[SWLUG] Which distribution?

[Graham Collins]

On Tue, 4 Feb 2003 15:47:57 -0000
"Carter N." <N.Carter at Swansea.ac.uk> wrote:

> Hi All,
> 
> I'm considering upgrading my distribution, and thought I'd invite people to
> recommend/decry the distributions (I bet this is a perennial topic!).
> 
> I started with SUSE (allegedly easy to install), but had terrible problems
> with Yast, which handled my newer-than-it video card badly when configuring
> X. However, once I got X running, I liked the distro. Sadly, SUSE is not
> available for download, and has been criticised for having some 'anti-Open'
> policies.
> 
> I then had Mandrake 7.0 with a book that used it for source-hacking
> tutorials. I currently use 8.2. I'm happy with this, but hear Mandrake are
> in financial difficulties.
> 
> I also noticed a few pro-Debian messages on this list lately.
> 
> Would anyone care to suggest their favourite distro, and the reasons for
> their favour?

Debian for me too. The Debian Way , wholly distinctive without a trademark in sight, takes a little bit of getting used to and perhaps a good deal more learning, but turns out to be simpler and more efficient every time, and the Debian definition of 'stable' really is a definition, not a marketing term. 

I've been running with the 'testing' branch since late August last year, and it hasn't been particularly testing yet. I do get a bit frustrated by the fact that I can't get Gnome2 yet without moving on to 'unstable', but then I would rather wait until it is *really* ready, and in the mean time I can save up for more memory to be able to run it! ;)

I have found Debian to be a good teacher. Over the Christmas period I tried out Mandrake and Slackware, to see what  some of 'the others' were like. With Mandrake, I found a good distro to recommend to the folk who are sick of M$Win and want to try something else, but I have got used to configuring things with Vim and man pages (and dpkg-reconfigure), and got scared of breaking the point and click DrakConf. 

I liked Slackware, but found it too spartan - sometimes it felt like there wasn't a hood to look under. Debian balances these two approaches, and can be turned to just about any purpose you could think of for a GNU/Linux system, which might be of interest to a techy working in academia.

Sorry for the ramble, but I have to admit its a bit of a Love Thing!

Graham,
Narberth.