On Thu, 18 Feb 1999, Mike Werner wrote:
> I disagree with this. Slack was my first distro, and I didn't find it
> too difficult. Quite the contrary, I had very little trouble with it.
> Mind, this was with *no* prior *nix experience. I have and will
> continue to recommend Slack as a first distro.
OK....I guess it all depends. Nevertheless, I know what I see every night.
A lot of them are, admittedly, extremely clueless. I don't think the
average extremely clueless linux user is here: they're clued enough to
join the list. :)
> Odd, many of the questions I'm seeing on usenet (other than the Slack
> specific groups) are about RedHat. Mostly concerning that RPM thingy
> they are so proud of. Also, one of the most common complaints I've
> heard from disgruntled former Linux attemptee's is regarding "that
> damned RPM" not working as advertised.
Well, RPM sucks for a lot of things. I like the RPM-based install but most
things I add later I do by hand -- or I did when I used RedHat. Now that I
have SuSE, I'm likely to use yast to do updates.
> So the person asking the question is still learning about Linux. There
> is nothing wrong with that. We all had to start somewhere. From what
> I've seen of Slack, RedHat, SuSE, and Debian I would think Slack and
> possibly Debian to be the *best* for a newbie. Less is "hidden" by GUI
> tools, the user *learns* more.
Depends on how much of a learning curve one is willing to put up with.
I came at Linux from a long albeit limited exposure to Unix as a user
(mostly REALLY light exposure). I was, at the time, a dedicated Mac user
and programmer. In May of last year, I installed Rhapsody (formerly
NeXTStep and OpenStep, now called MacOS X Server) and banged my head
against the wall for a week. It hurt. :( Then I got the "unix epiphany"
and stuck with it as my desktop OS.
After I switched projects, I decided to learn Linux and installed MkLinux
on the same machine. Everything pretty much worked from the start (though
I did have to do a second install as the first one I bungled). Even so, I
still felt like I was in an alien land -- even with KDE working right the
first time (one of the joys of the Mac installs is limited video chipsets,
etc.).
As for Debian, I have always considered it the "vegan" distribution
because it is so picky about licensing issues. My boyfriend has never used
Pine because of all the licensing stuff -- wheras I use it because it's
been the most consistent mailer (other than "mail") that's been on every
unix system I've used.
> > And you missed the BEST part about SuSE -- it has a live CD with a full
> > file system and man pages. Much superior to a boot diskette!
>
> As does Slack, last I looked.
This I stand corrected on -- I knew this some time ago but I had
forgotten. It raises my estimation of Slack considerably. :)
> All in all, I will stick with Slack and tar.gz's. Seems to have a
> higher success rate. And I will continue to recommend Slack over the
> others for the reasons I outlined above.
I like (and in many cases prefer) tar.gz files over rpms.
_Deirdre * http://disclaimer.deirdre.org * http://www.deirdre.net
Q: Where do you want to go today? A: The 9th Floor
