I like KDE I have to admit. I like Kate, it's a very nice program, I need to start working on it more all around. I like the way KDE works, I've looked at gnome, I don't think I like the direction they are going in.

I definitely want to check out mepis, I think no matter how you approach Debian, any of these packages are good, my impression of Ubuntu is that they have their own packages, which is something after using Yoper for a while I'm starting to realize isn't that good an idea. There's something very appealing about the idea of being able to directly connect to the debian community.

But I'll need to see how the performance is compared to Yoper, if it's reasonably close I think I'll go with Debian based distro, I don't want to be changing distros every year, I just want to start working on one. That's what I did with Windows 2000, I've had the same setup now for years, I never change it except to add little applications, that's what I want my Linux distro to be like too.

I'm out of cdroms or I would have already tried mepis, I'll have to get some tomorrow. I'm also going to see about getting beatrIX installed on my old laptop, I've been trying to get a working Linux on it for years, redhat runs very slow, suse 9.1 even slower, it's unuseable. Windows 2000 runs fine on that old machine, to its credit. Beatrix is a gnome based distro, it would be good to have one install with gnome, or maybe just icewm or something. I'll have to see, too much stuff to do and I'm too lazy at the moment to do it.
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Yeah, after having tried RH for a while and never really feeling enamoured about it, trying Debian was quite something, and did evoke those squishy amorous feelings you get when something works real nice and slick, and you have a good basic grip on what's happening. Staying with debian package management is one of the main reasons I haven't tried out Yoper yet - the ability to get fairly recent packages and update easily outweighs the speed element for me now, Debian feels speedy enough (except for bootup, but that's a problem I caused by me somehow or other).

Ubuntu has its own repository, but these are basically just debian packages which have been tested, possibly improved, and maybe slightly tweaked to work within Ubuntu - Ubuntu is basically an attempt at getting Sid to be as stable as Woody (or nearly as stable), since the Ubuntu team can do the testing and resolve the dependencies for the three branches of machine architecture it supports, and doesn't have to worry about bugs or dependencies in the other eight. It'll probably also focus more on fairly popular and stable libraries and apps, so things won't be back-burnered for ages since they have some kind of conflict with some obscure thing or other. You can still use the regular Sid packages for stuff that you absolutely must have that aren't in the Ubuntu repositories - they'll just be more 'siddish' (and sid has been so nice to me I don't really have problems with that).

At the moment I'm thinking I'll most likely use Ubuntu with pekwm, and switch into Gnome when I need to do some kind of auto-configuration stuff like I'd use KControl for. That should do the trick.
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My mini-review of the Ubuntu live CD wouldn't be very interesting - it didn't get my 3com gigabit LOM ethernet connector, so I'll probably have to install, make, and insmod. However, a sweetly short description of Ubuntu that will make you laugh has been posted at www.halberd.org/index.php?p=54 .
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