

Linux desktop user experience - gits1225
http://www.skillcraft.org/2012/09/linux-desktop-user-experience.html

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lstrope
While I agree with you that KDE is awesome, I feel as though you may be
passing up a really great distro that IMO meets all your needs. OpenSuse is
developed solely on KDE's latests and greatest. They extensively test on KDE
making it the most stable KDE experience possible. I highly recommend you give
them a shot. I feel that OpenSuse gets all the things right that Canonical
gets wrong.

Ultimately your point about fonts in the linux world is true, however there is
a reason for that. The reason is that most fonts are not free.

~~~
lstrope
comming back to comment again and I'd have to say that I think instructing
someone completely new to linux to use a more "stable" linux like CentOS or
Debian can be just as damanging when they cannot figure out how to get java
installed correctly or they need to connect a printer. I think the gnome shell
is responsible for those things, however those things work less in CentOS and
Debian than they do at distro's aimed at the desktop. You are recommending
stable server distro's for desktop deployment... there is no crime there but I
do question your logic (because I'm curious) about how CentOS would be better
than Ubuntu for your typical desktop user.

I should note that I use Ubuntu 12.04 w/ Unity as my developer workstation at
work but I use Arch linux on my home machines. Would I ever recommend Arch
over Ubuntu? Only if you are a developer. And only maybe then.

I think Ubuntu is far from perfect, but it is rock solid stable by end users
definitions.

~~~
gits1225
The reason I suggest CentOS (or Debian) is because it met the needs of a large
majority of people I dealt with. Also remember that a lot of these people work
in offices and having printers (or java) set-up correctly is integral to their
work, which I haven't had any problems setting up thus far (or directing
people "How to" on the phone) in CentOS. Every single one of 'em has then
installed the same distribution they use at work at home as well.

One of the reasons why this all works really well is that, these distributions
are installed on hardware which is relatively old (2-3 years), which is the
case for the majority. Distributions need to realise that when an operating
system is installed, it is supposed to run without issues for a very very long
time.

P.S: I did test openSUSE (12.1), but, it had its own share of issues that I
don't recommend it to newbies.

~~~
lstrope
In the end which font(s) have you found that render well or that you
recommend? Any monospace in particular?

Edit: P.S. I feel that I was too harsh in discounting CentOS as a "difficult"
server distro. It is, for the reasons in your reply, probably one of the
better choices. I can't knock that and it is a good enterprise recommendation
- for older hardware in particular.

~~~
gits1225
Any font that doesn't ship with the default install needs some amount of
tweaking to "get right". That said, like mentioned before, fonts in the Ubuntu
family works well in all areas. Personally, I have been alternating between
Ubuntu mono (bold) and terminus for a while now on the terminal and Ubuntu
Regular as the system font.

