On Wednesday September 20 2006 8:25 pm, Peter Roopnarine wrote: > On Wednesday 20 September 2006 17:18, Peter Roopnarine wrote: > > but there's no reason to give other distros. such as Fedora, > > OpenSuse or even Debian a shot. > > Oops. Meant to say, no reason _not_ to give them a shot :-) > I'm currently running Fedora Core 5, Centos, MEPIS, FreeSpire, PCLinuxOS, and dyne:bolic; I've also run SUSE, Ubuntu/Kubuntu, SmartCom, Blag, Vector, Elive and 64 Studio at various points. My take on this based on all this experimentation is the following suggestions for your friend to consider: Does he just want a replacement OS that will be relatively painless to install, easy to pick up and just use, and capable of the common things a desktop in the home should do? Is he a tinkerer that likes to learn how things work? Is he a cutting edge sort of guy that likes to fine tune his system, and learn lots of new software? Does he want to use software that is on the cutting edge and under rapid development, for example in the world of video editing? Based on his answers, I might advise the following: If you lean towards the first part of my list, try PCLinuxOS (a Mandrake derived Distro with a LiveCD that comes 'just working' right out of the install, including things like Windows Media playing) - it has all the the things you'd expect in a desktop, and a terrific computer management console for installing/configuring new services as you grow into it, a terrific package management system, and a pretty large repository with easy procedures that are usually responded to quickly, for adding/requesting new packages; the other two distros in this category are MEPIS, which is now based on Ubuntu, but in my view, is better because it does away with the disabled root user/sudo way of doing things, and comes configured with more things 'that just work'; and, FreeSpire, a pretty slick, previously commercial, distro that has a huge repository of easily downloaded/installation made easy, software - it's downside is that it takes a bit more knowledge to get the 'free' side of things going (you have to install Synaptic package manager which then allows you complete access to their repos, but there's a not so clearly indicated path to doing that), and FreeSpire tends to be about 6-12 months behind the cutting edge - it's stable, and comes with easy access and installation procedures for both free and proprietary software, so it's not for Linux OSS purists. If he leans towards the latter part of my list I'd definitely go with Fedora. Fedora gives you more frreedom of action than any other Distro I've tried. It takes a bit more work, but, if you're willing to learn, there's more available in terms of repositories, packages, support (such as this stellar list! - and I wouldn't play this aspect down - it's one of the most important criteria along with package availability there is), and amazing freedom of choice; SUSE is in the same league, but less in all respects. And to those who denigrate such questions on the list, I say you're just plain wrong. Studious comparisons of distros can only help make Fedora better... There's much more that could be said, but as others have mentioned, tell him to pick a few LiveCD's and experiment first - then, he can decide which one to install based on some first hand knowledge... And as postscript, my brief suggestions are by no means intended to denigrate the hard efforts of so many others out there, who've put together terrific distros - tell your friend that's one of the real upsides of Linux - the freedom of choice. No matter what subset of features he's interested in, there's a distribution out there that will come close to his predilections... -- Claude Jones Brunswick, MD, USA
