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Fuduntu: Back to Fundamentals, Gets it Right
- GhotiFish 14y agowhy not replace the window manager? Talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water.
- willismichael 14y agoWell, the first three letters are FUD.
- jimparkins 14y agoSounded great until I read that Fuduntu does not come with Apt or Deb and uses Yum/Rpm instead... "Apt is not installed with Fuduntu. Yum (Yellowdog Package Manager) is the replacement. For more help on yum, "man yum" from a terminal, or google "yum howto"." "The "debi" package installer is not included. Instead, the "rpm" command can be used to install .rpm packages. For more help on rpm, "man rpm" from a terminal, or search the internet for "rpm install howto"."
- INTPenis 14y agoSpeaking as a former Debian fanboy, current avid Debian/Ubuntu user, Yum isn't too bad. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it had rollbacks. And with 3rd party repos, you can get just as current, if not more current than Debian Sta(b)le, software.
- LukeShu 14y agoI'm a fan of pacman, but find apt/dpkg acceptable (barely). My biggest two beefs with yum/rpm are that it does not track "explicitly installed" vs "installed as a dependency" (dpkg does, but it's fuzzy), and that when processing dependencies, it does a brute-force recursive crawl instead of building a tree.
- elehack 14y agoModern Yum does track explicit vs. dependency installs, though this is not very visible in the UI. There are ways to query the Yum database for it, though. Yum also has an option (disabled by default) to remove unneeded auto-installed dependencies when removing packages (set clean_requirements_on_remove=yes in /etc/yum.conf)[1]. This option does not remove manually-installed packages (though the docs are not clear on this point, unfortunately). 1. http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/56056 http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/56056
- LukeShu 14y agoThat's good news! My latest experience was with CentOS and Fedora installs at my last job, but most of the installs there were a bit older.
- INTPenis 14y agoPacman is the Arch Linux standard right? I was fond of Arch when I first heard of it, because back then I was still a BSD fanboy. But as time has progressed I find the use of rc a bit stale and I actually like the initiative of LSB.
- alex-g 14y agoArch has moved on to systemd these days, if that changes anything for you.
- trumbitta2 14y agoI always had nightmarish experiences with rpm... Last time I checked, circa 2006, the db got corrupted three times in 1.5 years and I had to dance the hell-dance in order to get a working system back... [EDIT] And that's primarily why I love apt / dpkg
- sciurus 14y agoDistrowatch reviewed it a while back at http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20130121#feature http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20130121#feature
- iNate2000 14y agoThat didn't sound "fundamental" to me. The author likes the distro, and it sounds good to me too. But I missed how any of his favorite features were fundamental to the Linux desktop.
- tfinch 14y agoAbsolutely my feeling too. The review fairly swiftly turns into a list of what programs are installed. Let's face it, all of these are available in the repos of pretty much all distros. The rest of the features seem to be visual tuning and customisation. I haven't tried Fuduntu, but may be tempted at some point, and I can appreciate the amount of work that has gone into it, but this review doesn't really sell it for me.
- claudius 14y agoI never understand why people spend ages trying out fifty different distros if they could get just what they want if they spent half that time actually installing/adapting one distribution with a reasonably broad package base. Or, put differently: Given the relatively high dimension of preference space (desktop environment, window manager, file manager, icon set, web browser, editor…), it appears strange to me to assume that more than just a few users will be satisfied with the default DE, WM, file manager etc. installed by a distro. Just five different DEs, five different WMs and five different file browsers already give 125 possible choices. How, then, is it sensible to judge a distribution by its default programmes, especially since these can often be easily swapped out against others. Surely, the main points in considering which distribution to choose should be the low-level ingredients (package manager, for example) and update policies rather than the default icon theme.
- sn0v 14y agoWhile that ought to be the case, a lot of novice-intermediate level users often fail to take these points into consideration simply because they are unaware of the fact that the default DE+WM etc can be easily swapped out. Often, many people tend to give more weightage to higher visibility points like the DE+WM etc, rather than package manager and release schedules.
- ShawnBird 14y agoI ran Ubuntu with cinnamon for a little over a year but finally moved over to Mint. There is just a lot more support and stability for using the default DE+WM and a lot of programs can have problems outside of the expected.
- mirkules 14y ago"I never understand why people spend ages trying out fifty different distros if they could get just what they want if they spent half that time actually installing/adapting one distribution with a reasonably broad package base." Because if you have to do it more than once, or, say onto 100 desktops in a work environment, the time spent searching for a distro will pay off. Besides that, some people want stuff to work the first time - and every subsequent time - without having to worry "oh I need to install this on another computer, but I can't remember all the steps I took" in order to get to real actual work.
