On Wed, Mar 28, 2007 at 10:12:04PM +0000, Solo Voyager wrote:
> I have been using WinXP Pro for the last 4 years and have no serious
> complaints about the OS itself other than a serious dislike for M$ and
> its attitude.
>
> I am giving Fedora Core 6, SuSE and Slack consideration because of
> their availability in both 32 AND 64 bit versions as well as their
> being described as good transitions from Windows OS's.
FC6 and SuSE will be easier for a beginner to Linux. Slackware will
teach you more. (There are also more GUI oriented distros based on
Slackware, such as Vector.)
The trouble you might have with Slack will be dependencies--Slackware
does no dependency checking.
There is also of course, Ubuntu and it's derivatives, but lately,
I'm finding it no longer just works--various upgrades break things.
>
> I think I will try FC6 first. I want to install the 32bit version on
> my old Dell Dimension XPS T600(ca. 2000) in order to become familiar
> with it and begin the process of trying to get my peripherals
> (printers, scanners, etc) working and looking at potential ways to
> migrate Windows apps to LINUX or finding LINUX apps with as good of
> functionality.
This will depend upon what Windows apps you use and what you demand of
them. OpenOffice is not as slick as Office--on the other hand, it's
free. If you don't need a lot of macros and such, you should be fine.
There are various lists of applications and their opensource
equivalents. The gimp is not, I fear, the equal of Photoshop--on the
other hand, it's about $700 cheaper. :)
>
> Right now, I am interested in advice for my stated choices.
> Confirmations or suggestions as to alternatives would be appreciated,
> if it doesn't start a flame-war amongst the differing proponents.
It shouldn't start a flame war. It sounds as if your main interest is
to find an alternative to MS. In that case, Slackware might demand more
effort from you--however, you will definitely learn more.
Fedora and SuSE are good choices. Although Ubuntu might arguably be the
most popular these days, as I said, lately I've been rather disappointed
with them. For example, the entire Edgy cycle never fixed a problem
that they knew about with MGA cards. The latest beta, when I tried to
install, hung, looking for accounts to import--without giving me any
choice about it, nor even really telling me what sort of accounts it
wanted.
--
Scott Robbins
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