Re: [tlug] Gnome vs. KDE? BSD vs. Linux?

[Scott Robbins <scottro@example.com>]

On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 12:06:43PM +0900, Wayne wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 2008-03-19 at 14:23 +0100, Niels Kobschaetzki wrote:
> > Hi!
> > 
> > It seems that I get soon my hands on a laptop which won't be able to
> > run my favorite mixture of BSD and Mach.
> > And therefore I wanted to ask some absolute elemental questions:
> > Can someone sum up the most important differences between Gnome and KDE?
> > And what about the (did)advantages of the BSD-derivates compared to
> > Linux on an old PIII-laptop?
> > 
> > Niels
> > 
> 
> Old machine? Low on memory? I'd be looking at something lighter, like
> XFce as a desktop...

I'd agree with Wayne here.  Both Gnome and KDE are more resource
intensive.  Also, depending which Linux you use, you might find it quite
bloated compared to the BSDs.  

Arch Linux is pretty popular with the BSD people though, much easier to
get used to than say, Ubuntu or Fedora.  It also has a nice centralized
source of docs in its very good wiki.  

I say easier to get used to because it has a BSD style startup
file--called /etc/rc.conf.   :)  (For non-BSDers, the smiley is becuase
that's what the BSDs call theirs. 

Whereas with Fedora or Ubuntu, the network interfaces are defined
somewhere in etc--in Fedora, for example, the hostname is defined in
/etc/sysconfig/network and the interface is in
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0.  

Gentoo is possibly more BSD like, but since I think you still have to
compile lots of things, you'd probably prefer Arch's tendency towards
binary packages.  (Although I think Gentoo has lots of binaries now, but
I don't know if their system update still requires lots of compiling.
Josh or other Gentoo-ers, if you see this, could you confirm or correct 
me?)


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Scott Robbins
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