[Nottingham] Best distribution with apt for a newbie?

[David Bean]

On Mon, 2004-02-02 at 13:07, Martin wrote: 
> As with all things Linux, you gets lots of choice, and then many 
> choosings for each of the choices!
> 
> Obviously I'm very pleased with the Mandrake setup I have here. Good 
> graphical configurability to start with. You can also bash the configs 
> directly when you get to know how later.

> Mandrake 9.2 - GNU - Linux

<RANT>
In the last week I installed Mandrake 9.2 as a desktop system,
installing nearly everything (except server stuff, apache etc). I
selected the standard level of security, and install went smoothly,
except it incorrectly was my solaris partition as swap, but fortunately
did not format it (Solaris x86 has the same partition number as linux
swap).

The first thing I did was go to the updates, to download all the patches
to the OS. 269Mb to download. This was a lot but probably about the same
as XP, so I went to play an audio CD. No luck (permissions). 

Its not aimed at a particular techie market, so I would expect a CD
player to work straight off. I left to computer to download the updates,
then rebooted back into Debian. I'll probably not use Mandrake for a
while.

I moved to Debian after using Redhat which I liked, but found that once
I got going I was much happier with Debian. I find debian a little slow,
compared to a more optimised distro (gentoo, LFS), however I've been
experimenting with the 2.6 kernel, and it's remarkebly faster.

I would go with Debian, even if you are a newbie, as once it is running,
installing a new app is soo easy and won't break anything. The learning
curve is steep, but you wanted a powerful system. Debian allows you to
easily get sources and applications with apt, but without forcing you to
configure and compile them (Gentoo, LFS, Slackware). It handles
dependancies well, and the (text) installer does not necessarily make
the distro run any worse than others.

</RANT>

David Bean