I just did a samarital act by lending my Mandrake 9.1 install disks to a guy who looks to install Linux onto his work system to lower license costs to zero. Thats fine, but when I collected the discs once he'd copied them he said that he'd not try Mandrake and would get Red Hat 9.0 instead. When I quizzed as to why he then popped a printout into my hand showing an item from a slashdot forum saying that RH 9.0 had a much better thought out desktop setup compared to Mandrake 9.1.
I didn't argue (it is a loss - loss argument situation), but there is a real point here. Any Windows user wanting to try Linux will be I'm sure totally baffled by the in-fighting between Linux users and the "my distro is better than yours" arguments that frequent LUG forums.
Do I have a valid point here? I'm pretty sure this guy will install RH 9.0 and find his KDE desktop very similar to MDK 9.1. The printout even shows that the poster was confused about "Kompletely Kryptic and Konfusing" app names, which shows he knows little about distros if he thinks the KDE-centric app names are exclusive to Mandrake and not Red Hat...
Kind regards,
Chris Wilkinson, Christchurch.
