[SLUG] Fw: Re: which distro?

[Al Girling]

Hi All,

Seeing as the 'Which distro is best' question frequently raises its head.  I thought this reply from the York lug might be of interest to the group.

While Roger might be regarded as having a somewhat higher than room temperature IQ, I think his comments still apply to anyone trying to make this decision! ;)

Al

Begin forwarded message:

Subject: Re: which distro?

> But, which distro to use?  I'm used to Debian but don't fancy setting
> it up, I seem to remember that being a bit of a pain.  Ease of setup
> is my primary concern.

It's worth taking into account the ease of long-term maintenance
against the difficulty of the initial install, which you should only
ever do once--after it's done, you won't need to do it ever again.

My Debian system has not been reinstalled since I set it up nearly 4
years ago.  In that time it has been continually updated with security
updates, and it has been through two major upgrades
(slink->potato->woody), plus all the point releases in between from
slink 2.1r2.  The system is still in perfect working order, and I
don't expect to wipe the install during the lifetime of the machine.

The initial setup was done as someone fairly new to Linux (I had had
assistance setting RedHat and Slackware up on a machine in 1997,
basically as a toy to see how it worked), as this was the first PC I
had owned.  Debian has a reputation for being difficult, but I have
been using it without problems for a long time (and nowadays I'm a
Debian developer, too).

Although graphical tools make things easier, most things only need
doing once, and it's no bad thing to know how things really work
underneath a nice UI (and many of the nice configuration interfaces
are also in Debian, if you look).  Once you have your email, printing,
usenet news, ssh etc. set up, it's only rarely you'll need to tweak
the configuration.  Mine have all "just run", except for the
occasional config file changes needed during major updates.


-- 
Roger Leigh

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