[NTLUG:Discuss] Evil 2.96 continued...

[Steve Baker]

Will Senn wrote:

> --begin rant--
> I stand in amazement at the complexity involved in choosing
> a linux distribution.  Here, I had finally settled down
> to liking Redhat, because it is easy to setup and with the
> 7.1 release pretty easy to secure.  I wish things like this
> would just go away.  I want to 'pick' a distro and it wind
> up being the 'one'.  Is that to much to ask? I like Caldera,
> it is stable, not to complex and has a good tech support
> group, but it is too far behind the edge. I like Debian,
> it is really easy to maintain - but it is absolute hell to
> setup.  I like Slackware,  but I wonder if it'll still
> be around in 2 years. I like Mandrake, but it is too far out
> on the edge, seems flaky.  I don't like Suse, way too much
> stuff, all crammed in there...  In the non-linux world I like
> FreeBSD but that damn little demon annoys me. M$ WinX is a
> major scam.

Well, asking "Which is the best distro" is one of those questions
that'll cause a 100 email flame-war if you let it.

For me, SuSE is great...I don't understand your criticism about
"too much stuff" - it lets you install anything from almost
nothing to utterly everything...and I *really* like that utterly
everything is right there on that one DVD. (Or one of the seven
CD's!)  And in this age of the sub-$100 40Gb disk and DVD drives
appearing on most new PC's, there really isn't a reason not to
just tell it to install *EVERYTHING*.

For example - I was on vacation last two weeks and I took my
laptop and our digital camera.  While I was out there, I bought
a newer camera and wanted to suck the pictures out of it onto
my Laptop.

Without network access, I'd have been doomed because the drivers
that I needed for the gphoto program were not on my hard drive.
So, I pull out the SuSE DVD and *everything* is on there - including
the gphoto driver I needed.  You *need* a disk with seven gigs of
stuff on it to *know* that you have every Linux program you'll
ever need.

> What's a person to do? What do y'all think, is there a
> killer linux distro?

Well, for me it's SuSE - but you really truly aren't going to
get a straight answer...if you asked everyone on this list individually,
you'll find several people who favor every single one of those distro's
out there.

It's a matter of taste.

----------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------------
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