Featured Comments: Week of 2010 September 26

There were a few posts that garnered quite a few comments, so I'll try to include a few comments from each post.

Review: aptosid 2010-02 "Keres" KDE

I complained about the lack of Synaptic Package Manager in aptosid. Reader T Beermonster had an excellent explanation of this: "Because aptosid is based on debian unstable packages move fast (when debian isn't in a pre-release freeze anyway) upgrading (which should always be a dist-upgrade not an upgrade) or installing anything that touches X should not be done from a running X session because breakages can and will occur."
Commenter HPB had this to say about the distribution and the community: "I think aptosid is one of the best debian/sid based distro's. It's very fast, up-to-date and it has a very friendly community. As it is apparently not for newbies, it certainly is the distro of choice for newcomers to learn what GNU/linux is all about."

The Ideal Linux Distribution, As I See It

I complained that PCLinuxOS 2010 does not include OpenOffice.org out-of-the-box, thus justifying my choice of Linux Mint "Debian" over it. As an anonymous commenter reminded me, "Pclinuxos does have OpenOffice, but not on the live/install CD. You can download it using the Get Open Office script that will get all the right parts and localization, even KDE or Gnome integration."
Another anonymous commenter, in response to another anonymous reader's question about it, responded, "just try htop - the memory footprint is practically as low as a pure debian install's. And that's the smallest you can get with a pure gnome install."
Reader qa1433 remarks, "I have been using Mint Debian since it came out. On my old clunker box it works faster then other Ubuntu based OS. However, all OS's with KDE 4.5 seem to run very slow except Chakra which is Arch based."
Finally, commenter Matias had this to say about newbie-friendly distributions: "So my favs to newbies - Mint and Mandriva. Personally i'm mostly using Fedora. My family prefer Linux Mint."

Review: wattOS R2

I complained about the removal of the power management utilities that gave wattOS its name. Reader iggy_koopa explains that "I wrote the power management gui originally for wattos, but haven't really had time to work on it in the last year or so. It needs to be updated to support ext4 and I need to rework it so it can be packaged as a deb. I'm assuming that's why biff left it out of this release. Hopefully I'll have time soon to get it back up to date."

Well, that's all for last week's comments. Stay tuned for the posts coming up this week!