On Tuesday 17 July 2001 17:38, Bill Beauchemin wrote:
Greetings,
The previous respondents and Mr. Beauchemin brings up some good
points... however, at the risk of starting a (pointless) flame war,
the reality is that most people do not want to spend a great deal of
time reading HOWTOs and banging their heads on the keyboard; they just
want to get stuff working and then get to work. A lot of the
chest-pounding about this distro is better than that one is mostly
just that - chest-pounding; and not helpful at all.
In that spirit, Mandrake is one of the easiest distros to install
and get working - I've tried them all and Mandrake simply is the
fastest and least hassle to get working on a plethora of different
boxes and diverse hardware configurations. Also, an added benefit is
that unlike Windows, when you are done installing the distro you don't
just have a base & bare operating system, but also have a useful set
of utilities, applications, etc. that let you do what you need to get
done.
Let's face it, most people use computers to surf, write, read email
& newsgroups: basically exchange information. Linux does this
admirably. What makes this more enjoyable is being able to do these
things without looking at a BSOD, as in windows.
I'm also not naive enough to assume that Windows will never go
away, e.g. "youll [sic] never go back to winblows". We still have NT
systems around for proprietary apps (such as high-end CAD) that will
never, repeat never, be ported to Unix / Linux.
I use Mandrake Linux for my desktop and server-level work, and I
admire it's stability, speed, and generally helpful people who answer
questions quickly and effectively when things go wrong. My experience
with newsgroups and lists like this one is that they are far more
effective than tech support for any purchased, proprietary piece of
software.
My $0.02. Hope this helps.
Regards,
David
P.S. Also, every now and then it's to review the Linux advocate's
HOWTO:
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/Advocacy.html
P.P.S. Also check out
http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html
(Interesting discussion of Linux versus others...)
> Angus and Robert are right on the money. Run Mandrake as your first linux
> experiance and youll never go back to winblows. I started on RH years ago
> and stoped because of how hard it was to instal things. I finally tried
> again with Mandrake 6.1 and it was great. Load and go preety much. I also
> found out about webmin at the same time and that makes life alot easier.
> Now with Mandrake 8.0 it comes with webmin. I do still haave some issues
> with mandrake and smp and still love Slackware. Slackware is the sh!t for
> Linux IMHO Never had one problem with it. I ran it for over a year nonstop
> as a webserver in a large data center. Everything I ever tried to install
> went just like the readmes or howtos explain. I found with Mandrake 6.1
> updating to KDE2 was not as easyu as with slackware. For what its worth try
> Mandrake 8.0 then when your serious try Slackware or Debian. Now if your
> really brave try FreeBSD
>
> :-)
