On Wed, 20 Sep 2006 17:23:43 -0700, Peter Roopnarine wrote: > On Wednesday 20 September 2006 16:59, Amadeus W. M. wrote: >> So do we. If we used ubuntu, we'd be posting on their lists. > Well, we all use Linux, don't we? I use, in total, Fedora, Kubuntu, OpenSuse > and Debian. I find distro. allegiances amusing, since I remember the days > when Debian, Red Hat, and some long since departed friends were the only > packaged distros. out there, and I was compiling KDE from source. And > sometimes there are compelling reasons to choose one over the other, > particularly for newcomers; I would not recommend Gentoo to a newbie, no > matter how educational the experience would be. > Peter > Depends on the newbie. I liked gentoo when it first came out, because its installation/documentation notes were very well written, in a tutorial form. You learn a lot that way, by doing it. I find that very useful for a newbie. Assuming, of course, the newbie is a geek with a thirst for understanding of how things work. If gentoo was around when I started out with Linux and computers in general, I would have used it. Most of the time people associate the word newbie with lazy, easy going dudes, who only like to click on things, play games, and do the regular things they used to do in windows. And for good reason. There are exceptions though. But the exception newbies will find their way anyway, without asking which linux is the best. These days, when just about any major distribution has a live cd, recommending the live cd is perhaps the best answer. To paraphrase a popular commercial: for all other newbies, there's Mandrake. :) > -- > Dr. Peter D. Roopnarine, Assoc. Curator > Department of Invertebrate Zoology & Geology > California Academy of Sciences > 875 Howard St. > San Francisco CA 94103 > > Phone: (415) 321-8271 > FAX: (415) 321-8615 > WWW: http://www.calacademy.org/research/izg/roopnarine/peter.htm > "there's a mansion on the hill"
