it's to promote open, more like report what the open people want or are up to = more corporate spying bucks.
57 • @33, Jesse Smith and other Opera users (by Ricardo on 2014-01-21 02:27:59 GMT from Argentina)
First of all, to those die hard Opera users: Opera is not dead (at least not yetyet). Its developers are focused on th Windows and Mac versions for the moment and promised a Linux version (most likely a preview/alpha/beta) for March at the earliest.
The problem is that I really love Opera classic (versions <= 12) interface, som I'm sticking with it for the moment.
On the bright side, an independent developer set out to recreate Opera's interface with th Qt 5 toolkit, giving birth to Otter: http://otter-browser.org/
It's still alpha status, very incomplete but surprisingly stable nontheless (I'm actually posting this from Otter 0.2.01-dev, a git snapshot from 2014/01/17 to be precise).
So, there's still hope for us Opera fans :)
Oh, and speaking of alternative browsers, there's aso these other you might wanna try:
Rekonq integrates well with KDE's plasma desktop - http://rekonq.kde.org/ Leechcraft, a modular browser - http://leechcraft.org/ Dooble, a full featured multi-platform browser - http://dooble.sourceforge.net/ SRWare Iron, a Chromiun fork with some privacy protections - http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php
Cheers!
58 • @8 and 22 - LibreOffice startup speed. (by Kubelik on 2014-01-21 03:15:58 GMT from Denmark)
To speed up the startup of LibreOffice you could just disable java, which comes enabled in most distroes. Just go to settings/advanced (or whatever it's called in English) and tick the radiobutton. - Restart LibreOffice and see the enormous difference:)
59 • @6 (by Stan on 2014-01-21 06:03:16 GMT from Australia)
"Also worth noting that Chrome is the only way to use the latest flash. Older versions of flash are riddled with security holes."
This is incorrect. The Adobe Flash plugin for Firefox does receive security updates; it just doesn't receive feature updates.
60 • No searches at all? (by LinuxMan on 2014-01-21 06:46:21 GMT from United States)
@56, No searches at all? I find that a little hard to believe. Also torrents are not a bad thing, most of the time. Anyway, who cares what open people are up to? I don't see what the big deal is. You just change the privacy settings and if you're really paranoid you can use incognito mode in your favorite browser. That's what I do, and anyway if you know about it, it's not spying. If you have a facebook account it's all out there anyway sad to say.
61 • More Favorites (by Peter Besenbruch on 2014-01-21 07:10:55 GMT from United Kingdom)
It's a lot of fun reading people's comments on what they like. Thank you for the comments. I'll add a few of mine:
Image viewers: I'll put in my vote for Geeqie. It allows fast viewing, navigation, and the viewing of EXIF data. It links to the image editor of your choice (usually the GIMP). Feh is nice, if you want to put up with a clunky, but effective interface. Blisteringly fast and somewhat more flexible than SXIV, Feh is the best light weight viewer out there. Yes, it's also faster than SXIV.
I have used OpenOffice and then LibreOffice for years for documents. They work. I haven't run into too many compatibility issues with Microsoft Office files. For text files and most HTML editing, I use Geany.
Count me in as another vote for Claws Mail. It replaced Thunderbird for me. I keep Claws running on a home machine, sorting the mail, or marking it as spam with the help of Bogofilter. Even if I use a Web interface on the road, Claws keeps on working.
For browsing, nothing touches Firefox, nothing. I have tried Qupzilla, and it strikes me as a similar program to Midori, except Midori imports Firefox bookmarks better, and is a bit more stable. I like to browse somewhat privately, so I use extensions that let me toggle TOR on and off. I use Secret Agent, Noscript, Adblock Plus with the element hiding extra thrown in. Few Web pages look like they were intended. Most load very quickly. For FTP and the like, I use PCmanFM.
I use Audacious for audio files. I organize by directory, and Audacious plays along with that. K3B is the best burning program I have found as it is a good front end to CDParanoia.
