While I'm using Mandrake 8.2 and am pleased with it, I will probably
always continue to test new releases as they come out. However, I heard
that a beta of Slackware 8.1 is out, but I don't think I will bother
with that. I notice one of the things that makes a good distribution is
a good community of users surrounding the distribution. If Mandrake has
a weakness, it's that too many newbies are using it, and there doesn't
seem to be many experienced users. It ends up then. that there are a
lot of questions, but limited answers.
Take for example my problem with the Mandrake system overriding the
permissions. It would have been very nice if someone could have popped
up the answer: "Just set your security level in the the control panel
to 'high'." It would have saved me a tremendous amount of lost time.
So in that sense Wayne is right that the more people you have using a
given distribution, the more knowledge will develop around it. But in
the long run I don't think it's to wise to be myopic about the various
distributions. We should test them as they come put and then post our
opinions about them to the group. I notice that many of the CLUE
(Colorado Linux Users) are taking a strong interest in Mandrake 8.2 and
the president himself has stated that he thinks it's really cool. I
know he was using Slackware previously.
W. Wayne Liauh wrote:
What we need is to find one distro that has the best potential for us
(I mean software developers on our isles) to grow with (e.g.,
franchising for big distros, equity interest for small ones, etc) and
build an enterprise (empire?) here by developing our (add-on)
expertise around it.
