[cumbria_lug] Mandrake 9.2

[Michael Saunders]

On Wed, 5 Nov 2003 trevor at haven.demon.co.uk wrote:

> They buy a buggy and unreliable OS called Windows, with virtually no
> software for more than a hundred pounds at a time so spending say £5
> on a mag with a distro on the cover is not going to break the bank
> and that would now cover SUSE 8.2 as well as several versions of
> Mandrake/debian/red hat, I have a frightning collection of distros
> big and small

Most of the time, they don't. They receive Windows with their
computer, or pirate a copy, and very rarely pay the up-front retail
price. As for SUSE, I can't remember them ever having featured a full
release on any magazine (certainly not our mag) and, even if that was
the case, it's still difficult. If that user really enjoys SUSE,
he/she needs to spend £40 for each new release.

Don't get me wrong, SUSE has done a praiseworthy job on their distro
and it's worth the cash (particularly with the bumper dead-tree docs),
but it's still not appropriate as a first-time introduction.

> You don't need a bleeding edge, not even a <this years> distro just
> to try linux, there are more distro's in my diskl collection than I
> know what to do with, most are unused (redmond linux, Definite Linux
> ...) Yes a newbie needs to have ease of use but support (from a
> supplier) has to be paid for and this is available from suse and red
> hat and mandrake and ...

You need new if you want at least adequate hardware support. The
average user with his eMachines junk box and £15 webcam will need a
recent kernel. Ditto, I have about 50 distribution CDs here from doing
reviews over the years, and while they work well I wouldn't be happy
recommending anything over 6 months old to a first-timer.

> We all want well tested and reliable software but with free software
> it is up to us to test and correct, remember that GNU/Linux is
> techie project run by, contributed to by and supported by volunters
> not one commercial organisation

Not entirely accurate now. An enormous amount of work is done by paid
software engineers from Red Hat, IBM, SUSE etc. The community spirit
is still here, but it's a vastly different world to 5 years ago.

Mike

-- 
Michael Saunders
www.aster.fsnet.co.uk