First, I am not looking for a distro flame war. I will give some history of what I have used and what I am looking for, then hopefully I will get some suggestions that point me in a solid direction. Thanks for all who read the following and offer suggestions.
I have dabbled with Linux for 10 years or so and have been running it as my primary OS for almost 5 years. At one point in the past before Linux was my primary OS I had gentoo running pretty well, but compile times and lack of mainstream gaming put that system on the way back burner. I finally made the permanent plunge on Ubuntu 4.10 or 5.04 due to how quickly and easily the installer ran and how my hardware just worked.
Maybe a year ago I build a new machine with a quad core Athlon II, and an ATI 4200 IGP. Before installing Ubuntu I gave gentoo a try and for the life of me could not build a kernel that would boot xorg. I really wanted a rolling release so I gave Arch a try but had some issues with adding additional repositories, I think it was for Virtualbox but I can't for sure remember any more. Ultimately I settled back into Ubuntu because it again just worked.
I have upgraded my system to 10.04 and I told myself I would sit there until 12.04 so I wasn't redoing all my settings every 6 months (I find upgrading Ubuntu to be very hit and miss), but I am getting the itch to see how the new stuff runs, so here I am asking for some advice.
Also, I have always seemed to prefer Gnome over KDE, but I keep hearing good things about KDE. I also am not fond of the direction Ubuntu is moving with Unity, maybe it will pan out, but I would at least like to have some other solid options. Reading the thread about Unity in Ubuntu brought out some suggestions of what KDE distro people prefer which also fueled my fire to try out something new. I have installed the Kubuntu packages in 10.04, but I have only used them a couple times.
Ok, so with all that history, here is what I am looking for. I prefer something that is a rolling release, or at least has very minimal breakage between upgrades. I would like it to be simple to add additional repositories to the package manager so I don't end up having to manually manage a bunch of apps. I would like something that has a decent implementation of KDE and Gnome so I can play with both DE's. I also like to game from time to time so I dual boot with Windows, but I would like the system to to relatively easily handle binary drivers for my VC so I can get as much gaming performance under Linux as possible.
Thanks for reading!
I have dabbled with Linux for 10 years or so and have been running it as my primary OS for almost 5 years. At one point in the past before Linux was my primary OS I had gentoo running pretty well, but compile times and lack of mainstream gaming put that system on the way back burner. I finally made the permanent plunge on Ubuntu 4.10 or 5.04 due to how quickly and easily the installer ran and how my hardware just worked.
Maybe a year ago I build a new machine with a quad core Athlon II, and an ATI 4200 IGP. Before installing Ubuntu I gave gentoo a try and for the life of me could not build a kernel that would boot xorg. I really wanted a rolling release so I gave Arch a try but had some issues with adding additional repositories, I think it was for Virtualbox but I can't for sure remember any more. Ultimately I settled back into Ubuntu because it again just worked.
I have upgraded my system to 10.04 and I told myself I would sit there until 12.04 so I wasn't redoing all my settings every 6 months (I find upgrading Ubuntu to be very hit and miss), but I am getting the itch to see how the new stuff runs, so here I am asking for some advice.
Also, I have always seemed to prefer Gnome over KDE, but I keep hearing good things about KDE. I also am not fond of the direction Ubuntu is moving with Unity, maybe it will pan out, but I would at least like to have some other solid options. Reading the thread about Unity in Ubuntu brought out some suggestions of what KDE distro people prefer which also fueled my fire to try out something new. I have installed the Kubuntu packages in 10.04, but I have only used them a couple times.
Ok, so with all that history, here is what I am looking for. I prefer something that is a rolling release, or at least has very minimal breakage between upgrades. I would like it to be simple to add additional repositories to the package manager so I don't end up having to manually manage a bunch of apps. I would like something that has a decent implementation of KDE and Gnome so I can play with both DE's. I also like to game from time to time so I dual boot with Windows, but I would like the system to to relatively easily handle binary drivers for my VC so I can get as much gaming performance under Linux as possible.
Thanks for reading!
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