[SWLUG] Re: Giving up Windows

[Steve Anderson]

Rhys Sage wrote:

> 1. A lack of anything like Windows ease of use. My
> personal use of Linux is restricted to SME Linux which
> I use on my server. I have tried Mandrake 10 and found
> it to be awkward for dial-up access and somewhat
> processor intensive. In addition the desktop
> environments weren't quite as good as Windows. I did
> find one that I could almost live with though.

Well, I can't speak for dial-up access, what with having a dedicated 
ADSL router, but Gnome 2.9 on the beta of Ubuntu 5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog) 
is definitely better than Windows XP. By a factor of several. Seriously.

Some people prefer KDE, but Gnome floats my boat.

> 2. Most of the software seems to be of the
> compile-it-yourself variety. I just want something
> that'll run without having to compile because - let's
> face it - I don't know much about Linux, less about
> programming under Linux and don't have an awful lot of
> interest in doing the fiddly bits. 

To date, I've installed one piece of software by compiling and it was 
easier than I expected. Everything else is pre-compiled binaries, due to 
my laziness. Ubuntu benefits from being a Debian derivative, so it has 
the best package manager there is, in my opinion (and having tried a 
variety of distros over the past few years, I stick by this). Apt is a 
godsend. Synaptic (the GUI that most use to run it) is wonderful. And 
there's a load of alternative apt sources that are a doddle to use, so 
if there's something missing from the official Debian/Ubuntu archives, 
there's most likely a source that you can get it precompiled from. And 
apt deals with dependencies better than any other package manager I've 
found.

> I'm not even sure which programs will run under which
> versions of Linux. There seem to be so many - ubuntu,
> red hat, mandrake, suse etc. Everybody seems to be
> trying different versions as though they're unhappy
> with the previous version, which is rather
> disconcerting. People have been somewhat disparaging
> about SME Linux too yet it works for me as an offline
> server.

As Adam said, they're distros, not versions. What's probably confusing 
you is that you've seen a bunch of precompiled rpms on a website which 
have been compiled against those various distros - because there's the 
whole dependency thing to think about. To date, I've not had that 
problem with things using apt because the dependencies are checked and 
taken care of automagically. I had the same confusion myself when I 
started out with Red Hat. From what I recall, often things 'just work' 
between rpm-based distros, but I like having apt as a main point of 
contact for everything I need, and its this that drew me firstly to 
Debian, and then Ubuntu.

I should also mention that the people who inhabit the Ubuntu forums are 
great. Best community I've found to date for support.

Steve