Featured Comments: Week of 2010 September 26

There were a few posts that garnered quite a few comments, so I'll try to include a few comments from each post.

Review: aptosid 2010-02 "Keres" KDE

I complained about the lack of Synaptic Package Manager in aptosid. Reader T Beermonster had an excellent explanation of this: "Because aptosid is based on debian unstable packages move fast (when debian isn't in a pre-release freeze anyway) upgrading (which should always be a dist-upgrade not an upgrade) or installing anything that touches X should not be done from a running X session because breakages can and will occur."
Commenter HPB had this to say about the distribution and the community: "I think aptosid is one of the best debian/sid based distro's. It's very fast, up-to-date and it has a very friendly community. As it is apparently not for newbies, it certainly is the distro of choice for newcomers to learn what GNU/linux is all about."

The Ideal Linux Distribution, As I See It

I complained that PCLinuxOS 2010 does not include OpenOffice.org out-of-the-box, thus justifying my choice of Linux Mint "Debian" over it. As an anonymous commenter reminded me, "Pclinuxos does have OpenOffice, but not on the live/install CD. You can download it using the Get Open Office script that will get all the right parts and localization, even KDE or Gnome integration."
Another anonymous commenter, in response to another anonymous reader's question about it, responded, "just try htop - the memory footprint is practically as low as a pure debian install's. And that's the smallest you can get with a pure gnome install."
Reader qa1433 remarks, "I have been using Mint Debian since it came out. On my old clunker box it works faster then other Ubuntu based OS. However, all OS's with KDE 4.5 seem to run very slow except Chakra which is Arch based."
Finally, commenter Matias had this to say about newbie-friendly distributions: "So my favs to newbies - Mint and Mandriva. Personally i'm mostly using Fedora. My family prefer Linux Mint."

Review: wattOS R2

I complained about the removal of the power management utilities that gave wattOS its name. Reader iggy_koopa explains that "I wrote the power management gui originally for wattos, but haven't really had time to work on it in the last year or so. It needs to be updated to support ext4 and I need to rework it so it can be packaged as a deb. I'm assuming that's why biff left it out of this release. Hopefully I'll have time soon to get it back up to date."

Well, that's all for last week's comments. Stay tuned for the posts coming up this week!

Review: wattOS R2

Main Screen and Main Menu

The only review of a lightweight Ubuntu-based distribution I've done before this is of #! 9.04.01. I was looking around to see if there are any others, and I came across wattOS.
wattOS R2 is based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" and uses LXDE. From other reviews of this distribution that I have read, the thing that sets it apart is its comprehensive set of power management tools (hence the name).
The other reason I wanted to test this is because I wanted to try to make a "light" version of my Fresh OS respin. Yeah, I know this is based on Ubuntu while the regular version is based on Debian, but I've heard murmurs in the wattOS forums of the next wattOS version being based on Debian anyway. Anyway, this means that I will also be testing the installation procedure as well as a few other things post-installation.
I tested this in VirtualBox with 256 MB of RAM, as I wanted to test the performance of this lightweight distribution under a lower resource environment. Follow the jump to see how all of this goes.

Whose LXDE Is It Anyway?

I'm not here to answer the question of what LXDE is. Wikipedia has a very well-written article explaining what LXDE is. I'm also not here to hate on LXDE's functions and capabilities; it is a very nice and capable DE that's great for low-resource environments and environments where speed (and not overwhelming aesthetics) is paramount. What's been bugging me for a long time is that I've felt that LXDE doesn't really have its own identity.
Take WattOS. Its website says that it's a desktop made of Openbox and LXDE. Yet, Wikipedia says that Openbox is but a component (the window manager, in this case) of LXDE, and here the WattOS website elevates Openbox's status from a subset of LXDE to the equal of LXDE. What is LXDE now? Is it just the collection of LX-tools?
Now consider CrunchBang ("#!"). I've reviewed this distribution twice: once in its 9.04.01 incarnation and again in its version 10 (alpha 2). The website itself says that #! uses Openbox as the base desktop, but I've seen in a couple of forum posts that #! could qualify as an LXDE distribution. Furthermore, releases of #! 8.10.02 and prior used LXPanel (an LXDE panel tool) and Thunar (the Xfce file manager), while releases of #! 9.04 and after have used tint2 (a not-LXDE panel) and PCManFM (the LXDE default file manager). Why again is #! being called an LXDE distribution now?
So what exactly am I getting at here? I feel like the modularity of the LX-tools works against LXDE having a unified identity. When I think of GNOME, I have an intuitive sense of what's included — a GDM integrated with the GNOME theme, simpler GTK+ themes for the desktop and windows, Nautilus being the file manager and controlling the desktop, and Metacity or Compiz controlling the windows. Similarly, with KDE, I can picture a standard desktop made of the nice-looking Plasma desktop integrated tightly with Nepomuk, Akonadi, and Strigi, windows managed by KWin, logins managed by KDM, and files managed by Dolphin. (UPDATE: As an anonymous reader points out, Nepomuk, Akonadi, and Strigi aren't so tightly integrated with KDE that they cannot be run outside of KDE. I stand corrected, but I still say that the way KDE integrates them gives KDE an identity that LXDE does not have.) But what is LXDE then? Sure, it uses Openbox as the window manager, but it faces the same problem Acura had with the Legend — the latter, a subset of the former, was overtaking the former in terms of brand name recognition. (Acura therefore renamed the Legend to the RL to ensure that Acura would be the dominant brand name; with that, sales tanked, but I digress.) Sure, it uses PCManFM, but some distributions use Thunar instead and still call the DE "LXDE". Sure, it uses LXPanel, but quite a few distributions use tint2 instead.
So what makes LXDE? On the one hand, its modularity allows for better customization and easier implementation of its tools in other DEs. This comes at a price, however, and that price is an identity as a unified DE.