Three days ago, I installed Frugalware 0.8. As the speed and the availability of the repositories is not always stellar, I decided to download the DVD1 and to install everything on it. I supposed this would give me the "feeling of bloatedness", something close to what you get when you install openSUSE and select everything.

I noticed that the DVD2 is never asked for, no matter what you select during the installation. I guess it's really only for when you don't have an Internet connection and you want to install extra packages from a local source.

Everything went well after all, except that during the install I could not enter 1280x800 as a screen resolution, but only 1024x768 was accepted. I ended up with an xorg.conf file having 1024x768 as a resolution, however the intel driver actually detected and use the native 1280x800 screen resolution.

— § —

I don't know if this was because I installed everything on the DVD or this would have been the default anyway, but the desktop manager (login manager) was KDM. Nicely skinned, though. This can actually be changed in /etc/sysconfig/desktop, and I can tell that I liked the way GDM looks too.

Oh, I had to change KDM to something else because it always started with NumLock ON, and it wasn't this way because it was set to be ON in the console. On the other hand, no matter /etc/sysconfig/numlock has NUMLOCK_ON=0, I couldn't find any script that would ever parse this file — or maybe I wasn't able to find it.

SLiM is also available as a desktop manager, but it would simply start XFCE, no other session choices are offered. To start another desktop environment, you should edit the "login-cmd" line in /etc/slim.conf. As I am too lazy, I opted for GDM instead.

— § —

Probably because GNOME was installed too, the XFCE desktop had two Trash icons. The problem is that once you double-click the second one, it opens with Nautilus, and from that moment everything will open with Nautilus. You'll have to kill Nautilus, configure XFCE to manage the desktop, and delete the second Trash icon.

— § —

A serious problem for me is that throughout the system, it is set to have 72 DPI in all the desktop environments. You wouldn't notice this at first with GNOME, as it has the default fonts to 13pt, but you will notice some small fonts in XFCE, and then you'll know you must change the DPI from "Default" (which is 72, as revealed by xdpyinfo) to something like 96, and then you will be able to use 9pt fonts that will look like the 12pt fonts were looking before.

The dumbified X believes that my 1280x800 screen has 21" (451x282 mm), whereas it actually has 15". Therefore, instead of a "correct DPI" of about 100, it manages to use a value of 72, making the normal fonts smaller. What I don't understand is how did Frugalware manage to set larger point values for the system fonts in various desktop environments, at 12pt or 13pt instead of the more common values of 9pt or 10pt?! Did they purposely set the wrong 72 DPI value?! (Are they Mac addicts or what?)

Still, no matter I have switched to 96 DPI in all the desktop environments, Firefox was still dumb, and it displayed the fonts smaller than normal, as if it was still reading the X value of 72 DPI. Sure thing, you won't notice this with sites like Frugalware.org or Wikipedia, because their CSS files contain font sizes in em or in %, but sites like Beranger.org or like BlueWhite64.com are having the fonts defined in points, hence they look bad when a wrong DPI is selected for a given display.

Things were getting even stranger: whatever I was setting in qtconfig and then saving, it was ignored by the Qt applications outside KDE (I tried Konqueror and K3b in XFCE and in GNOME); this means any KDE application will have huge menu fonts under XFCE or GNOME if they're set to 96 DPI.

The side effect is that Konqueror will then show all the websites with the correct font sizes, no matter the menu fonts are huge! (It will also show the websites correctly under KDE, where the menu fonts are just fine, but I didn't bother to change the fonts to 96 DPI, so KDE works at 72 DPI.)

— § —

Another display peculiarity is that (I don't know if this has anything to do with the system being a laptop or not) everything is set to use RGB subpixel aliasing: XFCE, GNOME, KDE...

I will repeat one more time my strong faith that people are either idiots or blind to use RGB subpixel aliasing instead of grayscale smoothing: yes, I do use a laptop, yet I find it utterly disgusting to be bothered by all those blue or red traces around a text! I can very much see them as is, that means as colored dirt, and the only way I could read a black text on white is to use grayscale smoothing. The folks who have "invented" that clone of Microsoft ClearType must have problems with the colored vision, otherwise I can't imagine how could the RGB subpixel screwing help them. As a matter of fact, I can't watch to anything that has ClearType enabled under Windows either: this is such a poor invention that I yet have to see that particular LCD on which I could see a font "nicer" with ClearType ON rather than with it OFF. For God's sake, what's wrong with people minds? Black text on white screen, shouldn't this be smoothed using gray shades? Why not?!

