I read a lot of blogs. I find it both recreational and educational. I read many different types of blogs, although I must admit much of my blog-reading is centered around technology of some sort. Often, the content I’m presented is part of an aggregate of many blogs, so often I find myself reading blogs I don’t necessarily subscribe to directly.

Today I came across an article and was reading it, and noticed in the comments the author (of the blog, not the comment) had not only moderated a comment, but left a note – something to the effect of “Nice Try” and then pointed to his “Comment Policy” which I’ve included below:

* I moderate everything.
* Any attempts to drop flamebait, attacks or insults will be removed.
* Any pointless “good job” comments will be removed.
* Constructive comments that improve the discussion will be allowed and responded to.

Not too long after that I checked back on that thread of comments, and I noticed that after the discussion was getting further away from the (blog) author’s point of view that comments were suddenly closed altogether. This got me to thinking. If you are going to have a blog, why would you want to censor your readers comments? Why would you *only* want to have comments seen that agree with you? I love discussion, and I (sometimes) thrive on disagreement – that’s how minds are changed, and often times I’ve learned my biggest lessons in life through respectful disagreement!

That whole episode got me to thinking about my own site. I do, sadly, have comment moderation activated here on my site. It’s not because I only want to approve content that I agree with, but because I don’t want my readers to be subjected to porn links, spam and possibly spyware and adware (should they be on a Windows machine ). I do approve every legit comment that comes through regardless of whether I agree with the comment or not. I have had an exception where something actually got caught as “Spam” when it shouldn’t have been, but that is rare, because there are often times it doesn’t catch stuff that is obvious.

So please, should you comment on an article on my site, and not see it show up within a reasonable amount of time, please contact me at ask.jaysonr (at) gmail.com so that I can check on the status of your comment for you. I normally try get to them in a timely manner as I do want to hear (and allow others to hear/read) what you have to say, and I always respect a differing opinion.

I’ve pretty much taken a break from Linux for quite a few months now. I did dabble around in Fedora a bit around April, but outside of that I was either playing w/ the iMac I owned briefly or one of the pre-release Windows 7 builds. When  I decided to sell the aforementioned iMac, I decided to purchase a notebook, and I picked a Lenovo Y530 which also turned out to be quite an awesomely compatible Linux machine when tested w/ a Live USB, so I decided to make it my “Linux Box”. But what distro to run? I liked Fedora when I tested out the pre-release builds, but did I like it well enough to live w/ it as a full-time OS? I used to be a die-hard KDE user, but I switched to GNOME around the time of the KDE 4 release – was KDE 4 ready to win be back? These were questions I had to answer. Anyway, here are a few brief “non-review” reviews of a handful of distro’s on my specific machine.

KDE vs. GNOME:

Sorry – I didn’t get around to really testing KDE 4 this time around like I wanted. I did create a Fedora 11 KDE Live USB and I have played around on it a little, as well as a KDE 4.3 Live CD from openSUSE. I think KDE 4 *is* getting “better”, but I think I’m pretty much set in concrete as a GNOME user from now on.

Distros:

Fedora 11:

Fedora actually wound up being the “winner”, and I’m going to do a separate post on Fedora 11, and how I have it set up, but here are a few of the reasons I ended up picking Fedora:

* All of my hardware works
* Large, friendly community
* Rooted in Enterprise Linux (anything I learn in Fedora can be applied to RHEL/CentOS/SL)
* It’s not Debian or Ubuntu (Means nothing other than I can learn a “different” way of doing things)

That’s all I’m gonna hit on for Fedora – I’ll save the rest for the dedicated Fedora 11 post.

PC-BSD:
Wanted to try – never could get the ISO to download – gave up. PC-BSD guys – you should work on getting more mirrors and/or Torrent seeds out there!

Debian Testing/Sid:
Never could get Testing or Sid to install using the businesscard.iso for the testing distro, which is usually how I set these up. Regardless of whatever mirror I would choose, or regardless of if I chose Testing or Unstable, the install would fail at some point during the “Base Install” stage. I’m assuming it’s just where the cycle is at in dev. at the moment. I tried to install Lenny & upgrade, but like Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) I think Lenny is just too old for my hardware as I couldn’t get X to work.

OpenSolaris 2009.06:
This is an interesting OS. I’ll be honest, I never intended on staying with this when I installed it, and I knew I was just playing around from the beginning, but honestly, I *think* I *might* could live with OpenSolaris long term IF I wanted to devote the time to learn a new Operating System, because this isn’t Linux by a long shot Everything did seem to work ok out of the box, and I even got VirtualBox set up and working. Some things I noticed – ZFS LOVES it some RAM – used up almost my entire 4GB of RAM almost instantly, but I guess that’s a good thing since unused RAM is wasted RAM, however the machine got slower, not faster, and seemed to be swapping. Also this has to be the S-L-O-W-E-S-T booting Operating system I’ve ever used!

OpenSUSE 11.1:
I like openSUSE – I like their GNOME implementation, if for no other reason than it’s “different”. They do a great job with making KDE 4 almost usable, and the OS is always stable. However, as much as I “should” like openSUSE, I’ve never been able to get it running stable for more than a couple of days on any machine I’ve ever tried to run it on. I don’t know where the problem lies, but I simply don’t get along with it somehow. I think I end up trying to over-tweak it since it has a butt-load of services and stuff turned on by default, and it is surely the most bloated of the mainstream distro’s. In short, I like it, they have a great community, and it may be a great distro for you – it’s just not for me. Do be sure and check out Suse Studio though – it’s the coolest thing since sliced bread and Velveeta cheese

Ubuntu 9.04:
Man…I don’t even know where to start with this one. It was the last distro I tested, mainly becuase I had the preconcieved notion of it working the “best” and had planned to stay with. I used Ubuntu full time from 5.10 until 7.04 – as of 7.10, things started going downhill for me, and I wonder just what is going on. The community is beyond huge, the distro has come closer to becoming a Mainstream OS than any other Linux distro has (Dell, etc.) yet it seems to get WORSE with every release. Even the “LTS” 8.04 was an utter disaster for many people. Is it a situation where there are simply too many cooks in the kitchen? Is the distro just too big with too many packages and too many volunteers? Is Ubuntu just riding a wave of success and as a whole lost some of it’s drive to take things to the “next level”? I mean they have been talking about a new theme for over a year – since 8.04 – it STILL hasn’t happened – they can’t even decide on a new color scheme – that, to me, speaks volumes on the state of the development process at Ubuntu.

9.04 was very broken for me with my Intel graphics. I’m not getting into that, as it’s very well documented in other places on the web, but there was also something going on w/ brightness and power management. My screen would just randomly get brighter and then dimmer with no warning, and never would go full brightness. I then tried upgrading to the development branch of 9.10 as I heard that fixed many of the Intel issues, and I *thought* I had a stable distro/install and was pretty happy until for no apparent reason my machine just randomly started hard locking. I lived with it a few times, but after that, it was time to move on – and back to the first distro I tried, Fedora 11, which has been awesome. This whole thing disappointed me, as I was pumped up having an “all Intel” machine as I’d always heard that was the sure-fire way to ensure full Linux compatibility. The fact that Ubuntu would release, knowing all too well those Intel regressions were there, JUST to stay on time with their precious little 6mo release cycle is disheartening, and I think I’ll stick with Fedora from now on, as they are always more cutting edge, better with upstream and as leading edge as they are, they aren’t afraid to push a release back if something is broken!

So, there you have it – my brief run through some distro’s in the Summer of ‘09!