the 'which distro' question

[Kurt Wall]

On Friday 02 March 2007 06:28, Tony Alfrey wrote:
> So I'm getting a new box like everyone tells me to do and now I'm trying
> to figure out what to put on it.  I'm an rpm kinda guy in that in the
> past I've used rpm from a terminal to install most stuff because I don't
> trust a lot of these installer things like YAST.  And most of my older
> apps that I want to run on my new box are rpm things.  So it occurs to
> me that things like kubuntu that are based on debian require debian
> packages, not rpms?  And there seems to be a lot of grief of one sort or
> another with SuSE 10.2, so am I left with something like Fedora?

I wouldn't make a decision on a distribution based solely on the
package management system. That being said, I prefer the 
dependency resolution features of Debian and its clones. Yum 
handles this for RPM, but it was added as an afterthought, not
integrated into RPM. I still use Fedora on my main desktop machine
at work, but I've been experimenting with Ubuntu at KurtWerks.

However, I suggest experimenting with some of the less popular
distributions. There's an awful lot of Linux beyond Red Hat, Fedora,
*buntu, SUSE, and Mandriva.

Kurt