I am something of astronomy fan, so I use Stellarium and Cartes du Ciel (Skycharts). I use Cartes in the field, and I have it interface with my telescope mount.
Finally, I use XFCE as my desktop environment, and Debian Stable as a distribution.
That's about it for me, and thanks for your sharing.
62 • prefered applications (by sam on 2014-01-21 08:27:43 GMT from Congo, The Democratic Republic of the)
Browsing: firefox, now trying quipzilla because I have known of it's existence on this DWW. Productivity: Libreoffice. GNUcash a must for me too. Email: claws-mail. Distro: my main distro on main machine debian stable xfce but right now playing with Manjaro on a different machine. Have also used centos for long. Music: I use anything I come across that works. Do not watch videos or edit photos. Search engine: switching to duckduckgo.
Other software that I must have: Rednotebook, Dosemu, lingot, unetbootin
63 • Sharing Tastes (by Wolf on 2014-01-21 08:50:25 GMT from Germany)
Trying to help many of the technically handicapped woman in my vicinity my preferences for favourite programs are purely driven by the Idea of what to recommend (Install) on another persons computer. I.e. simple to install easy to understand and use.
Web browsing: Trying every browser known to man, even the text based ones (lynx?) I'll always come back to recommending Firefox. Sometimes a bit sluggish and oh so many Addons but as I seem to have time and my connection is always good I don't seem to care. Runner up: Chrome
Productivity: Libreoffice: odf enough said. If one has to use proprietary standard than KingSoft come to mind
Video: VLC second to none.
Audio: I'm open to suggestions here and still testing myself. But I like to stay away from KDE so no Amarok
E-mail: I always recommend using the web based interfaces of the providers as I see no use for average Jane Doe to fiddle with Email on their Homecomputers. In the End Emails seem to get lost more often as the People do not Backup their Data frequently, so!
Password Manager: This is essential. I tell all of them cause they can't remember a password if their life depended on it to use KeePass. It's easy and comfortable but to no avail...
Graphics and multimedia editing: GIMP and ProjectX only cause I don't use it very often, works fine with the ts Streams from my dvb-t recorder, but I will try some of your suggestions.
Transferring files: Filezilla for ftp, transmission for torrents, SABNZBD for Usenet Downloads and for keeping data in sync I use Freefilesync which is a nifty little tool for mirroring or syncing directories or even whole volumes!
Disc burning: I never did that much so I'll leave that to Distros Choice. Brasero seems to get the job done
GNU/Linux distribution: PearOs, Elementary, (X)(L)Ubuntu, #!, Peppermint, PointLinux, Puppy, LinuxLite Ah so many great ones and their Spinoffs hard to decide depends on power of machine to install it on. With Woman Ubuntu is quite self explanatory and shopping lenses man they just seem to love it... frightening
Bye Wolf
64 • Favorite multiboot flash-drive tool? (by Fossilizing Dinosaur on 2014-01-21 09:09:05 GMT from United States)
While we're at it, ...
65 • @46-47 (by Alecon on 2014-01-21 10:16:48 GMT from Italy)
elementaryOS seems to me the closest replacement (assuming you were happy with pearOS)
66 • Best of Breed (addition to #15) (by Pierre on 2014-01-21 10:54:49 GMT from Germany)
Desktop environments were added to the stack, so I want to write a few lines on that, too.
As I already mentioned I prefer KDE when it comes to fully features desktop environments. Nevertheless I love the beauty of Xfce's simplicity which makes for a very clean desktop. In my opinion the best solution would be a compromise between KDE and Xfce. So you can imagine how excited I have been when I heard of Klyde (K lightweight Desktop Environment). Disappointingly the developed concepts will 'only' be included by including the concept of how KDE is packaged for openSUSE and not released as a real lightweight KDE alternative.
