news

[Aaron Grewell]

On Thursday 09 May 2002 05:37 pm, Brett I. Holcomb wrote:
> What do you recommend then for a distro?  I see - and this is based only on
> my time in the newsgroups and mailing lists:
>
> RH - the MS an AOL of the Linux world: breaks rules, doesn't maintain
> standards,bleeding edge, doesn't have much of a clue.  They made it popular
> but lost it
>

Once I understood RH's release schedules I've gotten along fine with them.  I 
also have no issues compiling my own stuff if they've done something wacky.  
Basically I look at it this way:  x.0 is an alpha release, test if I feel 
brave.  x.1 is a beta, might work OK.  x.2 is a stable product now that the 
early adopters have found all the nasty bits.  Anything after x.2 is gravy.  
It annoys me that they use their end-users as beta testers, but now that I 
know what to look out for...

> SUSE - ?
>

6.2 was wierd.  YAST did what it thought was best regardless of what I might 
actually want.  I never went back, but probably should since that was a long 
time ago.

> Mandrake - ?
>
Great when it works, not as well tested as I would like.  Uncommonly used code 
paths tend to be buggy.  Try installing 8.0 on an LVM, for example.  The 
feature's there, it just doesn't work properly.

> Debian - ?

And people say RedHat makes their own standards!  Debian was so different from 
every distro I'd ever used that I finally gave up on it.  Just finding things 
was a major adventure.

>
> Who else is there - Maybe use gentoo to set it up and then make your own
> changes and updates (I do that with Caldera anyway in that I upgrade the
> kernels and some of the apps).

I also like Lycoris for its out-of-box functionality.   I borrowed a number of 
their RPMS for my RH box, like their version of Xine that seems to work with 
just about any file format I throw at it.  Clean and friendly, if not 
particularly techie-oriented.  Again, I'm quite willing to compile my own 
stuff, so no biggie if they don't ship my favorite widget.