[Discuss] The distro/desktop tower of Babel

[Bernie C. Till]

Thanks for the detailed reply, Alan!

I will likely go with Debian / KDE.  Seems I can't go too far wrong with
that choice; after all, the "out-of-the-box" distro is only a place for me
to toddle around until I learn to walk.

And by the way, you guys ARE my primary Linux contacts!

-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-bounces at vlug.org [mailto:discuss-bounces at vlug.org]On
Behalf Of Alan W. Irwin
Sent: January 25, 2014 10:12 PM
To: discuss at vlug.org
Subject: Re: [Discuss] The distro/desktop tower of Babel


On 2014-01-25 20:14-0800 Bernie C. Till wrote:

> Hi All --
>
> Holy crap.......
>
> Gnome, KDE, Unity, LXDE, Xfce, text shells ad nauseam, ...
>
> How many C/C++ compilers are there?
>
> How many development environments?
>
> Debuggers? Databases?  Web servers?  Browsers?
>
> It seems I could spend the rest of my life just listing the options, let
> alone choosing one!

Exactly.  One of the culture shocks of entering the Linux world is there
is an enormous amount of choice.  That said, the various choices are
normally designed to coexist peacefully.

>
> It looks like some software I need is layered on Qt, and other software I
> need is layered on GTK+, and who knows what hidden dependencies there are,
> which I haven't even heard of yet.

Linux handles dependencies well.  So if you are running a KDE desktop you
can install and run any GNOME (GTK+-dependent) application and vice
versa without having to reboot.

> And then we have all the distros.  Even if I standardize on Debian, there
> are at least four different versions -- one for each major desktop.  How
do
> I choose one?

Not really.  With Debian (and most other distros) you can choose any
desktop you like, and that does not rule out running applications (see
above) that were primarily designed for a different desktop.  Each
different kind of desktop has their strong advocates, but perhaps a
good rule of thumb is to choose your first desktop based on what your
primary Linux contacts are using so that if you run into trouble with
it, you can get quick help.

> Or do I have to have them all, and boot into one or the other
> depending on which application I want to use at the moment?

You could install several desktops and try them out, but you
normally do not need a full reboot to switch from one to another.

> For instance, when switching from a Qt-based application to one based on
> GTK+, do I have to reboot, or otherwise change desktops on the fly?

Same question, same answer... No.

>
> Is it advisable, of even possible, to install more than one desktop?
>

In my case no, because I know what I like, but I would think in your
case you might want to give several desktops a _quick_ try until you find
one you really like.

> If I install Gnome and KDE, how would I stop KParts and CORBA from
stepping
> all over each other?

You don't have to worry about that.  They get along peacefully.

>
> How do I maximize capability and flexibility without spending the rest of
my
> life climbing different flavours of the same learning curve over and over
> again, learning to do the same thing in one object model after another?

That's a good question.  Sometimes the best strategy for dealing with
so much Linux choice is to make almost arbitrary choices between
several good contenders. For example, you already should know from
advocates here that GNOME, KDE, and other desktops work well and are
being actively developed (two important criteria).  So look up each
one up on wikipedia and their websites, and pick one that appeals to
you based on those writeups. Also, you might want to try several
choices of desktop for a few hours just to get the feel of them. But
once you have made your initial choice, I would stick with it a long
time to get the most out of it rather than flitting from desktop to
desktop without settling on one.

I have used that strategy myself in picking software components so as
a result I have stuck with pine (now alpine) mailer software, jed and
now emacs text editor, and the KDE desktop for decades.  As a result I
am quite effective at using those sofware tools because they are
familiar to me, and I doubt I would ever change to the alternative
tools that are available (although I came close when KDE developers
badly handled the transition from KDE3 to KDE4). That said, I am
pretty sure if I had made other Linux choices of mailer, editor, and
desktop, I would have been effective with them as well.

Of course, no strategy is perfect; sometimes you make a really bad
initial choice, and then the "stick-with-it" strategy backfires
because you wait to long to move on. For example, that happened with
me when I made a bad initial choice of shell (tcsh), and I stuck with
that loser much too long rather than giving in and acknowledging it
was a rotten choice (buggy and not developed by nearly as active a
team as the bash developers). However, I eventually did make the move
to the bash shell, and I am so happy with that choice that I doubt I
will ever need or want to move to another shell for my command-line
work.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
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