OK, now suppose I disable the RGB subpixel screwing in XFCE, GNOME, and KDE. In XFCE and in KDE, this applies system-wide, but in GNOME this doesn't matter as much as Firefox is concerned, because it will always have the RG subpixel stuff ON, no matter what!

Here's how Firefox is the only application under GNOME that doesn't respect the grayscale smoothing system setting:

You can see some color shades everywhere, because the image was zoomed, but you'll still notice how the Firefox menu text is different from the GNOME menu text or from gedit's menu

Yes, under GNOME it is always this way.

A final note concerning KDE: once you modify the default font settings, which are set to follow... the system's defaults (i.e. subpixel RGB smoothing ON), you can't select or tweak the subpixel rendering (e.g. change the RGB order), as that area is disabled:

You must go back to following the system's defaults and give up the customizations (such as excluding a range from smoothing) to be able to have RGB subpixel rendering in KDE.

— § —

I would say that GNOME is the most buggy desktop environment under Frugalware 0.8.

Take the power management. Under XFCE, the logout screen has be hacked to include Hibernate and Suspend (to RAM) options, and they work just fine. Under KDE, once you enable them in KLaptop (which is started by default, but not properly configured), hibernate and suspend to RAM work too. Well, under GNOME you can only have Suspend (to RAM), and it works, but I couldn't find any way to enable the hibernation in GNOME Power Manager! (No, adding resume=/dev/sda1 to the kernel line didn't help.)

One more thing: GNOME Power Manager believes I have two batteries!

I suppose the same applet is responsible of the hectic behavior of the screen brightness under GNOME: the screen turns to 100% brightness at random moments (I don't know why), and it also turns to the maximum brightness always after you unlock the GNOME screen saver. The brightness adjustment keys on my Acer TravelMate 5310 work fine in XFCE, but in GNOME they behave quite strange: it's much easier to turn the brightness up than to turn it down!

— § —

The graphical package manager Gfpm is at version 1.1.1, and while still slow in searching, it is otherwise a very pleasant experience. This should have made me happy, as using the CLI version is always a pain: I could never memorize the idiotic switches, so I always have to have the Pacman-G2 Basics and Apt - packman-g2 cross-reference at hand.

Gfpm only has a few glitches, but I'll mention them though.

First of all, while you install a bunch of packages (including the dependencies, that is), you never know: how many packages are in all; how many packages are still to go; how much time is still estimated to be needed; the total download size. Instead, you only know the progress (and the size) for the current package, and the "Details" button only shows a list of the packages installed so far.

I would then mention that the dialog can't be closed in the end by clicking on "Close" ("Fermer" in this case), but only by clicking the window closing "x" button.

Note that the source repository is not managed by the package manager: you should simply find the corresponding source package and download it manually.

A confusing issue is the inconsistency of placing Gfpm in the menus.

In XFCE:

 Configuration -> Package Manager (Gfpm)

 System -> Frugalware Update Notifier (FUN)

In GNOME:

 System -> Preferences -> System -> Package Manager (Gfpm)

 Applications -> System -> Frugalware Update Notifier (FUN)

I very much doubt that package management is a "configuration" issue, in the meaning it has in XFCE — which is "preferences", actually. I also very much doubt that it's a "Preferences" matter in GNOME. Also note that the update notifier should be logically related to the package management, but apparently the development team has a different opinion.

