[Lancaster] Help me select a distrob

[Ken Hough]

max* wrote:
> Hi HAB
> 
> Not easy to choose :-)
> 

snip

> 
> SuSE, although very good in lots of ways, (and near to my heart as my first 
> distribution about 10 yrs ago), is quite non-standard in too many areas,

There's an awfull lot of people who would disagree with you on that one.

  and
> mixing the wizards

What do you mean? Practically everything can be done via YAST. Simple!

  and hand tuning is not recommended. (although this is
> getting much better).

I've done hand tuning under SuSE. It's not a problem, provided that you 
take note of any messages in the config files (usually at the heads of 
the files).

I suggest that there very few distros which can now be considered to be 
'standard', whatever that might now mean. Different people prefer 
different distros. The fact is that SuSE now has a very good reputation. 
It's one of the easiest to use and to configure.

You might be interested in a 'Distro Hit List' produced by 
DistroWatch.com and recently published in Linux Format. This sets out to 
monitor the popularity of distros based on the number of visits to each 
distro specific page. The figures are:

       Ubuntu       2618
       SuSE         1901
       Fedora Core  1494
       Mandriva     1169
       Gentoo       869
       Mepis        861
       Damm Small   836
       Debian       785
       Knoppix      717
       Slackware    612

Bearing in mind the number of Ubuntu CDs that have been freely sprinkled 
around the world, it's no surprise that this distro is at the top of the 
list.

>
> Fedora - i just find confusing these days. they just seem to be wandering 
> around thinking "ah yes, that'd be nice." (which isn't unusual when it comes 
> to choosing software, but is confusing when they can't make their minds up 
> about which graphical front end for installing software they promote).
> 
> Result: i usually recommend ubuntu. it has lots of wikis, newsgroups and 
> howtos - all of which are really important.

So has SuSE. A lot!

Ken Hough