The reason I am not really sad about this is that a friend was using awesome (window manager) lately and when I saw him working I was so impressed, that I started to read a lot about tiling and stacking window managers. Awesome sounded awesome indeed and working on it was impressive when I saw it. But in the end I could not get used to the way, too. The limited options to order windows on the screen simply always seemed to stand in my way and I finally made the conclusion that I am wasting more time this way than I would by having to resize windows on traditonal DEs/WMs. So I started testing the other options I read about and when I tried i3 I was feeling so much at home that I simply stayed with it.
67 • @23 (by Andrew) (by Pierre on 2014-01-21 10:55:30 GMT from Germany)
To be honest I don't see where package installation is not intuitive on openSUSE. It's as simple as hitting 'sudo zypper install packagename' into a terminal. Or, if you prefer a GUI, there are YaST and Apper available, too. So, well, at least three very easy and quite intuitive ways to install software. I don't know of any other distro that makes it easier or more intuitive or really different in any means. Additionally adding the Packman repository to your package repositories is very easy, too. Simply open YaST and go for managing package repositories, then add custom/community repositories and simply chose Packman from the offered list. Another option is the command line again with 'sudo zypper addrepo -f -n packman http://packman.inode.at/suse/openSUSE_13.1/ packman'.
Well, I cannot see where this is handled too difficult to be intuitive. In the end it's the question of feeling at home or not. So if slightly different approaches fit your way of doing things better it's ok. Open Source is about having the choice.
68 • Reactions to users favorite softwares (by Kazlu on 2014-01-21 14:01:51 GMT from France)
It's interesting to see several points of view here. And it's an occasion to discover new things.
@61 Peter Besenbruch: Wow. Thank you so much for bringing Stellarium and Cartes du Ciel to my knowledge. I definitely have to try these.
@63 Wolf: I second you about FreeFileSync. I even recommand it as a backup tool to people that do not want to invest time in learning how to use a tool. Sure it is limited as a backup solution (no compression, no incremental backups) but is is very easy to backup and restore data as well as to understand what the software does. This allows to easily get them to know what to do by themselves when a problem occurs.
69 • Favorite Software (by Dan Hart on 2014-01-21 15:52:15 GMT from United States)
For the list of favorite software, I agree and use just about everything there as well.
For my multi media needs, I use Banshee as well. It is fairly intuitive and easy to use as well.
For productivity, I rely on LibreOffice, but I supplement with a note taking app called Cherry Tree. It is a node based note taking app that makes organizing things into sub categories very easy.
One last piece of software I use as my password vault is Password Gorilla. You can set up categories, sub categories, and sub categories within sub categories. It can also generate a password for you if you like based on the criteria you set up. Again, very intuitive and easy to figure out.
I personally use Debian as my distro of choice. All the apps I have mentioned above on in the Debian Stable repo.
Your list was a great summarization of apps! :-)
70 • Favorites (by fernbap on 2014-01-21 15:54:27 GMT from Portugal)
browser: Firefox. Enough said, except for the ftp client i use, which is in fact a Firefox addin, Fireftp. Taking care of both tasks with a single app.
Multimedia: audio files - depends on how you want to listen to your music. Moc is awesome, as it uses very little resources, but usually you want something more, you want a music organiser as well as internet radio player, podcast player, the works. Audacious is a bit heavy on the resources, specially while using winamp skins. The gtk interface is much lighter. But i have to agree with Jesse on this one. Clementine is the exact balance between simplicity and functionality.
Video - All of them have issues. My preference goes to SMplayer, which has the best user interface imho. VLC has trouble with some video formats. Smplayer (mplayer) has trouble with some video formats as well, but the combination of both cover about everything, so i have both installed. So, i use smplayer except when i bump into one of the rare cases where it struggles with, in which case i use VLC. Smplayer is the best by far when dealing with external subtitles files.
Productivity: LibreOffice, enough said. However, on old hardware, Abiword is an awesome lightweight text processor.
Text editor: Geany all along, as it is one of the best development environments available.
