Had a few issues with Kubuntu crashing and acting strangely, but I’m attributing that to it still not being officially released yet (Karmic), plus there was a big update I got today so maybe that’s fixed many of the problems.
I did flirt with the idea of changing to something else today, but after booting into Kubuntu and doing the updates, I’ve decided to keep this around and give it another chance.
Gentoo is gone, Kubuntu (9.10 “beta”, though you can hardly call it that with a release next week) is now officially installed in its place. Had it installed using Wubi and had some decent experiences with it so I decided to just use it.
Immediately I see improvement. I’ve been trying to run Lord of the Rings Online using Wine (and the pylotro launcher for it) under Gentoo but had a problem with it freezing after about five minutes of play. Even setting everything on low as suggested didn’t help. It’s running great under Kubuntu, though. I just played it for quite a while with no issues.
Well, we’ll see how it goes. I’ve really disliked all of the stuff running in the background and the automation of everything before but everything just seems to work now — I didn’t even need to edit xorg.conf to get ATi drivers working nor proper settings for my monitor. That was impressive, given that it’s never happened in the past.
I’m crossing my fingers as hard as I can.
I’m still here, and still using Gentoo, although these days I’m really finding myself stuck in Windows mostly due to gaming that Linux just can’t provide. Even though the ATi drivers have vastly improved as of late, I’m still finding myself looking at crashes and other issues with some games that supposedly should work just fine, and I’m starting to wonder if Gentoo is to blame.
But do I really want to get myself into the whole Distro Mess yet again?
I really got tired of playing the Distro Hop, going from distro to distro trying to find the one that would serve my needs without being horribly irritating and allowing me to update and move to applications and drivers without throwing a huge fit. Gentoo is just perfect for that — it stays out of my way and allows me to use what I want to use while still providing a good base of applications to use. And the desktop and applications work wonderfully.
I’m just needing to scratch that gaming itch, and I really hate to have to reboot to get it every single time. Maybe it is time to do the Distro Hop yet again. I don’t know if I will end up with anything useful or just land right back where I started, but every day I am becoming more and more ready to take that chance.
I’ll put on my hopping shoes.