- EugeneOZ 14y agoEveryone has own opinion what is "right".
- Zirro 14y agoMy experience with the designs used by Linux desktop environments is limited, but haven't the dock and some of it's (folder-)icons shown in the article[0] borrowed a little too much from OS X? I would much rather see them go about improving the GUI in their own way rather than trying to imitate another OS. [0]: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iQDB5aZg__U/UVHDwY33wAI/AAAAAAAAHbc/kk8H2Z7ZhzE/s1600/Workspace+1_008.png http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iQDB5aZg__U/UVHDwY33wAI/AAAAAAAAHb...
- bluedino 14y agoCairo is a project to make a OS X-like dock. It's not enabled in any of the main distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu...), but you can add it if you'd like.
- Zirro 14y agoI see. If that's the case, it seems they are doing a good job ;-)
- gcb0 14y agoNot at all! Cairo is a vector graphic renderer for X (and others, but i think only for X now) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(graphics) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(graphics)
- bluedino 14y agoI'm sorry, the full name is 'Cairo-Dock' (http://www.glx-dock.org/ http://www.glx-dock.org/)
- claudius 14y agoIf people like that particular feature of the other OS, why not imitate it? There were also themes for Metacity (Gnome 2.x window manager) looking like Windows XP floating around – if people like that sort of thing… You still get plenty of diversity and ‘improving’ even though some elements are borrowed sometimes.
- christopheraden 14y agoThe name choice seems bizarre to me. It's like a portmanteau of Fedora and Ubuntu, yet has very few of the features of Ubuntu. Judging by the default GUI, Facintosh seems more appropriate.
- BHSPitMonkey 14y agoUnder-the-hood decisions aside, this distro seems to fairly closely match the philosophy of Elementary OS [1] (which, admittedly, seems to be "follow OSX"). One main difference is that, whereas Fuduntu uses rpm/yum, Elementary OS is an Ubuntu fork and uses its repositories (dpkg/apt). [1] http://elementaryos.org/ http://elementaryos.org/
- Samuel_Michon 14y agoWow, that's by far the best looking Linux distro I've seen. Judging from the screenshots, Fuduntu, like most distros, is pretty fugly. ElementaryOS actually looks like it has someone making UX choices and creating a consistent design language. The system font isn't great and type could really use some font smoothing, but that's the case with all Linux distros I know of. They're even working on a curated App Store: http://elementaryos.org/journal/introducing-appcenter http://elementaryos.org/journal/introducing-appcenter I think this is exactly what Linux needs to become a platform consumers like to use. Once it's out of beta, I'm definitely going to install ElementaryOS. Screenshots: http://elementaryos.org/journal/when-its-ready http://elementaryos.org/journal/when-its-ready
- xiaomai 14y agoI don't care for the desktop shell they're making, but the applications I have tried are really high-quality. The screen-capture program is really great and feature-full.
- joe_the_user 14y agoLooks like a gnome-shell clone with burnished aluminum frames. It may be pretty in the abstract but it's apparent lack of usability makes it ugly to my eyes.
- BHSPitMonkey 14y agoAs others have noted, a lot of their efforts have been going into developing new (or new forks of existing) tools and applications, with much attention to implementing a simple "do one thing and do it right" solution for each item, and making all of them cohesive. You can still quite easily replace their file browser, their dock, their terminal, etc. with ones you prefer quite easily (this is becoming difficult within Unity), but I've found myself not wanting to. The OS is very cohesive and kind of a joy to use, I've found.
- notmarkus 14y agoOff topic, but Linux Advocates, your "Cloud Categories" widget is morbidly obese. It's a mass of swirling red letters that looks like it's straight out of a 4chan Zalgo-Text thread. It's using more memory than all my other Chrome tabs combined.
- kriro 14y agoI have an Aspire One Netbook (Edit: different model, mine is a 722 with 4GB Ram, 1.333 dual core processor, 320GB HDD) like the OP and run Xubuntu on it which works perfectly fine (in case someone is looking for alternatives to Fubuntu). Might give Fubuntu a try some day for kicks, wasn't aware it existed. I'm perfectly happy with Xubuntu though, I also run it on my beefy desktop.
- caycep 14y agoThis distro needs a better name. The current one is kind of unfortunate...
- renke1 14y agoI am pretty happy using Debian testing with xfce4. It also gives you a minimalistic and traditional desktop. It's perfect for me because I am actually too lazy to configure some fancy window manager and other stuff. Also, everything just works out of the box.