Beryl was hard to install a year ago.

Now so long as you have recentish nvidia, intel or ati graphics you just have to get the relevant packages and run beryl-manager or compiz's equivalent...

So long as you're productive and efficient it doesn't matter how it looks.

Of course you get marked down for using emacs and not vim :)

My desktop (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/pd.yates/screenshots/Screenshot-gnome.png) with a few apps open.

If your windows is any nicer looking please post it. I call BS until then.

xubuntu (http://www.xubuntu.org/)

Aimed at older/low end machines. All the advantages of Ubuntu's good hardware detection with xfce desktop environment for speed.

There was a discussion (http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/28/2227232) on /. a while ago about the pros and cons of Gentoo on a production server.

Incidentally my servers at work all...

Xandros is based on Debian (like Ubuntu) but uses KDE instead of Gnome. I'd guess that installer crashes/problems may have been fixed in later releases. As far as I know the full version of Xandros...

Hi, I'm afraid I'm not a Linspire expert however if you have data you want to save you can download a live cd (knoppix, ubuntu..) and boot using that; it will boot into a linux desktop without...

Windows XP Service Pack 3 is penciled in for H1 2008, approximately a year after Vista launches. I doubt they will discontinue support for an OS they sold 18 months ago. I would guess they'll offer...

Windows XP support will continue until at leat 2009 for regular users and 2014 (or there abouts) for businesses.

You can use most standard plugins with Ubuntu; they are not distributed because they (flash, realplayer, sun's java) are not under the GPL.

To get these 'restricted formats' working in ubuntu I...

and it comes on 5 disks. And the gnome on SuSE distros is kind of bastardised.

I know you said no Debian derivatives but have you tried Ubuntu? I find it to be the best all round distro for...

Gentoo?

or


sudo /etc/init.d/servicename restart


or


su

maybe blueflops (http://blueflops.sourceforge.net/) ?

I like ubuntu on the desktop because I like Gnome and I like having all my hardware discovered first time.

I run Redhat (well, CentOS) on my servers because I'm more familiar with it (used it...

hi, why not try freebsd (http://www.freebsd.org), openbsd (http://www.openbsd.org) or netbsd (http://www.netbsd.org)? They are derived from BSD (the University of California's version of UNIX.

yeah - i wasn't having a dig or saying you're wrong

i'd agree with that however for personal finance Grisbi (http://www.grisbi.org) is probably more suitable than GnuCash

1) No. Although there are alternatives to most.

2). Not sure I understood the question. Stability depends more on the applications than the OS itself, both operating systems left to themselves...

what resolution should you have?

if you go into (off the top of my head... not used SuSE for a while!) YaST, then under one of the options (hardware, i think) should be Display/Graphics/Monitor or...

I ran Fedora Core 4/Gnome for ages on my old machine (800Mhz Athlon w/ 512mb RAM)

A stick of 512MB RAM is very cheap ($44 according to Froogle!) and I'd imagine you could run pretty much any...