[Lancaster] Help me select a distrob

[Ken Hough]

Andy Smith wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 21, 2006 at 09:35:10AM +0100, Ken Hough wrote:
> 
>>mp wrote:
>>
>>>The choice is yours, I am happily hung up on politics.
>>
>>Your choice, but I favour living in the real world with it's problems 
>>and considerable benefits. Idealism is fine for setting goals, but it 
>>seems to me, useless without a healthy measure of realism.
> 
> 
> This just reads as rhetoric to discard someone else's viewpoint.

Just an attempt to explain why, after a fairly long life, I've learnt to 
accept inevitable compromises.

> There is nothing unrealistic about using a distribution like Debian
> in a business environment.

I didn't say that there was, but a newbie is likely to find it hard work.

> It would involve different choices and
> structure than using, say, RHEL, but it is by no means unrealistic.
> 
> Similarly the resources that vendors like Red Hat and Novell plough
> into the Linux community should not be dismissed with comments like
> "they're just doing it to make money" -- well, duh!

I don't believe that I did dismiss their activities, but they are 
commercial entities who MUST make money to survive.

> If that were
> always unredeemably bad then the world would have ended a long time
> ago.

I didn't claim that it was. I did try to suggest the opposite. Obviously 
not very well.

> 
> Balance is good.

Yes.

> 
> BTW, my personal belief is that if you're new to Linux and want to
> know which distribution to use then use the one that the people
> around you are using,

A good point.

> whatever that may be.

Not necessarily. Do get local advice, but choose a distro that's likely 
to be comfortable for your own needs. For examples:

Are you interested in becoming a 'geek' and in squeezing the maximum 
performance out of your hardware?

Are you interested in sys/admin and complex networking and server solutions?

-- or do you just want a very good and easily maintainable desktop system?

Ken