Distro: DE - Mate all along. XFCE isn't even close when it comes to offering the most complete and versatile experience. XFCE used to be a lightweight alternative to gnome 2, but not any more. Mate is as light as XFCE, so i see no valid reason to use it. On old computers, LXDE or just Openbox, dependiong on the user.
"Family" - Debian all along. Btw, Fedora 20 offered me a good experience in thew live session. Then you decide to install it, you boot on the disk and it doesn't boot. It stops saying that it can't find the partition where it was installed (lol).
As i am interested in the Mate desktop, i find PointLinux awesome. Light and fast. I have also installed Mint 13 LTS Mate backported to Mint 16, where i run a web and mysql servers.
71 • Favorite Software (by Dan Hart on 2014-01-21 16:01:10 GMT from United States)
Sorry about this...I ommited these two last thoughts...
I use Brasero and XFburn, both suit my needs for CD/DVD creation.
And for web browsing, I go between both IceWeasel (Debian version of Firefox) and Chromium. Both suit my needs as a web developer. For general browsing, I tend to favor IceWeasel. When I am in developer mode, I tend to favor Chromium. One other web browser I have come to like as well, but do not use it regularly, is Midori. Very stable and fast.
72 • Qupzilla (by AliasMarlowe on 2014-01-21 16:36:56 GMT from Finland)
Qupzilla appears to be a nice enough browser (this was posted using it). However, as Jesse pointed out, it is lacking a few items.
In particular, it does not support logging into my router (the username and password fields are missing), and it does not support some features that are common among other browsers (try http://m.fmi.fi/saa for example).
73 • Best of breed (by Didier Spaier on 2014-01-21 17:02:47 GMT from France)
Reminder: there is a poll every year @ LinuxQuestions.org on that topic. For 2013 the poll didn't occur yet but see this thread for the list of nominees: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/lq-suggestions-and-feedback-7/2013-linuxquestions-org-members-choice-award-nominees-4175487763/
Other than that, I prefer to use directly the command line than tools that are just a GUI front ends where applicable. For instance: for file transfer: wget, lftp and rsync for disc burning (mkisofs + isohybrid) => cdrecord or dd or growisofs
Other than that I'm a happy Slackware user but of course that's only my personal choice ;)
74 • @60 Please don't converse directly... (by Linadian on 2014-01-21 20:27:05 GMT from Canada)
with me or make comments about my comments. Personally, I don't like your condescending tone, and no, I don't use my desktop search, I run SolydK, so I don't even think there is one. I was however warning people that might be thinking of using Ubuntu about their 'search' and what in might entail.
75 • @74 (by jaws222 on 2014-01-21 20:36:24 GMT from United States)
" I run SolydK"
I've been running Solydx. They are sweet distros, right?
As far as the Ubuntu search, who needs it.
76 • QupZilla and private browsing? (by Pearson on 2014-01-21 20:44:43 GMT from United States)
I've glanced at the QupZilla site, and I can't find whether it has the same features as the "Private Browsing" feature in Firefox.
77 • re 76 - QupZilla (by corneliu on 2014-01-21 21:14:39 GMT from Canada)
It does. It's in menu "Tools" or Ctrl+Shift+P
78 • @46 Pear OS (by historyb on 2014-01-21 22:24:50 GMT from United States)
Hi,
Elementary OS is great as an alt to Pear OS
79 • I USED TO like Clementine (by edked on 2014-01-22 00:25:16 GMT from Canada)
Clementine was perfect for me, and I was very happy with it until they made the idiotic decision to remove libgpod support, apparently because it had problems with "newer ios devices." Well, it was fine to use with my old 80g 5th gen, and I don't see why I had to lose the use of it because of people complaining about issues with their nano or iphone. So, back to Banshee, which I like, but wasn't too pleased about the metric buttload of gnome components it installed on my kde setup. Maybe next time I do a full install I'll leave Amarok on and try that trick I saw written up somewhere to tweak its database settings to speed up music-library-reading, which is just intolerably slow in any standard install I've ever tried...
