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longtom
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« on: November 27, 2010, 09:31:57 AM » |
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Now what is this longtom up to now again? Ah well – I try to be accommodating by writing in one of the least read sub-forums here. But write I'll write.
This time it is not about PCLinuxOS only but about a flavour of this wonderful distro, Phoenix.
As most of you probably know, Phoenix is the Xfce desktop environment version of our superior distro and as such one of the smaller ones outside the big boys like KDE and Gnome. It is therefore certainly made for my old machine, which is a 2.0 Celeron with 1.2gb ram. Xfce was the very first desktop environment I ever saw when discovering Linux, in those days on a different OS. It wasn't implemented to well, or so I thought at the time, and I moved on to something different.
Since pitching my tent with all of you here in the PCLinuxOS camp I had a look at all available isos'. I naturally started out with the mother de KDE, which worked very well on this old block of mine, albeit, as can be expected, not as snappy as most of us would properly like. I then moved home to my mama, which was Gnome. That worked well enough until for reasons still not established hal decided to leave the building on my work machine. That was a bit of a blow to my bravado and I had to move on.
So with Gnome being on my red list at the time and KDE not very fast on the old setup I had to look out for something else. I digged into Phoenix, LXDE, e17 (beta at the time) and later Openbox as well.
I had my trials and tribulations and some excellent help, as I have to come to expect, from some knowledgeable members of our community, in particular Neal and Sproggy. I heard through the grapevine that Sproggy prayed every night that I will not appear in the IRC channels – but that obviously can't be true …. can it?
The die was cast when Sproggy put a Phoenix-Mini together. That gave me the chance to load afresh, correct al the stupid mistakes I made in earlier installs and have a clean as a whistle, fast, responsive operating system which just works. Hours of fun!! It is so good – it gets boring. Nothing to fix, nothing to mend – you get the drift.
I mean, I am actually envious. I am! Look at this lucky guys using KDE – or e17 for that matter? Always something to fix. Icons appearing and disappearing, stuff vanishes from KDE-Menu, a picture viewer becomes a file manager … they have all the fun! Look in the Phoenix part of the forum and it is all boring.
Now – don't get me wrong, I love trying stuff and testing and mending and fixing, that's probably why I started with Linux in the first place.
But I also love to have a haven of calm, where my stuff just works every time I call upon it, programs open when they need to, being in the menu where I expect them to be, mail downloading as it should, now funny programs and databases starting up when I don't want to … I need that as a base and from there on I can do all the fun stuff.
Ooops – reading this again I hope I didn't step on any toes …
What I am actually saying is:
If you need a solid base to work from I recommend Phoenix-Mini any day. It has all to get you going, like browser, e-mail client, media player etc, all lean and mean and the excellent PCLinuxOS repos have anything else you might want to add. Don't believe me – well – you'll never stop wondering if you don't try it.
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank all involved in this particular desktop environment. Joble is the master of disaster and he deserves all the credit for Phoenix. Sproggy is the grey eminence of Phoenix as a former boss and managed to build himself a statue with Phoenix-Mini.
In the end thanks to the godfather of PCLinuxOS Texstar and all the unnamed helpers in the background who make PCLinuxOS a truly unique distro which deserves all the accolades it has received and many more coming.
The end …. till next time.
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