[sclug] Alternative to Ubuntu

[Laurie Clark-Michalek]

Hi,

I'm an ex-ubuntuist now using Arch Linux. Personally, if you are
having problems with ubuntu (which I completely appreciate) then I
wouldn't suggest going to Arch now. I suggest you regress to 7.10. If
you had no problems with it, then there isn't any need to upgrade.
Unless you are desperate for a certain package, it should be perfectly
fine and secure. However, before you do that, conciser trying a LTS
release, namely 8.04. This will be supported for a long time, and in
my experience, has fewer problems that jaunty.

Hope to see you on arch one day,

Laurie

2009/10/4 Alan Pope <alan at popey.com>:
> 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 The repositories for no-longer-supported releases aren't withdrawn,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.
>