Saturday, April 24, 2010

PCLinuxOS, I have my eye on you

Very, very interesting. I must say, as a KDE user, after experiencing OpenSuse, I will probably never use Kubuntu until I hear consistent reports that it provides a better experience than OpenSuse. I must say though, the mention of a performance boost in PCLinuxOS and the fact that the author says he has tried OpenSuse (though he does not say what version) has me quite interested. I always suspected that KDE was being held back by other parts of the system and this review confirms my suspicions.

I was planning on trying Win7 for the games, but I think instead I will give this one a shot on a separate partition. Compare it to OpenSuse 11.2, which I have absolutely no complaints about at the moment, except that the UI does get a little jerky when you're moving multiple GBs from various sources on an NTFS partition onto an EXT4 one. Edge case though that I'm willing to live with. However, if PCLinuxOS can nail that part, it will go a long way to convincing me to switch. If it can give me easy to use Samba administration in addition, I will switch. OpenSuse is great, but if I want a no frills setup, the simplest way is still to write a bare bones config file. Finally, if it can install the drivers for my all-in-one Brother DCP-115C (because there are no linux drivers for it - you need to use the DCP-220C drivers instead), label me an evangelist.

It is interesting how things come full circle, even in technology: I started off on Mandrake, moved to RedHat, then to SuseLinux, on to Linux from scratch, then to Debian, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Linux Mint and finally OpenSuse. Having used and lived with each distro, I find myself heading back to a derivative of what I started off with :)

Friday, February 12, 2010

A little tip about Firefox

I use Firefox a lot. I use it because I like the way it works. I also use it because I like the way things I don't know about yet work.

Fan boy you say? Think about it, I say. Here's an example:

I know that pressing the Control key (I'm on a PC) and clicking a link will open that link in a new tab without switching to the new tab. I use it all the time. What I just found out was that holding Control down and clicking the Back or Forward buttons does the same. I like that. Imagine one of those crazy web sites where you have to fill in a form, submit it and then get some results. You like the results. You press the back button to get back to the original page because you want the link to email out to those you want to share it with. When you press Forward again, depending on the site, there is a good chance you may never get back to the results again. Ctrl+Back lets me work in a new tab without affecting the results I already have. Simple. Effective.

And that's my tip of the day to share with you.