Teleidoscope

Sun, Oct 15, 2006

Unpopular Technology Choices

Posted at 9:50 pm MDT to Technology

I have a Beta format VCR stored in my basement. I think it technically would still work if I plugged it in, so I can't quite bring myself to throw it out.

I have a couple of old, tiny hard drives installed in one of my computers at home that still have HPFS partitions on them, from the days when I used OS/2 as my operating system on my home machines. (I even ran OS/2 on the first laptop I ever owned.)

These days, I seem to be falling on the wrong side of the KDE/Gnome divide. I like KDE and Gnome just rubs me the wrong way, though I generally load the Gnome modules so programs based on Gnome will run. I like KOffice and a lot of the other KDE-based programs, too.

Until last spring, my Linux machines ran KRUD distributions, which were tweaked Red Hat/Fedora, but KDE support there began to be more and more crippled over time.

SuSE had a good reputation for KDE support, and for AMD64 support, so when I got my current travelling system, I ordered it with SuSe installed instead of Fedora. I'm currently running 10.0 (upgraded to KDE 3.5), and I like its KDE configuration. But I'm concerned for the future, since reviews I've seen seem to indicate that Novell may be backing away from KDE support. And the SuSE admin tools, which are really slick in 10.0 seem to have to have gone to hell in a handbasket in Novell's newer Enterprise products, which are 10.1 based.

And whoever decided on the AV support configuration for SuSE just needs to be slapped. I'm running the for-cash version -- got a printed manual and a DVD with a lizard on it and everything -- and trying to do basic stuff like play sound files or write stuff (even data files) to CDs and DVD has had so many gotchas it makes me nostalgic for Fedora, where that stuff mostly just worked.

I'm trying to load Kubuntu into one of my VMWare clients, to get some experience with it just in case I decide Novell won't provide the combination of current software versions, and KDE, and viable backups to 4.7 Gig DVDs that I want. But I'm pretty sure some of the software I need to install for work doesn't support Debian/Ubuntu -- it's more commercial oriented.

At least on this laptop, Windows is isolated in a VMWare jail, and can be run at the same time as Linux. The old laptop was configured dual-boot. I'm really NOT looking forward to Vista/Longhorn.

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