Distro suggestions for my laptop?

[Recursion]

I'm normally a Debian guy, but Debian's acpi thermal zone driver incorrectly detects an overheat and shuts down. Ditto Ubuntu (which I dislike anyways).

OpenBSD runs great, but I can't watch YouTube, and it doesn't see the battery so I have no idea how long I have left running off AC.

Net- and FreeBSD don't see the wireless (Intel 6235) and I don't like NDIS.

My only other goto is Slackware, but the installer for 14 is broken (half the packages are in .xz, which it doesn't recognize).

I'm rolling a Linux From Scratch install right now, but I usually get sick of that after about 3 days of compiling or so. Anybody got a distro they can recommend for me to try?

[d_r]

1. Did you try opensuse?

I put it w/kde on a laptop and it is nice.

[Recursion]

6. I used SuSE way WAY back in the day

Pre-Novell, even. It was pretty good back then. When I get tired of doing LFS I'll give that a try.

[ChromeFoundry]

2. Looks like FreeBSD can support the Intel 6235

http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=35467

[Recursion]

7. If I'm reading that it takes patching the source of 10?

That could be worth a shot.

[My Pet Goat]

3. Just installed Linux Mint KDE on a 3 year old laptop...

Went smoothly. I think there's a way to disable acpi temperature monitoring with a grub parameter at boot anyway (then grab a hardware monitoring app that works for your laptop)?

[hobbit709]

4. I'm running Mint 13 XFCE on my Toshiba.

Install went without a glitch, found all the hardware correctly, wifi works perfectly.

[Recursion]

5. Mint is, like Ubuntu, based on Debian Sid

So I assume it would have the same problem as Debian. Also I'm iffy on the Cinnamon desktop (I don't like Unity either).

[hobbit709]

8. I liked the XFCE desktop better than Cinnamon or MATE after trying all 3 of them.

It's lean and clean and I haven't had any problems. Cinnamon, like Ubuntu's Unity was starting to look too much like Windoze eye candy.

[Recursion]

9. I'm a WindowMaker guy mostly

I've been using the desktop since back when it was NextSTEP 15 years ago. Old habits die hard. I still use tcsh too, for that matter.

[Phillip McCleod]

10. i too prefer xfce

and have been revisiting them in turn with mint 14 in a project to find the perfect setup to start selling on refurbished machines instead of windows. seems to me as a nothing fancy tech-for-hire that people want to be led by the nose by a perceived 'expert' to the best solution.

ALL the best solutions are *nix-based. period. so why keep cheating them and ourselves?

[Phillip McCleod]

11. ima arch junkie myself

i have a cobbled together custom arch/xfce4/xdm dual-booting on my macbook (6,1) and just love it. it's my baby. but i put arch! 'archbang' arch/openbox on my workstation at work then just added xfce4 after and replaced packer with pacman.. same result as my laptop, less work, almost zero bloat.

if you haven't played with arch you can always try archbang livecd. it's just linux no frills.

[Recursion]

13. Yeah, in the end I'm going Arch

Good call. I haven't used it in a while, but it's the only one who hasn't been completely #$%&ed by the Gnome 3 conversion. (I use Windowmaker mostly anyways, but sometimes I like AWN and Enlightenment.)

[Phillip McCleod]

14. yep that's a fact.

i'm writing a gui project with gtk3 in python/c++ and there's no api for python at all. just gotta use the c++ one and sorta guess. i think part of the problem is coders liked gnome2 just fine and since they (we) aren't on board, there's no progress. gnome is practically begging for documentation contribs. instead it's getting poured into the likes of mate and cinnamon which are only marginally better for the same reason as above (gtk3 'lag' floabw). xfce is solid though. i finally added compiz just because and now it's pretty too.

[Recursion]

16. I feel like Gnome3 makes way too many decisions for the user

Like, the shell is one example of what a good configurable compositing desktop could look like, but rather than build the framework and set that as a default, they just made it only that way. And then there's the stupidity about the notification area: "things can't blink". Why the fuck not? It's a great way of being informative. Plus empathy bugs the hell out of me, and they should have swallowed their pride and stuck with pidgin.

[Phillip McCleod]

17. yep half the fun of linux is customizing every detail.

those tools aren't floating in the universe yet to do that with gnome 3, and they weren't built in. i think gnome was responding to the big beginner distros desires for user-friendliness and stability. ubuntu especially wants to be the consumer linux appealing to users not hackers, and i can't say i blame them. i work at a repair shop and would love to do reloads of linux all day instead of windows, but.. basically your average user is used to a desktop environ that can't be really customized so it's a smart move for linux overall.

but i won't use it. gtk3, yes, but not gnome3.

[Recursion]

18. But if they wanted to make Canonical happy they completely failed

Canonical sunk a ton of money into making Unity because they were so unhappy with gnome-shell.

[Phillip McCleod]

19. maybe that's why they're so pissy right now.

i have to use their site for the gtk3 docs and some of the snarky responses to the raging hatred for gnome3.. slipped into docs, no less.. it's just comical. basically, 'quit complaining about GObject Introspection. that's how it's gonna be done in the future so get used to it or go Qt.' which i refuse to do. kde can burn.

[Recursion]

20. I'm glad my programming is lower-level than that

I make daemons and clients for them. Still, if they wanted introspection they should have used LISP rather than glomming it into glib from Mono, which is itself a travesty.

[Phillip McCleod]

21. once again.. i agree completely.

bowing to your insight. most of my past programming experience is fairly low-level. i have a nexys2 board about 3 feet from me.. until python, anyway. i like that you're lisp savvy i wish i was. maybe i'd better prioritize it? it'll never go away. everybody knows it's here to stay.

ps. seems like you like retro tech.. the windowmaker ref, you grok arch, your language prefs.. may i ask more about your hackground? clearly you remember 300 baud modems when you plugged your phone into a couple rubber suction cups.

[Phillip McCleod]

15. (btw.. windowmaker? i had to look it up. wow. old school.)

[L0oniX]

12. Ubuntu LTS 12.04 n/t