On 03/24/2012 06:53 PM, Pete wrote:
the VM approach solves the hardware problem. So now I'm left with the question of which Linux distro to go for.... Pete
Since you can test them so easily, I would suggest firstly not to be too anxious about making the "best" decision. You don't have to decide Before you start; you can decide as you go. Again, you can download either fully set up virtual machine disks or run almost any distro from a liveCD, which is also a fabulously easy way to trial a distro. I run openSUSE, currently and ran Mint 9 and 10 before that. For what you expect to be casual use, I would think that the Desktop Environment (the Unity, KDE, Gnome, Enlightment, XFCE, LXDE things that people talk about - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_environment) will be the most important consideration. You will need to find the one that is the most intuitive to you. After that, the software management aspect may be the second most important. This was much simpler in Mint than it is in openSUSE.
I would recommend you try a Mint version first. I have no experience with Gnome 3, but Mint 9 is the long term support version of that distro and uses gnome 2. Mint 10 was very pleasant to use but it will lose support next month. I had bad experience with KDE under Mint and Kubuntu has a very poor reputation, so it's hard to recommend KDE in those distros. Do a little research about desktop variants of whatever disto you are gravitating to and (taking everything with heaping spoonfuls of salt) you should find some helpful info.
Inside VirtualBox, you will probably find your desktop doesn't run with effects (Compiz, KWin) so you save some memory. This somewhat equalizes the playing field between the "heavy feature-full" (aka bloated) Desktop Environments and the "light nimble" (aka primitive) ones. That *should* mean you won't be making as many performance/feature sacrifices as you look for what best suits your taste.
Good luck! Warren _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
