anyone have/tried Mandriva 2005?

[Collins Richey]

On 5/14/05, Kurt Wall <kwall at kurtwerks.com> wrote:
> On Saturday 14 May 2005 00:03, Net Llama! enlightened us thusly:
> >
> > must be nice.  why can't everyone just wise up and use RH/FC to make
> > my life easier?  ;)
> 
> Right. I keep forgetting it's all about you. ;-)
> 

My, My, My! Aren't we all getting a little snippy!

Here's my summary:

1) The subsidiary support programs (yum et al) have resolved a lot of
the dependancy Hell issues in the RPM world.

2) RedRat and its siblings have drastically increased the number of
packages offered.

3) Caldera is a particularly bad example. I never found ANY
non-caldera rpms that would work on Caldera, period. Since most of the
RPMS were RedRat or its siblings, that's not too surprising. File
placement differed widely between Caldera and RedRat, et al.

4) Some upgrades to a new release level on RedRat and siblings are
possible. I've heard of successful upgrades from CentOS3 to CentOS4,
for example, but the vendor does not recommend it. You get to keep
both pieces if it breaks.

5) There is absolutely no question that the Debian package manager
beats RPM hands down.

6) One of the advantages of distros like Gentoo or Debian is that
incremental updates are offered. It can be almost impossible to say
what level a Debian system or a Gentoo system is since, potentially, a
lot of incremental updates have been applied.

7) Some people don't like the continuous update philosophy, preferring
to make only critical updates to a distro and run that distro at a
(somewhat) known level for longer periods of time.

8) David's philosophy that Linux is Linux is Linux only becomes valid
if you take/have the time to learn the little peculiarities of a
distro or family of distros.

9) Not much is accomplished by put downs.

-- 
 Collins
       When I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, 
       it was the start of a new Arab world.... The Berlin Wall has fallen. 
               - Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt