Search for a perfect OS

If you recall in my earlier post I was in search of a good operating system to replace windows. In these 20 days I tried several versions of Linux.

• SLAX was fantastic distro using Slackware as a source. It uses modules which help you to simplify the installation of programs. live scripts it uses is simply awesome. SLAX is fast and beautiful Linux operating system which fits on small (3.14″) CD-ROM disc. It runs directly from the CD (or USB) without installing. Only reason I couldn’t use it on my machine as my main OS was that it was based on 32bit. So it could just see 2GB of my 4GB of RAM.
• Ubuntu was another distro I played around. The Gnome interface was very spartan and was not much to my liking. The Ubuntu community is very enthusiastic. But the speed of Ubuntu was not upto what I expected.
• Kubuntu is KDE variant of Ubuntu also did not enthuse me a lot. Both these were slower than my expectation.
• Sabayaon Linux is a gentoo based Live DVD. I downloaded newest version 3.4a. it installed fine. A very nice arty interafce, but several programs were broken in the so called stable release. Portato which was used to emerge new packages was broken. I like the interface as well as the speed. I tried installing VMWARE workstation 6.0 on the Sabayon Linux as I wanted to run Windows along with Sabayon. It failed miserably to install despite all the tricks I could get from the Sabayon Forum. It is a worthy Distro but for some broken softwares. As I am writing this I saw new version which is released called 3.4e. I hope that solved these quirks. i gave up after struggling for over 3 days.
• Finally I realized a fantastic distro which serves my purpose in Sidux. It is based on Debian’s unstable branch called ‘sid’. It was in 64 bit, it had the latest and most modern softwares, it had a fantstic manual, superb hardware detection and drivers, latest kernel. This finally was the OS of my choice.

I will talk in details about Sidux in my next blog. Until then happy surfing 😉