[cumbria_lug] New distro advice

[Schwuk]

Russ Phillips wrote:
> I'm sure you'll all have your favourites, but I'd like reasons why I should go 
> with whatever you recommend, so that I can make an informed choice :-)

Ooooh... How to start a flame war 101 :)

Well, I'll chip in with my personal favorite - Fedora (
http://fedora.redhat.com/ ). It's Red Hat evolved. You get all the
goodness of RH (stable, well integrated, good hardware/software support
etc.), but Fedora has the added features of much higher revisions of
software, a supposedly debian-like development process (we're still
waiting to see this properly manifest itself), much improved
patching/updating procedures, and a quicker release cycle. Yes, it's
primarily Gnome based, but KDE is well integrated in the default install
and you can download binaries for KDE 3.2 ( http://kde.org/download/ ).
If you don't like Red Hat, then you probably won't like Fedora, but I've
stuck with RH for a good time now, and I'll probably stick with Fedora
for the forseeable future.

Mandrake 9.2 was good when I tried it briefly, and I would certainly
recommend it to newbies over Fedora simply because of the installer and
the consumer-orientated desktop (Red Hat, and Fedora, are more
professional orientated, but that suits me more), but I quickly returned
to my Fedora install after a couple of days playing with it. I'm sure
Adam will weigh in on the side of Mandrake... :)

If you fancy something a bit more challenging, people always say good
things about Gentoo ( http://www.gentoo.org/ ) - it certainly appeals to
me, but I've not played with it to any great extent.

I'm happy to provide Fedora CD's for you at the LUG meeting on Fri.

Cheers,
--
Schwuk