Re: What linux distro is recommended

[Christoph Dalitz]

> On Sat, Oct 25, 2003 at 10:22:02AM -0600, Quentin Spencer wrote:
> > Obed Sands wrote:
>
> > [...] I believe there are several 
> > users on this list who would recommend Debian. The advantage of Debian 
> > is you can use apt-get to install the latest version without compiling 
> > anything yourself.
> 
This only holds if you are ready to possibly corrupt your Debian system by
switching to unstable (it is not called "unstable" out of fun). Just installing
the newest Debian binary does not work due to the Linux libc incompatibility
insanity.

> which may counter the old 'but Debian is too hard to install' criticism
> (which I tend to find unfair, but then I only ever install Debian :)
> 
Although I run Debian myself on three computers because of the incredible
amount of software that is packed into the distribution, I must admit that
it is either hard, very hard or impossible to install Debian on a brand new
computer for several reasons:
 - the hardware relevant software (kernel, xfree, alsa, cups, ...)
   shipped with a stable version of Debian is mostly too old to support
   new computers
 - there is no support for hardware detection

It took me a week to get Debian running on my brand new 300 Euro computer,
and in the end it only worked because I found a nice guy who changed my
Geforce 4 with his Geforce 2. Not to speak of sound or the hpijs printer
driver which is shipped with woody but not integrated in the cups setup...

Thus I would recommend to choose some other distribution unless you have
considerable Linux experience or are ready to invest a lot of time in the
setup of your system.

[Flame Protection]
I am quite happy with my Debian installations and have no intent to insult the
Debian team, which does a great job.
[/Flame Protection]

Christoph Dalitz



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