Hi guys,
I am sorry if this has been posted in the past but I am trying to make my way into KDE having been a Gnome guy for long now.
I own a lenovo y470 laptop with the following specs: i5,4 gig ram, nvidia gt 540m,640gb hdd.
I want to know if Fedora KDE would be a good option for me, as I don't see a lot of Fedora KDE users(wonder why?).
If not which is a good distro which has support for my nvidia graphics card and is great with KDE ?
I used Chakra and I feel I am out of options when I want something. I would prefer a distro with somewhat large repo.
Thanks alot !

With your hw any distro would be appropriate - could you be a bit more specific regarding your needs? Any of the more popular distros should have a pretty large selection of apps

if you search best distro on this forum you'll see some threads already covering this topic viewtopic.php?f=15&t=97769&p=207318&hilit=best+distro#p207318 viewtopic.php?f=63&t=97157&p=204878&hilit=best+distro#p204878

google01103 wrote:With your hw any distro would be appropriate - could you be a bit more specific regarding your needs? Any of the more popular distros should have a pretty large selection of apps

if you search best distro on this forum you'll see some threads already covering this topic viewtopic.php?f=15&t=97769&p=207318&hilit=best+distro#p207318 viewtopic.php?f=63&t=97157&p=204878&hilit=best+distro#p204878

well my needs is that it should have proper drivers for my Nvidia Graphics card even though I will mostly be using it for only programming stuff .
I also wanted to know if Fedora is good distro wrt. to KDE as I don't see a lot of ppl in this forum with the fedora icon So just wondering which is the best distro for KDE

I think openSuse is best, but people always think what they run is best (silly them)

you want deb's, rpm's, tar's?

you want bleeding edge? rolling release?

any specific apps that you couldn't find for Chakra?

no matter the distro used if you can compile apps you can probably install anything

Major Distro's that tend to be KDE centric include openSuse, Kubuntu, PCLinuxOS, Mandriva, Pardus, etc .....

google01103 wrote:I think openSuse is best, but people always think what they run is best (silly them)

you want deb's, rpm's, tar's?

you want bleeding edge? rolling release?

any specific apps that you couldn't find for Chakra?

no matter the distro used if you can compile apps you can probably install anything

Major Distro's that tend to be KDE centric include openSuse, Kubuntu, PCLinuxOS, Mandriva, Pardus, etc .....

I would prefer Bleding edge + rolling release so that I dont need to re-install the os every time they bring out a new one. and as for deb's/rpm's/tar's no specifics.
I tried ArchLinux, I liked it but had very little luck getting my nvidia gfx card working

openSuse has, Tumbleweed, what I would call a pseudo rolling release in that it needs to be re-synced to the base whenever a new version is released. Mint has one based on Debian (not Ubuntu).

You really should compile you own Nvidia drivers, that way they're current - of course you must recompile every time you up the Kernel. Was your gpu just released when you tried Arch? Maybe drivers didn't yet support it.

Maybe a better thread would be "what's a good rolling release KDE distro"

google01103 wrote:openSuse has, Tumbleweed, what I would call a pseudo rolling release in that it needs to be re-synced to the base whenever a new version is released. Mint has one based on Debian (not Ubuntu).

You really should compile you own Nvidia drivers, that way they're current - of course you must recompile every time you up the Kernel. Was your gpu just released when you tried Arch? Maybe drivers didn't yet support it.

Maybe a better thread would be "what's a good rolling release KDE distro"

well I am not sure about that ... I tried twice and twice I couldn't get it to work, I don't know now if I did it correctly .
Well I am not all too particular about Rolling release I could do away with a stable one too ...
but I want a proper KDE distro.

I use KDE full time on my Fedora 16, and I am and always have been very happy with it.

with the "redhat kde" repo's found at http://kde-redhat.sourceforge.net/ you always get the very latest version and updates.

I say go for it

Martin

Camberwell wrote:I use KDE full time on my Fedora 16, and I am and always have been very happy with it.

with the "redhat kde" repo's found at http://kde-redhat.sourceforge.net/ you always get the very latest version and updates.

I say go for it

Martin

Thanks

I use KDE on Fedora too. There is a KDE spin available in Fedora so you can get a KDE system with little non KDE stuff. Another option is a Fedora remix like Kororaa which comes with the popular software options and all the codecs etc.

For nvidia it is recommended that you use the nvidia packages available for Fedora from RPMFusion and not the drivers from nvidia as they replace standard Fedora files. Try nouveau the standard nvidia open source driver it is getting better with each update. Many people find it is sufficient.

Give a try to Sabayon which is rolling release and pretty much good for KDE.
There are a lot of packages and you can extend to gentoo packages.
Package management is compiled gentoo package using his proper package manager (called entropy) and it is possible to get native gentoo packages (compiling it).
This option is better if you feel confortable with linux.
Natively entropy as a lot of packages (recently I had openbox, metasploit, eclipse and more directly from sabayon repository).
You can check available packages from : https://packages.sabayon.org/
However it is end user oriented and I would say if you can give some command lines sometimes you should not have any problem.
I used it for w while now with little problems that are usually fixed quickly from user forum.
I dont know how it is for NVvidia but it should be ok as this distro is not closing the door for everything but open source.
Update are coming very often (almost everyday) for various software but it does work.