[SLUG] Please advise me on my next distribution...

[Chris Sutcliffe]

Stephen O'Neill wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm after some advice on what distro I should try next.
>
> I have only used 2 so far - Fedora Core 3 and Suse 9.2.
>
> I liked FC3 - it had a great community with lots of forums to scour
> for tips and help - e.g. getting ATI drivers to work etc plus the
> latest KDE, gnome etc.
>
> I disliked Suse - I can't find a way of getting bleeding edge Gnome
> without buying 9.3; it makes annoying system beeps when shutting
> down/restarting and I find yast doesn't do what it says on the tin in
> all cases - amongst other annoyances!
>
> I have disregarded Mandriva as I see them in a similar vein to Suse -
> with understandably waning upgrade options for their free OS.
>
> The Ubuntu live cd crashes on my machine so I'm not too enamoured to
> try installing it for real.
>
Have you looked into why it crashes? Does anything else fail - apps in
Linux or Windows? Maybe its just a faulty CD. I run Unbuntu, I moved
over from Debian cos I love the latest shiny stuff, and I have found it
to be a reliable stable distro. I also installed it on my son's machine
and did n't run into any problems there either. The commonality between
those two machines was the make of Graphics card - Nvidia, although
different models. Is your card ATI? If so are there any documented probs
with Unbuntu and ATI cards?

btw: Debian is not difficult to install, its just making sure you have
any none-free drivers for your Graphics card to hand - I couldn't get
Debian to work with my Geforce4 without installing Nvidia's drivers -
unless you are happy using terminal tools to download the drivers after
your install.

> Debian and slackware look far too scary in general with my limited
> knowledge.
>
See above.

> I want a distribution that's not going to take a month of my life
> getting a graphical desktop going then work out how to get samba to
> share my printer - I want everything up and running the same day.
>
> So I kinda think that I should just go back to FC - I did like it
> after all! But then I think that's boring?!

If it works for you - use it. I had FC2 running on my daughters machine
before changing to Gentoo and it seemed a good, solid distro and, as you
mentioned, there's plenty of help from the Fedora community. The only
reason I changed distros was that I like to tinker and I wanted to play
with Gentoo to see if there was much difference in speed from an OS
compiled for a particular machine - and I thought I'd use my daughters
machine rather than my own - just in case :)

>
> I've eyed up gentoo (do you use that Phil?) but wonder if I'm going to
> have lots of config problems that I don't have the time to fix - is it
> like debian/slackware in scariness?
>
As mentioned above, I have installed Gentoo. There is plenty of help
with the install on Gentoo's site and I think that the documentation is
the best I've seen for a distro. However, everything is compiled from
scratch and you are also creating config files from scratch, this all
adds up to you spending a lot of time getting a working desktop. I think
it took me the best part of a week to get things how I wanted, sorry,
how my daughter wanted ;)

Once up and running, it is a nice distro and things do seem a little
faster but not the massive difference I expected. I do like it, however
and would go through the install again on my machine if it were n't for
the fact that I am very happy with Unbuntu.

> Anybody else recommend anything else that's shiny?
>
> Steve

Steve, I think you answered your own question earlier, I think you
should stick to Fedora. It worked and you were happy with it and there
was plenty of help when you needed it.


good luck with whatever you decide.

all the best


Chris

-- 
Chris Sutcliffe
Linux User #160319
<chrissut2003 at snbcomputers.com>
Scarborough LUG <http://www.scarborough.lug.org.uk/>