80 • Liking CentOS, best in class software... (by Arkanabar on 2014-01-22 01:03:02 GMT from United States)
Jesse: Did you consider Rekonq? Probably not; it's pretty well wedded to KDE, aparently not very cross-platform.
The news that Red Hat plans to fund CentOS tells me they really, really want to put the screws to Oracle Linux as an EL clone. More power to them.
I've used and liked CentOS, but I don't want to fool around with manual driver updates that my wired(!) NIC requires to work under CentOS. If my old computer hadn't died, I'd still have and be using it.
I've long been a distrohopper, installing new distros to bare metal every month or so, and having as many as six at once prior to giving up WoW, which had me trying nearly everything coming and going in order squeeze a few extra frames per second out of my old hardware. Because I generally had a new distro that needed stuff to be complete, and favored cutting-edge distros with rapid update cycles, I usually had a lot of updating to do. My wife figured this was typical of Linux usage and far too much work for a rational person, so she threatened me with bodily harm when I offered to install linux on her computer.
She favors a more conservative approach, to cut down on the work of keeping up to date. I've told her that CentOS (by way of Stella) would last nearly as long as her beloved Windows XP has, without requiring reinstallation, and that there would only be updates if there was a bug or security issue. She is a lot more receptive to that.
Moral of the story: recommend to people distros that suit *their* needs, not yours.
Best in classes: OS: Lubuntu, #!, openSUSE, with Mint 13 KDE on my lappy. For me, anyway. I think about rebasing #! to Jessie, but I never get around to it. As I mentioned, I think my wife would prefer Stella/CEntOS. Browser: Firefox/Iceweasel. I can't STAND using a mouse to navigate my bookmarks. I keep Chromium, Midori, w3m, Rekonq, and Konqueror around, but most of the time, I use Firefox. Text editors: nano for the console; any of leafpad, mousepad, gedit, kate, kwrite, and pluma for the gui, depending on environment. Productivity: LibreOffice. It works, and I'm too lazy to go hunting OpenOffice down. But I like to have either Abiword or Calligra-words installed too, just in case. A/V: VLC. It does what little I need. Email: web browser. I know the NSA can read it at will. I edit things to suit. Graphics: the GIMP. It does what little I need. Password manager: KeePassX. I am in job search, and I am NOT going to rely on any policy other than random generation to get into all these sites that require me to leave my SSN. File transfer: grsync, bittorrent, ktorrent. Disk burning: K3b.
@30: KNOPPIX is widely regarded as *the* premier live rescue distro. Its popularity at OSDisc is thereby assured.
81 • @30: KNOPPIX (by Rev_Don on 2014-01-22 18:14:17 GMT from United States)
"@30: KNOPPIX is widely regarded as *the* premier live rescue distro. Its popularity at OSDisc is thereby assured."
You got that right. Any Linux user who doesn't have a Knoppix Live CD/DVD/USB in their arsenal is really missing the boat. I can't imagine not having all three available to me at all times to deal with emergencies that always seem to arise at inopportune moments..
82 • @16 @48 CentOS (by PePa on 2014-01-22 22:31:21 GMT from Canada)
@16 Unfortunately, RedHat taking over CentOS is probably going to lead to way less distros based on it, because only official CentOS distributions can use CentOS. More here: http://nerdvittles.com/?p=8721
@48 When Fedora was birthed, it wasn't a merger with RedHat, but a split-off.
83 • Qupzilla - the little browser that certainly can - seconded (by Robert Alonso on 2014-01-23 02:51:19 GMT from Australia)
Jesse I felt vindicated by your article on Qupzilla and the fact that you are using it as your browser of choice.
I started having issues with Chrome/Chromium about 8 months ago (memory hog) and was not happy with the workaround solution of using the "onetab" extension so I started looking for a replacement. Much like you I didn't like the performance of Firefox and I really just wanted something light that I could browse the web with. When I came across Qupzilla it just felt right. It's quick, it's light, it has adblock built-in and does everything I need it to do on my KDE Archlinux desktop. Whenever I tell my friends or colleagues what I'm using however I just get blank stares....
