The last time I used Linux for any length of time was back with Mandrake 8.2, when Gnome was separate from a window manager. I had that system pretty well honed (I even had a cron job to change my xmms playlist to a night-time mix at 10pm)… until Mandrake 9.0 came out. I installed it, and it just didn’t feel the same.
I then installed the Windows Server 2003 trial, and I realised that Microsoft actually could make a decent OS. This lead to a couple of years of using MS Windows almost exclusively, only briefly looking at the various incarnations of Mandrake and Fedora. Latterly, I looked at Suse 9.3 and was fairly pleased with it. Not enough to use it, though.
I’ve just installed Suse 10.0, and spent a couple of hours getting it set up how I want. Two things I would advise laptop users to do:
- get the ksynaptics package (for me it was to turn off the tapping of the trackpad, but it also controls everything else)
- turn off the PS/2 mouse (in YAST), only leaving the trackpad enabled. Makes the mouse feel quite a bit better
After this, I’m fairly happy with the whole thing. Not sure about KDE… it does seem to be a little heavy, but then I’m comparing it to Enlightenment and Fluxbox which are both fairly minimal window managers.
