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

[Rob Hall]

I grew up with Redhat and now have FC3 on my machine. In a similar way
to you, I have been around the distros (making sure that I have a
separate home partition to keep all my work in - you only make that
mistake once!) and here are my feelings on the ones I have tried.

My machine (prior to the northbridge fan dying and frying the
motherboard!) ABit KV7 mobo with Athlon XP3000, 1Gb DDR400 memory,
Samsung 120Gb SATA drive + 80Gb Seagate Barracuda etc. etc....

Mandrake - pah! Couldn't even get it to boot up no matter how much I
fiddled with it. The installation routine was nice though. Did try it
once on a friends machine and I wasn't that impressed but I had been
tainted by my own experiences.

Unbuntu - very, very nice indeed. Slick, fast and polished. And I liked
the brown theme as well. Didn't like the faff of installing extra
packages and couldn't get WINE to work properly. Might try this again
though.

SuSE - I so much want to like SuSE. I really do. Slightly awkward
installation and I can't stand KDE (/dons asbestos suit) and Gnome just
wouldn't work properly. I am trying to convince my family that we could
really move to Linux if only they would try. SuSE wasn't going to make
that happen for them.

So, it was back to FC3 for me, a shed load of updates and it even shuts
down properly now!!!

Just all my own humble opinion btw.

Rob

On Sun, 2005-05-15 at 11:41 +0100, 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.
> 
> Debian and slackware look far too scary in general with my limited 
> knowledge.
> 
> 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?!
> 
> 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?
> 
> Anybody else recommend anything else that's shiny?
> 
> Steve
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