I downloaded a trial version of the new VMware 5.0
since my favorite computer magazine wrote me it would be good,
and it all works just fine. To test it all, I downloaded iso images of Fedora Core 3, SuSE Linux 9.2
and Kubuntu Linux to have a look at what KDE looks like in
different distros.
Fedora Core pleased my eyecandy fetish with a good looking graphical
install, and had a quite polished overall appearance although a couple of things really annoyed me.
It didn’t seem to remember that I would login into KDE but instead held GNOME as default. Yum, which
is supposed to be the online update tool did quite a bad job, it would take hours just to parse the
dependencies of all packages only to tell me that I’m out of diskspace. Trying to remove a couple of
packages which I wouldn’t need anyway, it wanted me to first install a couple of others. Oh well,
guess it must be me …
SuSE also was quite polished and much more a native KDE
distro, with all necessary tools integrated into kcontrol. The installer looked much less polished
than Fedora’s, it chose text-mode to do all necessary stuff, but that’s really only a cosmetical
thing. What also striked me is that it needed much more interaction than the others and left me with
a couple of necessary things left to do (setup network, setup X, both with graphical tools at
least).
Kubuntu finally, which was actually the distro I began with installed
fast and smooth, needed only one CD iso (FC3 needed 3, SuSE was installed from a 3.2GB DVD iso since
the netinstall wouldn’t work (segfault in early boot)). Everything went fine during the install and
even updating to the development release Breezy Badger was fairly easy.
Guess I’ll keep Kubuntu then, which is what I’m running on my workstation anyway. Still
nice to see what other distros offer and that the grass is not always greener on the other
side. :-) (Although it would really come handy to have the PyKDE toolchain fixed at some point …)