<br><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div>
<br></div><div>So I tried Sidux in a KVM virtual machine on Sunday. </div><div><br></div><div>I tried it on a virtual machine first to check if the distribution was worth the effort reloading my laptop. Not hard, but </div>
<div>KVMs are a lot easier. Obviously I only have used it for 3 days, not full time, just on a virtual machine.</div>
<div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>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. <b>They need an install process in the manual, even if it is simple, which includes</b> 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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>The Gentoo Distribution does a fantastic job of this....</div><div><a href="http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/">http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/</a></div><div><br></div>
<div>I also would have never found those tidbits If I did not read the documentation straight through.</div><div>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... </div>
<div><br></div><div>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. </div>
<div><br></div><div>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).</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>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. </div>
<div><br></div><div><br></div><div>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. </div>
<div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Mike Irons</div>