[sclug] Alternative to Ubuntu

[Alan Pope]

Hi Neil,

2009/10/4 Neil Haughton <haughtonomous at googlemail.com>:
> I was wondering if anyone has a personal recommendation for an alternative
> to Ubuntu for a desktop OS. I'm currently using Jaunty (9.04) and it is
> beset with niggling problems, viz
>

A lot of ex-Ubuntu-users seem to like Arch Linux. I'm not convinced myself :)

I'll happily help you get these issues reported as bugs, or help you
find them if you can give us some more detail.

Filing bugs is super easy really... here's a good page about it..

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs

> My CD writer isn't recognised.

Which make/model of drive is it?

> The printer doesn't start until I reboot, and then after clearing the print
> queue it stops again. Result = I have to reboot every time I want to print
> something (all these reboots - is Ubuntu trying to be Windows, or what? :-)
> )
> 5 times out of 10 it won't do a clean shutdown.
>

The guy who looks after CUPS (the printing system) for Ubuntu is
really attentive. I've had bugs fixed very quickly by him.

> These are all regression from 7.10 Gutsy, which didn't have these problems
> and ran quite nicely until they withdrew the repositories in April and I
> couldn't get any more packages.
>

The repositories for no-longer-supported releases aren't withdrawn,
they're moved:-

http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/

> Can anyone show me the way forward?
>

What happens when you hit a bug in F11 / Arch / Slack / whatever
distro you choose next? Switch again? Surely that's going to become
very boring very quickly?

Cheers,
Al.