aapgorilla wrote:

Shining Arcanine wrote:With alien and any other installation method that does not rely on your package manager, your installed software will not be properly managed by your package manager, which is precisely why all distributions discourage using other methods of installation, including Gentoo.

This is not true, alien converts to your native pm, it's just that it won't always work because the program might be compiled against different libraries or the setup is a bit different.

Will the files be in the correct places for your distribution, such that package x that expects files from package y in location z will always find them in location z, even if package y was another distribution's binary package?

Anyway, this has little to do with whether or not your distribution is the best KDE4 distribution. I think having an SMP-aware preemptible kernel compiled is probably more important in terms of being a good distribution for KDE4 than anything else.

Having your kernel compiled to take advantage of your CPU by breaking compatibility with the original Pentium helps too, but not as much as those two features, which binary distributions usually do not provide in the case of kernel preemption or do not use by default in the case of SMP-awareness. I know Ubuntu offers a i686 kernel, but it usually is not selected by default. The same goes for SMP. Other binary distributions usually have the same issue.

Back to the original question, the best KDE4 distro IMO is openSUSE...then for me after that it would be Kubuntu and Mandriva. I'm on KDE 4.4 now with openSUSE, and it's pretty fantastic really....quick and stable so far I've adjusted well from debs to rpms, apt to zypper, and the suse build service is pretty great also.

You need kernel preemption compiled into the kernel to have a good distribution for running a Desktop Environment. Do either of those distributions have kernel preemption enabled in their kernels?

Shining Arcanine wrote:You need kernel preemption compiled into the kernel to have a good distribution for running a Desktop Environment. Do either of those distributions have kernel preemption enabled in their kernels?

I don't know, but, How is that relevant? If it didn't you could recompile a kernel easy enough. I mean how is that a factor in determining a good KDE distribution if we're talking about one of the top 4 or 5 distro's?

My computer does not have Nepomuk, Akonadi, HAL, or PulseAudio. Also, despite its somewhat aged hardware, it boots in 19 seconds, and has has been running solidly ever since I installed Gentoo two half years ago. Gentoo rocks!

thezoid wrote:

Shining Arcanine wrote:You need kernel preemption compiled into the kernel to have a good distribution for running a Desktop Environment. Do either of those distributions have kernel preemption enabled in their kernels?

I don't know, but, How is that relevant? If it didn't you could recompile a kernel easy enough. I mean how is that a factor in determining a good KDE distribution if we're talking about one of the top 4 or 5 distro's?

It is necessary for a responsive desktop. Otherwise you get random lag issues where things will pause/freeze for a moment, no matter how many cores you have or how fast they are.

By the way, I believe that most distributions refuse to officially support systems that run user-compiled kernels. Gentoo is one of the few that do not.

Let's try a different line of questioning;

Which would you say is the best KDE 4 distro that remains close to the Ubuntu line, requires no modification/compiling on the users part, is debian based and uses an up-to-date KDE.

Dante Ashton wrote:Let's try a different line of questioning;

Which would you say is the best KDE 4 distro that remains close to the Ubuntu line, requires no modification/compiling on the users part, is debian based and uses an up-to-date KDE.

That basically narrows down to what? Linux Mint?

Hm, not a bad call Mind, sidux ain't bad either AND it is rolling release. I'm not quite sure what Dante Ashton means by "no modification". Surely there is no such thing. And if there were, I wouldn't want to have it

By "no modification" I shouldnt have to tinker around with settings to get things working; on Kubuntu, for instance, I have to use Alsamixer to get Flash sound....

Linux Mint dosent really fit the bill; it goes with an older KDE version, still at 4.2 :/

Dante Ashton wrote:Let's try a different line of questioning;

Which would you say is the best KDE 4 distro that remains close to the Ubuntu line, requires no modification/compiling on the users part, is debian based and uses an up-to-date KDE.

You should make a new thread for that rather than hijacking a thread about the best KDE4 distribution.

Whoops..sorry, did go off on a bit of a tangent

No doubt that the best distribution is linux ubuntu with kde (Kubuntu). Specially for new linux users

I used almost all distributions, but I stayed on Arch. If you know what you are doing, KDE on Arch is perfect...

Another vote for Arch. I haven't bothered testing all that many, but I did use debian for 8 years or so and tried ubuntu for a year, but Archlinux beats them all. I just like rolling releases and don't like to look at a compilation more then I have to.