Rather than pretend to an expertise I don't have, I'll try to be helpful by commenting on how well Debian fits with each of your criteria.
At 01:59 PM 2/27/2003 -0500, Haines Brown wrote:
I've always used Red Hat. My installation of 7.3 began to go sour last fall after a clumbsy video driver installation. Things got more and more complicated, and I ended up having to do a fresh install of Red Hats 8.0. Since then, things just have not worked right and I'm spending all to much of my valuable time doing repairs, often unsuccessfully.
I'm considering a retreat to 7.3, but must also consider changing distributions. Here are my criteria:
1. I like to rely as much as possible on keyboard input rather than the mouse. Red Hat seems to be moving in the opposite direction, and more and more I'm being forced to use the mouse.
I mostly use my systems as remote servers (my everyday desktop is a Win2K machine) accessed via ssh sessions. So in that context, *everything* is done with the keyboard. The main exceptions are some video apps that run in X ... they all run very nicely from xterms, though they usually have GUIs that require a pointing device (a trackball, for me).
2. I must have multiple desktops and window stacking. I don't know that any window manager supports stacking order except enlightenment. Yet I like Gnome's panel and applets. These two applications don't get along well in RedHat 8.0, but do in gentoo; I don't know about other distributions. I've never used Windows, and so don't find anything appealing in a Windows-like interface.
I use the minimalist X wm Blackbox myself, so I can't comment on these heavyweight X wm choices, beyond noting that they are all available in Debian. Blackbox, like almost all wms, provides multiple workspaces (I assume the equivalent to your "desktops") but not window stacking ... as I said, it is minimalist, uncluttered, and (for me) tranquil and soothing.
3. I've got plenty of hardware muscle, so don't worry much about speed. It is fairly standard SCSI and USB stuff, hardware compatibility is probably not a big issue.
This is mostly in the kernel, so I would expect it to be distribution agnostic. Hardware *detection* is a different issue, and on that score, Debian fares poorly ... unless you use very mainstream stuff, you have to tell Debian a lot about your hardware.
4. I don't need to be at the bleeding edge in terms of kernel and applications, but I need my stand-alone workstation with DSL connection to be secure and reliable. I've an interest in ham radio, which used to favor one distribution, but I assume there's no significant difference today.
DSL usually (though not always) implies PPPoE, and for that, the RP package is pretty much it, also distro independent. I don't know anything about the ham radio stuff. In the past, the Debian package manager set up PPPoE for me just fine (now I have a static address and a NAT'ing router -- also Debian based -- so I no longer use RP PPPoE).
5. I don't find ease of installation to be an issue, and am quite willing to put up with gentoo's notoriously slow compile.
I don't know Gentoo closeup, so any notoriety it exhibits has escaped my attention. Do you mean kernel compiles? If so, Debian is nothing special either way here.
Debian is OK on ease of installation ... not awaul, not great, and more suited (in my opinion) to custom installs than to "standard workstation" installs. (Debian uses a set of dummy "task" packages to provide some standard configs, but I stopped using them years ago, finding them a bit bloated for my taste.)
6. I'm quite willing to edit configuration files by hand, but will occasionally need spiritual advice, and so would prefer a distribution that's not too exotic. I find configuration files that are on the move to be a pain.
I supose "not too exotic" means one where you can ask questions and get useful answers. I don't think there are a lot of Debian users here on this list, but there is an active (for me, too active) set of Debian help lists. You might want to subscribe to one or a few of them, as well as similar lists from other candidate distros, to get a sense of which offer the kind of help you would like.
Also consider that more and more, specialized applications have their own sites and user lists, where you can ask more focused questions and (usually) get specialized help.
7. I mostly use a few standard applications, especially emacs.
I don't use emacs myself, but my son is a real emacs fan, and he's quite happy with Debian's support for it. I can't comment, of course, on unnamed "standard applications", except perhaps to note that if they really are standard, then all the distros will support them fairly well (that's almost the definition of "standard", I would think).
In light of this, which distributions should I be considering? Does one of them stand out in your opinion as an obvious choice in light of my criteria?
I would say that your question, as posed, does not have an "obvious" answer.
I'd need a better sense of the actual apps you use to answer this question, beyond saying that any of the conventional "major" distros -- RH, Mandrake, SuSE, Debian, I suppose even Slackware (sorry, Richard) -- are candidates. I would limit my range of choice to the distros that are active enough that they get regular updates, so the core apps are current, as bugfree as possible, and not vulnerable to security threats ... you mention none of this in your list of criteria, but it's hard for me to think about software choices without considering these issues.
(It's those issues that cause me to like Debian. Debian Stable is a rock-solid way of doing core, conventional things, and Debian Unstable is good at keeping up to date with bleeding-edge apps. Richard, perhaps you'd like to comment on Slackware in this regard, especially its system for providing security-related updates?)
You might ask yourself to what extent your problems with RH come from trying to use the free version of a distro intended to make money (it's been far too long since I used RH, or anything but Debian and specialized, small distros like LEAF, for me to dare try to answer this for you). If the answer looks like "quite a bit", then consider Debian on that score ... it's designed to be free, supported by its community of maintainers. After Debian, consider Slackware ... not free in the same sense, but still coming out of Walnut Creek, which makes its money modestly by selling CDs, not by trying to be a big-name IPO.
I'd be *very* cautious about a "retreat" to RH 7.3, unless you can satisfy yourself that it gets good security updates ... with a DSL connection, you are vulnerable to attacks from the Internet pretty much all the time, right?
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