[Lancaster] Help me select a distrob

[Ken Hough]

Clair wrote:
>

snip

> I'd suggest avoiding SuSE - very non-standard and I dislike the wizards, and 
> the fact you _have_ to use them.
> 

Distros are now mostly non-standard in some way. Debian is reckoned to 
be about as standard as it gets, but it's also one of the most techy of 
distros to manage.

What wizards? Everything is done under YAST. Simple! Why not use it? If 
you do need to do something manually that's not covered by YAST 
(rarely), then it's not a problem.

SuSE works and works very well. Just have a look at review articles over 
the last couple of years. It's maintained a reputation for being rock 
solid and includes pretty well all software that most of us are going to 
need.

I note that many of the reviewers have switched to SuSE. That must say 
something.

Whenever I have questioned critics of SuSE, I invariably found that they 
hadn't had personal experience of since something like version 7 or 8. 
We are now on version 10 (nearly 10.1).

>>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).
> 
> 
> FC5 is now all yum, there's now only one graphical frontend to it :)  - this 
> is what I recommend.

And this is better than YAST? YAST also has one (very good) front end. 
YAST also has an alternative text based front end (via NCurses).

> 
> 
>>Result: i usually recommend ubuntu. it has lots of wikis, newsgroups and 
>>howtos - all of which are really important.
> 
> 
> I think they all do :)

Here! Here!

I really do despair. People use Fedora and Mandriva while acknowledging 
that these distros have problems, and yet reject SuSE which does not (at 
least not major ones).

I'll give my last comments here as I'm outvoted by this group:

SuSE WORKS and WORKS very well. If, like me, you want an easily 
installed/configured system that (contrary to comments made previously) 
is easy to reconfigure, then it's up there with the best. It's a very 
professional product.

Ken Hough