My Distro Story

I’m a man who expects perfection :mrgreen: and I just felt like giving a good solid rant today, so here it goes. In my quest for the perfect distro I have roamed across the vast mine of distros that are available. And everytime I get simply astounded by the sheer variety and choice I have in choosing what distro I need.

In the beginning it was Debian. I didn’t even know what a partition meant back then ;). But gradually I both learnt loads of stuff and wasted loads of time getting to know Linux. I don’t know whether it was the romantic love story behind debian or sheer inertia but I have stuck with Debian distros for a while. After flirting with Mint, Ubuntu I landed with Tinyme ( I was the only one who asked for SATA support and they predictably cods walloped :eek: Nearly wiped out now, But was a beautiful distro ). After getting no support I switched to Zenwalk, an rpm-distro. Again it was light, efficient and good, but somehow I never got that feeling of home with it.

I went back to Ubuntu x64 edition. Again, it was too much like windows for me. I mean, if everything was so simple to the point that if it’s in the forums you could do it, else you couldn’t - It’s almost windows right. But, Ubuntu was and still is a great distro and will probably be the one that could displace Windows. And if they do get Shuttleworth’s recent beautifying part correct Ubuntu will be going places.

And then came Arch with KISS - Keep it simple Stupid ! I had to learn loads, waste even more time, But I was learning and getting to know every part of my lap. I learnt that the volume key was actually Capacitive, the Fan non-existent :( and so on . I dabbled with Kde, Enlightenment and nearly every window manager out there. In fact, that would be the one field where I could claim some expertise. And then predictably my archbox collapsed one fine day due to grub-gfx upgrade. Knowing I could not build an entire system once again ,I switched.

I found Crunchbang. It was done with my taste. The months with arch had given me a taste for light, minimal software. Crunchbang ran Openbox. So, I got it up and running and then an update broke it. I switched to Sidux. A rolling distro . I had lots of fun with it, but it was too boring for me. And something was calling me.

So once again I went back to Arch - the only distro I have installed twice. And now after nearly a month of tweaking and setting up things I proudly present to you my arch-box.

Thought, I could give you a quick glimpse of what I’m running

• Openbox - window manager with xcompmgr for compositing
• Cairo-dock - the only piece of eye-candy
• Conky for the top bar
• Trayer for the tray at top
• Chromium - the best browser ( err… except for the download manager :P )
• Feh for images - seriously the fastest image viewer
• netcfg for wifi ( No, wicd is too buggy for me )
• sakura for terminal
• Thunar file manager
• The ubiquitous VLC
• Automount by autofs
• Vim and jEdit for the very little code I produce

And to think that several years ago, when I acquired my first computer and began to learn more and more about them, I did not even dream that I would be using one as much as I do today. It was all Heretic and Wolfenstein then, hah ! Life is indeed beautiful ! :P

Happy Hols everybody :)

Ipse Dixit
*I have spoken*