Well having a quick spin of black panther now. All installed and running fine, with ati drivers installed fine as well.

looks all nice and sleek but no real "wow" factor for me i s'pose - but then KDE never really did much for me anyway.

Slipping my recovery disk into the drive already

I personally much prefer the KDE interface than the chuffing annoying Unity interface with the pop-out side-bar. The old Gnome interface wasn't that great either in my view, so I'm going to stick with KDE for the time being until someone comes out with something truly special later on.

Project Looking-Glass looked quite interesting, but no doubt incredibly resource-heavy, and it's a pity that's pretty much abandoned now.

You only don't like it because it works easily. I don't think you want it unless you've had to fight for it.

I agree with Chizzle about KDE. It's absolutely gorgeous out of the box, but amazingly configurable if you want to tinker. I completely love my Kubuntu 11.10 install. The saddest thing about KDE4 for me is how long it's taken us to get to this stage where it's so good. It's been a painful road imho.

You might be right

I agree about Kubuntu 11.10 and KDE4. I use Kubuntu 11.10 exclusively. A couple of minor problems though, which may be to do with my fairly complex desktop layout and a windows program which I always have running under Wine. Sometimes several desktop 'plasmoids' are repositioned on start up and I have to move them back how they were. And sometimes I get one or two application 'crash' dialogues on shutdown. But they occur so rarely I am not too bothered.

I use a few Gnome programs of course and I really like the way they look in KDE. My favourite email client (Claws-mail) looks just fine and I even slightly prefer the Gtk widget set to Qt's. Currently messing with Glade (Gtk UI designer), Gstreamer and Python. Writing simple little applications never looked easier, but still I struggle.

Here's a tip to save some desktop space - With the default plasmoid opacity, you can layer them. I have the Hardware Temperature and System Load Viewer side by side with the System Monitor showing Network, Ram and CPU on top covering them completely. The temperature dials can easily be seen through the monitor background. Looks better than conky! (imho of course.)

I've got Kubuntu 11.10 running on both my work machine and my laptop. I've had to install VirtualBox with Win7 / Outlook on my office machine to be able to access the work email system fully but besides that I'm running totally with Linux apps.

The Ubuntu move to Unity pushed me over to KDE, and since KDE 4.6, I've been very impressed with the desktop. As others have said, it's very configurable and I can set up the system to a level where the desktop helps me not hinders me.

Released today

http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-active-two/

Cooo!

/coos

Looks great, and the nice thing about them creating this is that they've already said they won't be focusing exclusively on it and leaving the desktop development behind. Great news imho.

Having said that, though this is obviously touch based I could imagine it still being fine to use with a mouse, like Gnome Shell.

Dunno if mentioned previously, but MicroMart gives a thumbs up to an Arch based gaming distro.

4.4GB Big download or 650MB Lite with less games.

http://live.linux-gamers.net/

Happy Christmas All

I like the look of that ..

"Uh-oh" says the thread

I had you in mind.

Might have a go myself tomorrow.

I tried that linux gamers distro. Installed fine, graphics drivers installed fine but ......... none of the games worked

Didn't really bother trying to find out why to be honest.

Just seen this though and I do like the look of it ..

http://www.pear-os-linux.fr/

Can't imagine Apple would be too impressed though

This is rather weird.

I'd had Ubuntu on both my Emachines (ER1401/2) it ran OK but a bit laggy in places even with the correct Nvidia drivers installed.

Video playback using VLC teared like a b***h so I had to mess with the Xorg config to disable composite just to get smooth playback, I had good playback but Unity looked awful.

Installed Kubuntu a few days ago, both are running extremely well, no random lagging & video playback is smooth as butter both before and after I'd installed the Nvidia driver. Work that one out .

I'd tried Kubuntu before & I never really liked it but now they've made so many improvements I actually quite like it, The Muon Package Manager is excellent too, much better than the god awfully slow Software Center in Ubuntu.

For me Kubuntu is starting to over shadow it's big brother, and I never honestly thought I'd say that!

Performance wise Kubuntu is definitely much faster for me than Ubuntu on the above machines.

Yay choice!

just using 'pear linux' at the moment and it's really quite impressive. it uses docky as the main dock bar for starters.

'launchpad' gives you the main menu - it's similar to gnome 3, but it doesn't scroll, just kind of flicks between screens.

the 'appstore' is just a slightly re-jigged version of most of the software centres i've seen.

all good stuff though. will definitely keep the dvd in case i want to come back to it

Sounds good. I was reading about PearOS somewhere else and it sounds fun. I wonder how long before Apple get onto it.

I myself have done the seemingly impossible and reinstalled Ubuntu 11.10. Was all good on openSUSE until recently, where I was getting the Oh No! Gnome has failed screen thanks to a couple of simple extensions. That coupled with other issues having to mess about manually too much, I decided I prefer the easy life on Ubuntu.

If Ubuntu hadn't gone with Unity I'd probably stick with that flavor, but KDE beats Unity into the ground on looks, feel and performance. Madness for Ubuntu to drop Gnome really.

RE Pear logo ...Should be ok, as i and others have used this one a few times

http://wallbase.cc/wallpaper/15155

Never heard of them bothering with it

Well they haven't dropped Gnome at all, only the new Gnome shell. It still runs on Gnome 3, but they've just made their own shell to replace it in Unity. Six of one and half a dozen of the other between them really. I'm happy I can run both on Ubuntu.

I kept my Kubuntu install too. I suppose I could've just installed the kde-desktop packages, but it's nice having it separate in its own environment.

I need to do a clean install of kubuntu at some point, it's all well and good having the kde-desktop over the top but I think I'm missing a few KDE-only programs. I had problems with Muon so I had to remove it and stick with the Ubuntu software centre.

Whenever I can get round to it, I think I'll sort all that out. Or I might try one of the other distros, see if there's anything I'm missing out on.

Yeah, this is why I kept the installs separate. Installing KDE on top of Ubuntu results in bugs and neither one feeling complete. I would have picked a different KDE distro altogether, just to have two different OS's, but I do feel Kubuntu is the very best KDE distro at the moment.

I think KDE hasn't had a lot of love for some time in distro land, sadly, but I think that's partly because no-one knows whether they're coming or going with it. Lots of changes have upset a few, and I hope it gets a little easier here on in. Bet it doesn't though, what with the Plasma Active thing knocking at the door.

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/12/j...user-machines/

Just been reading about mint devs having a play
http://www.webupd8.org/2011/12/cinna...th-gnome2.html

Yes I saw this the other day. It's interesting, but I still don't get the idea of forking Gnome Shell. Surely their original idea of creating extensions would have been easier?

Then again, I say that but I myself came up against it with the Shell extensions. I only had a few installed when I was using openSUSE, but I logged in one day to find the Oh No! screen as I mentioned above. It recommended switching off every extension as it was one of them that was causing the problem. I didn't understand this, as I'd been running these extensions for a while with no issues, and there had been no new Gnome 3 updates that could have broken compatibility. I was getting a bit bored with it anyway, so I got rid.

So I suppose I've answered my own question. Between Cinnamon and Unity, I suppose I can see exactly why a distro vendor would want more control over their desktop environment. I don't think Gnome 3 and Shell can really offer that at this moment in time. It seems very changeable to me.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTAzMzE

Look out for latest being installed on youre OS

The Pear OS strapline is surely ironic genius


While aping OS X look and playing on Apple's fruit based trademark. May as well launch the jpad, jpod and jphone.