Thank you for making me feel like I'm not a lone voice in the wilderness...
84 • @82 (by :wq on 2014-01-23 04:20:28 GMT from United States)
As I said, a different set of circumstances that merely stirred a memory, but for the historical record: https://web.archive.org/web/20031014042928/http://www.fedora.us/
85 • @81: Knoppix (by Kazlu on 2014-01-23 09:55:08 GMT from France)
I personnally use Puppy for those purposes. Fast, able to to do anything. Actually its small size got me to make every USB stick / microSD card I use bootable with Puppy in it. I didn't try Knoppix, I don't feel the need. Have you tried both Knoppix and Puppy? Mind sharing impressions about Knoppix compared to Puppy?
86 • @64 • Favorite multiboot flash-drive tool (by Rev_Don on 2014-01-23 14:09:03 GMT from United States)
"64 • Favorite multiboot flash-drive tool?"
Sardu, hands down. I haven't found anything that even comes close. http://www.sarducd.it/
87 • Qupzilla (by Dbl Mtn on 2014-01-23 14:39:20 GMT from United States)
I installed Qupzilla, and it looked to be the answer to leaving my favorite, Opera. Got it setup to my liking, and began reading 1stheadline.com news stories. Any ABC News article will display the banner across the top of the screen, but the rest is blank. What do I need to do to correct this? This is a killer for me, and I will have to find another browser, if this isn't fixed.
88 • Qupzilla "issues" (by Pearson on 2014-01-23 16:10:42 GMT from United States)
When I glanced a the Qupzilla site a few days ago (haven't been able to install it at work), I saw something about some sites requiring you to set the User Agent String in Qupzilla (I infer that some sites are looking for particular browser names to enable certain features,and qupzilla isn't in their list, and their default is too minimal)
89 • 1stheadline (by sam on 2014-01-23 17:00:32 GMT from United States)
Attempting to workaround browser quirks, some sites parse user-agent string from HTTP request headers and conditionally tailor the content sent to you based on the browser you APPARENTLY have. You might also see the same (mis)behavior when visiting 1stheadline while using other lesser-known browsers, like midori. (hint: doing so would be a troubleshooting step)
"I will have to find another browser, if this isn't fixed." Mentioning it in comment here probably is unlikely to get it fixed, eh. Alert 1stheadline's webmaster to the issue and report the issue to Qupzilla's space on the github site.
90 • Qupzilla (by Wolf on 2014-01-23 19:22:45 GMT from Germany)
I hate to be the guy that breaks the bad news but at least on my system Qupzilla is quite a memory hog. Nearly 3 times the Memory usage and even up to 6% Process time.... I'm confused does anyone confirm my observations???
Bye Wolf
91 • Top 3 distros (6 months data) (by GNUday on 2014-01-23 19:51:21 GMT from Canada)
Has anybody else noticed all top 3 are Debian based? What ever could this mean, lol. ;-D
Yes, I know, "don't take the HPD seriously".
I have another idea for a top distro counter system, total repository traffic combined with ISO downloads or just ISO downloads, repository upgrades means the user has already downloaded an ISO. New and existing distros wanting to be part of the distro popularity contest would need an ISO download counting system in place.
92 • 64 - multiboot flash-drive tool (by Somewhat Reticent on 2014-01-23 22:47:14 GMT from United States)
YUMI from PenDriveLinux.com comes in DebIan and Ubuntu flavors.
93 • @91 - Counting Downloads (by Serge on 2014-01-23 23:49:55 GMT from United States)
The two main problems with counting downloads are: First, this only tells us how many times the ISO was downloaded, not how many deployments of that distro are active; I might download the ISO once and install it on several computers, or I might download it, install it, break my setup and re-download it to re-install it, or I might download it, install it, decide I don't like it, and never use it again. Second, counting ISO downloads does not track re-distribution by third parties, such as for example re-distribution within a local corporate intranet. A corporate sysadmin will download the ISO only once regardless of how many installs he or she plans - that one download could lead to hundreds or even thousands of deployments.
