Well, my adventures in Linux continue.  Initially, I was quite happy with Linux Mint, but it soon became clear that it had some stability issues.  Specifically, it would frequently crash when suspending to RAM or hibernating.  On top of that, I was getting kernel panics far too often.  I think the wireless driver was the culprit there, but I wasn’t able to get anywhere with that.  So I decided to try openSUSE 11.1 with KDE 4.2, which I was familiar with from our lab computers.  While openSUSE was far more stable than Linux Mint, it had other problems.  By far the most severe were the graphical issues.  Unlike Linux Mint, openSUSE 11.1 suffered from terribly unresponsive graphics with my integrated Intel gpu.  The worst manifestation of this was very laggy window scrolling, particularly with Firefox.  Then Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) was released in May, so I decided to switch distros again.  I’m glad I did.  Unlike Linux Mint, which, weirdly, is based on Ubuntu, Ubuntu Jaunty has been solid as a rock.  I have had zero crashes in ~3 weeks of usage, and I have no problems with suspend or hibernate.  And unlike openSUSE 11.1, the graphics are quite responsive.  There are still some issues with the linux driver for Intel graphics chips, but I can live with it while the driver is further developed.  So I’m pretty darn happy with Ubuntu 9.04, and I don’t see myself switching distros anytime soon.  Anyone looking for a good linux distro for their Thinkpad would do well to try Jaunty.

As far as desktop environments go, gnome has really grown on me.  It might not be as slick as KDE 4.2, but with some tweaks it can look quite nice.  Below is a picture of my current desktop.  I’m still playing with things, but I’m pretty happy with it.  The dock is the Docky plugin for Gnome-Do, which I prefer over AWN.  My conky configuration is from this site.

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