Linux distro sampling - Ubuntu GNOME and Kali Linux

I decided to try a few new distros this week after realizing that my current Ubuntu 12.04 install is wrecked. Before picking what to install next on my dual boot machine I decided to try out a couple of things in a VM form. So I downloaded VirtualBox, installed that, changed my BIOS to be able to run a virtual machine and off I went installing Ubuntu Gnome.

Ubuntu GNOME

I had seen a few videos of the distro and read some reviews of Gnome 3 and thought this looks quite nice, looked nicer than KDE and it seemed a bit more practical and fast than Unity. Well after installing it I'm not nearly as impressed as I thought I would be. I don't like a lot of aspect of this version of gnome. I thought I would like the idea of a desktop environment that's simple, clean and minimalist, but I don't. I like the search function of the DE but it's not even as good as Unity at that. Not having minimize and maximize buttons is annoying even if they are not essential. The color scheme is annoying and I can't find a quick way to remediate that without downloading something. I know this is probably not related to my desktop environment, but the software center in this distro has no search function, and that's just abnoxious. I ended up downloading synaptic which I do like but seriously. I'm also not a big fan of the file manager that comes with this distro, Nautilus in my opinion is superior. All in all I think I would go back to the regular Ubuntu as soons as I can unless I do find something better before I make the jump back.

Kali Linux

After trying to get my old copy of Backtrack 5 running on my newer laptop and having a lot of issues to fix I decided to go ahead and download a more recent version of BT which would be BT5R3. Well I discovered in this process that there is a whole new distro that is the next BT called Kali Linux. I did a bit of reading and despite my natural propensity to avoid change I went ahead and downloaded Kali. First thing I noticed was how much smaller the ISO file is compared to BT5. The OS uses KDE and it isn't nearly as sleek looking as BT5 was, but obviously aesthetics of a distro with this kind of purposes is kind of a silly thing to worry about. The bottom line is that I'm extremely impressed with this distro. I don't think I will ever touch BackTrack again after experiencing Kali. It's faster, lighter, does the job with minimal problems. It also took a lot less configuring to get things I needed working to work such as the network adapter. I would strongly recommend anyone using BT to try Kali next chance they have, it's a wonderful change from BT in the sense that it does what you need it to with minimal to no headache. Great move by the developers.

Ubuntu Server 12.04

Since I'm at it and this was something I did recently I figured I'd post it here too... I mentioned in earlier posts that I'm also working with a server distro on my old laptop. I'm using it headless with Putty on my desktop machine. Right now I have it running a samba server which shares any HD attached to my dock, and this week I installed miniDLNA on it to share media over my network to other machines as well as my PS3 (mainly to my PS3 really).

My experience so far with this distro has been very positive. It's so fast even on my old shitty laptop. Working on it through a command line and no GUI has actually been quite an interesting experience. I'm not going to say it's not a bit more challenging to work on it this way (at least for a noob like me), but I feel like I'm learning quite a bit and it just makes the whole experience "cleaner" if you understand what I mean. It's nice having such a minimalist OS running in my server.

Overall (tl:dr)

Ubuntu GNOME 13.04 - I want my unity back, sorry Gnome 3 but it's just not going to work out.
Ubuntu Server 12.04 - Fast and reliable, what else do you need from a server?
Kali Linux 1.0.3 - An upgrade from BT5, I didn't think it was possible. It was love at first ARP spoof.