Tracking repository access is more accurate, but runs into the problem that derivative distros are going to be misrepresented - distros like Linux Mint and Netrunner by default include Ubuntu repositories in their package managers, and it is difficult for Ubuntu's statisticians to then tell the difference between an actual Ubuntu user and a Linux Mint user. Another problem with this method is that users of open source operating systems tend to be very privacy conscious, which makes tracking repository usage a sensitive topic.
I'm not trying to beat your ideas down. I'm just pointing out problems that have been pointed out to these kind of suggestions in the past. Accurately tracking distro usage is a problem that people have been trying to solve for as long as there have been multiple competing distros. It's just not possible.
94 • Favorites (by Bill on 2014-01-24 00:30:58 GMT from Canada)
I went to Linux several years ago as I found windows to be rather weak in playback quality of recorded music. I liked Win XP and still do as a desktop. When I moved to Linux I tried just about everything. Initially liked the mint distros until I tried Debian 7.
My primary reason for moving to Debian was that it offered superb music playback with very low overhead and to my surprise, it has been truly stable.
Every application I have tried has been a rewarding experience, even running Windows in a Virtualbox. I prefer gnome classic desktop as I have configured it much like Windows XP. I also like the Xfxe desktop. Favorite apps are: Audacious, LibreOffice, Evolution & Thunderbird, Qjackctl, Gparted, Unetbootin and Bleachbit.
If I was into video and gaming, Ubuntu would be my first choice as a distro for Xbmc but I am not into video that much. Fortunately there are a good number of other distro's that one can use for their computing needs. Open source software is great, isn't it?
95 • Qupzilla (by os on 2014-01-24 01:56:49 GMT from Australia)
It's a shame this review was for Qupzilla 1.4.4 when 1.6 is alreay out and has some significant improvements.
I've been trying out every new Qupzilla release for quite a while and have always liked it, but 1.6 is the first one that I use as my main browser. It is definitely more stable than previous versions and has fewer rendering problems than previous versions (or any other lesser-known browser I have tried).
The main extensions I use in Firefox are Adblock, Flashblock and the KWallet plugin - these are all handled natively in Qupzilla. The only thing I (occasionally) miss is Firebug as some other people have already mentioned.
96 • RE: tracking distro usage (by :wq on 2014-01-24 02:09:18 GMT from United States)
Why not just ask the NSA?
I kid.
The NSA would never share that information.
97 • MATE desktop Ubuntu 14.04 (by jaws222 on 2014-01-24 19:55:34 GMT from United States)
Does anyone know if the MATE desktop is compatible with the 14.04 alpha 2?
98 • @88: User Agent String (by Vukota on 2014-01-24 22:05:12 GMT from United States)
Microsoft concluded (based on a research) that there is a significant number of web sites that are checking user agent strings and due to that fact, content in their IE browser is rendered incorrectly. If they made such conclusion and due to that fact made in their IE11 user agent string similar to Firefox, Chrome and Safari, I would say it is enough reason that any modern browser agent should be able to do so easily.
99 • good OS (by Ken on 2014-01-25 02:27:23 GMT from United States)
Thank you Distro-watch team. I'm a regular reader. I am not a geek in any way shape or form. I'm just average "Joe User" and distro-hopper since about 2005. I've tried most all distros. I love Puppy the best but I don't used it for every day work. I prefer the lite -fast distros. For the past few months I've been using "Point Linux" and it has been perfect! I have bloated it some and it still works exceptionally well. I've had a couple of application crashes and Point Linux came right back to normal rock solid performance. I highly recommend this distro to all. Just my opinion! Thanks Guys Ken
100 • @87 • Qupzilla (by coonhound on 2014-01-25 05:37:27 GMT from United States)
You need to disable Adblock to view the webpage. After you disable adblock refresh the browser and the full page will be display.
