[clue-talk] Alternative KDE distro

[Michael Irons]

First, please take my comments as constructive criticism. Most of my
comments are pointing out negatives where Sidux falls short IMHO. Many other
popular distros fail from similar problems.

So I tried Sidux in a KVM virtual machine on Sunday.

I tried it on a virtual machine first to check if the distribution  was
worth the effort reloading my laptop. Not hard, but
KVMs are a lot easier. Obviously I only have used it for 3 days, not full
time, just on a virtual machine.

My overall impression was not bad, but I wasn't really impressed either. In
other words I don't see any compelling reason why I would change from
Kubuntu to Sidux.

1) The documentation is horribly organized....(I realize this is a smaller
project that is still growing). I wasn't sure where to start even after
going through all the documentation, so i just started by clicking on the
installer.  Not good for newbies. The documentation does have some great
information and tips in there. But it had nothing to do with the install
proccess, just general linux tips, I didn't know that. *They need an install
process in the manual, even if it is simple, which includes* what to to when
things go wrong. It should also include definitions. I am far from a linux
guru, but a less experienced user would have gave up long before I did.

The Gentoo Distribution does a fantastic job of this....
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/

I also would have never found those tidbits If I did not read the
documentation straight through.
The wiki seems nice, I didn't go through all of that, as I figured things
out on my own... It looks like there maybe have been better help in there...


2) The live installer did not work well. It continually just stopped working
in several places, most notably in the disk partioning section. The odd part
was that I could not find where it was breaking down. It would just sit
there, but I could not find any obvious processes besides the installer
itself that where hung. After trying several of the integrated partitioning
programs, several times. (Gparted, cfdisk, fdisk) with Ext3, Ext4 and having
the installer just freeze. I finally gave and partitioned manually with a
fdisk and the mkfs tools from outside the installer program. Even then the
installer failed to copy the files twice to the hard drive after
partitioning. I realize I am using a virtual harddisk for this, and maybe
there is a issue there, but of the 10+ other distributions I have tried in
the past month or so have, none had an issue installing. On the third time
it successfully installed.

3) Once running, The desktop is beautiful. But that is just skinning,
anybody can do that (but not many distros do, so I give them accolades).

4) Even with with the KDE minimal install iso, Sidux seems to install some
extra software cruft. So does Kubuntu, and several other distros... That is
one reason why I wanted to leave Kubuntu. Sidux packages do not seem to be
so heavily modified as kubuntu though (at least in my brief glances), which
is good.

5) Ceni network config. Whether you may not all agree if Linux should be
pushed to the world or not, the reason why desktop linux fails in the "real
world" is the fact that a programs like ncurses based ceni is the
recommended network configuration program. I used ceni, but I believe
servers systems should use text files . GUI systems knetwork-manager plasma
applet is where we need to be going.


Anyway, to wrap it up...Sidux seems to work well once everything is set up.
The install headaches were not that hard since I knew what to do, but they
were time consuming considering It took 2 hrs before I gave up on the
default install routine.

I am sure they had there reasons, But I wish they would have just used
Debians installer (which works better), and spent there time on other other
issues. Such as fixing up there wiki/Documentation. Once that was much
better, then they could improve on Debian's installer.

Sidux does not offer any compelling reason to switch for me at this
time....It seems to be switching one set of problems for another...  At
least for my purposes at the moment. Maybe in a few years, as Sidux grows
and has more help. It shows promise. I hope any Sidux fans take these as
points to make their distro better.


Mike Irons
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