Ouch! I wasn't able to start FUN, the Frugalware Update Notifier, no matter the associated service was started (service fun start ; service fun add and checked with the Frugalware Runlevel Editor, frugalrledit). The CLI error was:

ERROR: Method invoked for PerformUpdate returned FALSE but did not set error

A good thing though is that the available updates will be proposed to you by the package manager after every synchronization with the remote package database:

A last notice, which is not the fault of Gfpm, but of GNOME: once you have entered the administrative password for starting some configuration GUI, and then you need to start the same password-requiring GUI within a given time frame, the French dialog that should notify you why you weren't asked for a password is empty:

— § —

A very, very tiny glitch: the Run dialog seems to have problem with non-ASCII characters, notice the ? instead of é:

— § —

Other issues I encountered:

 Nautilus may fail to close and hang with 100% CPU.

 Ekiga doesn't show in the system tray under XFCE, nor anywhere else, it simply hides in the background.

 Anjuta silently dies at the end of the creation of a project if you're letting it trying to save under the default directory, which is / instead of being ~.

 Anjuta also dies silenty after you start the compilation (Shift+F11), God knows why.

 WindowMaker is not configured, so the menus are as useless as they can. For instance, there is no menu entry for Firefox, but there is one for... Netscape.

 KDE is coming by default with the single-click-activation-for-morons in Konqueror.

A customized XFCE desktop, showing that I am dependent of the GNOME layout

— § —

All things considered, I am sad I have to replace Frugalware with something else — most likely, Mandriva 2008 Spring, Fedora 9 or Ubuntu 8.04. I liked in Frugalware the richness of the packages — of course, Frugalware is far from being like Debian or Ubuntu, and it has less packages than Fedora, however most of the packages I need are available (many of them not on DVD1), and I also liked the GUI version of the package manager: while still not perfect and much slower than Synaptic, it's however much, much better and faster than Pirut (which is the biggest shame for the Red Hat distros).

Frugalware also has an excellent documentation, where you can occasionally discover nice gems like this page dedicated to configuration tips for 105 packages.

I could not stand some of the most obnoxious bugs presented here, especially the strange DPI that bugs Firefox no matter what I do with the rest of the system. Also, GNOME is terribly buggy, so I guess KDE and XFCE are the best choices for users of Frugalware.

What I still try to figure out is why I keep trying distros I never settle for? Maybe Dilbert has the answer:

P.S.: Et voici l'idiot qui me fait réjouir du fait que je ne suis pas utilisateur de Frugalware, pour ne pas être dans la compagnie d'un bidule si présomptueux que celui-ci. Va rire, mon pote, je m'en fous. Il est vraiment foutu, ce Devil505, avec cette attitude à la FreeBSD, du genre "on est les plus cool, les autres sont des cons"...

UPDATE 03/25: You can never get rid of the superior attitude of the developers or fans who only want people to praise their beloved distro. On Frugalware's IRC, <vmiklos> (sadly, Miklós Vajna, Frugalware's founder) is so dumb to say: "so a distro is wrong because the default dpi setting is not what he wanted." Yet another guy who is pissing in his own work (just like Zenwalk's founder): no, dear stupid, it is not what I want, it's what it should have been! If you're f-ing unable to determine the "correct" DPI, then f-ing let it be the traditional GNOME (pre-2.20) and Windows (pre-Vista) value of 96 DPI, it will always do. Screwing it to 72 DPI and than complaining of my complaint... say, if I would have filed a bug, what would have you done with it?

The French Frugalware community contains more than one tête de bite. This one is saying: «Béranger est un être un peu bizarre... J'ai rarement vu une review de sa part qui était "correcte"... il descend toujours la distro est les gens qui la défende... quand j'ai découvert linux et que je m'informais au sujet des distributions, j'avais lu quelques-uns de ses articles et je pensais que c'était simplement un utilisateur qui avait de hauts standards et qui s'y conaissait bien... avec le temps, j'ai compris qu'il avait l'air d'un simple "frustré", qu'il descend toujours une distro dès que LUI a un simple petit problème et il a souvent de la difficulté à bien installer/configurer une distribution, exceptée ubuntu.... Bref, je vous suggère de lire ses autres reviews pour voir qu'il n'a rien de si crédible ce mec...»" This doesn't deserve a real comment...

These folks really want "reviews" à la Ubuntu or PCLOS fanboys, most of them blog posts simply saying "ah, oh, how wonderful, I installed it and it works, aaah, oooh, I feel I'm coming!" and so on.