101 • @82 wrt to CentOS (by Johnny Hughes on 2014-01-25 16:20:17 GMT from United States)
As "Skavoovie" pointed out in 2 comments on that site, the article that you linked to is inaccurate.
The only thing that Red Hat is saying is that the CentOS trademarks must be used properly. You can't call something CentOS if it is not CentOS. You CAN (and CentOS wants) you to use the underlying code in other projects. In fact, the whole reason for the arrangement with Red Hat was to allow for SIGs to be able to use CentOS as a base for their projects and create "variants" where the can actually use the CentOS branding.
Open source or not, some group can not say that their product is Debian or Ubuntu or Mageia if they are not. They also can't use the logos of those companies to promote their products. The trademark section of the CentOS site says that people can say their product is Based on CentOS (if it is) and they can say that any software they create "Runs on CentOS" or their sites are "powered by CentOS". They just can't say that their product IS CentOS, unless it is.
In short, that article is complete poppycock, and there is no reason why people should not use CentOS source code in their products.
==============
You are also incorrect with respect to Fedora. Fedora Linux existed and joined with Red Hat, see this article for clarification:
http://archive09.linux.com/feature/31767
102 • @96 & 93 (by GNUday on 2014-01-25 19:52:57 GMT from Canada)
@96 Your NSA joke made my coffee go up my nose laughing! o_0
@93 You are absolutely right, I failed to take all those facts in to consideration. Maybe all installed distros should 'phone home' like Ubuntu, lol. ;-D
103 • Page Hit Count interpretation (by Fossilizing Dinosaur on 2014-01-25 23:51:47 GMT from United States)
Shouldn't such statistics go to Marketing for analysis? After all, these should imply how well Marketing is appealing to seekers ...
Number of Comments: 103
Display mode: DWW Only • Comments Only • Both DWW and Comments
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• Issue 1108 (2025-02-10): Serpent OS 0.24.6, Aurora, sharing swap between distros, Peppermint tries Void base, GTK removinglegacy technologies, Red Hat plans more AI tools for Fedora, TrueNAS merges its editions |
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• Issue 1079 (2024-07-15): Ubuntu Core 24, hiding files on Linux, Fedora dropping X11 packages on Workstation, Red Hat phasing out GRUB, new OpenSSH vulnerability, FreeBSD speeds up release cycle, UBports testing new first-run wizard |
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• Issue 1076 (2024-06-24): openSUSE 15.6, what makes Linux unique, SUSE Liberty Linux to support CentOS Linux 7, SLE receives 19 years of support, openSUSE testing Leap Micro edition |
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• Issue 1062 (2024-03-18): KDE neon 20240304, changing file permissions, Canonical turns 20, Pop!_OS creates new software centre, openSUSE packages Plasma 6 |
• Issue 1061 (2024-03-11): Using a PinePhone as a workstation, restarting background services on a schedule, NixBSD ports Nix to FreeBSD, Fedora packaging COSMIC, postmarketOS to adopt systemd, Linux Mint replacing HexChat |
• Issue 1060 (2024-03-04): AV Linux MX-23.1, bootstrapping a network connection, key OpenBSD features, Qubes certifies new hardware, LXQt and Plasma migrate to Qt 6 |
• Issue 1059 (2024-02-26): Warp Terminal, navigating manual pages, malware found in the Snap store, Red Hat considering CPU requirement update, UBports organizes ongoing work |
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Wazobia Linux was a Nigerian commercial distribution based on Red Hat Linux. Developed by Leapsoft Ltd Nigeria, the product includes a user-friendly operating system, together with a complete set of desktop applications, such as office suite, web browser, instant messaging client, multimedia viewers, and graphical software. It also offers the latest open source applications for developing software, setting up a home network, running a web server, and more. The product, which includes installation media, printed documentation and installation support, was currently available in Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo as well as English, with ongoing translations into other African languages.
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