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by karatestomp 2312 days ago
shrug I've had Linux desktops across Debian, Mandrake, Gentoo, Ubuntu, and maybe some others. Oh I think Fedora in there somewhere. Gentoo and the first few years of Ubuntu (pre-Pulseaudio, basically, though it's not the only reason it suddenly got worse right around that time) were the only ones that felt like they weren't built on some kind of horrid Jenga tower always on the verge of toppling over, but in Gentoo's case that's only because I placed all the pieces myself. And it's never felt any "faster" or more responsive than Windows unless stripped down to bare bones on the UI side. And God did X used to crash a lot. At least Xorg's mostly better on that front, but then Windows doesn't BSOD a couple times a day anymore either.

[EDIT] oh as for BeOS, it ran a lot of the same junk I ran on Linux just fine. Better, really. It wasn't suitable for a server, but that didn't and doesn't really matter for one's desktop OS experience. Especially these days—can it run a VM (as one supposes any modern BeOS-alike could, because why not)? Cool, then I can run most any deployment target I like on it.
1 comments
LargoLasskhyfv 2311 days ago
That reminds me of something wrt configuration files. What always rubbed me the wrong way, for instance in Debian were the commented out examples in config files inapplicable for the configuration of the running system. I remember this for the bootmanager, framebuffer and X when setting up a flicker free boot with the SAME video mode as early as possible, networking, and file systems.

Only Mandrake and PCLinuxOS got this right, they had nothing in /etc which wasn't applicable, because somehow generated programmatically by their installer, according to the choosen configuration.

That was CLEAN, there were no useless ##commented out things for stuff the system didn't even had installed.

Unfortunately their package repos at the time were 'clean' (meaning lacking the stuff i needed/wanted) too.

SUSE also tried this with YAST, but got it wrong often, and felt sluggish and bloated.

I can't really remember XFree86 and later Xorg crashing on me, except when pushing its boundaries wrt multi monitor and hotplugging, i guess that depends on the used hardware and the quality of their drivers?

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