On Wednesday, May 30, 2012 10:41:09, Eric Myers wrote: > On Sun, 27 May 2012, Adam wrote: > > What distros do you use, and why did you choose them? > > I started with Slackware 3.6, mainly because a colleague had already > created the floppies for it. This was on an already old Zenith laptop > with a 486, about 6MB of memory, and no chance of running X11. > (http://www.spy-hill.net/~myers/xena/ which is over 10 years old)
Interesting note concerning the above link: for some reason when I read this email using KMail it presents the above link as: http://www.spy-hill.net/~myers/xena/whichisover10yearsold even though the /actual/ link in the email is: http://www.spy-hill.net/~myers/xena/ i.e. KMail seems to be bundling everything inside of the () as being part of the html link. Guess that means it's time for me to file a bug report. :-P ... > I've become frustrated with Fedora because of the difficulty of upgrading > without just doing a fresh install I last dealt with Fedora 6 within a VPS I was administering, and likely had difficulty that might be similar to yours concerning upgrades. The main thing I have not liked about Red Hat / Fedora are issues concerning how RPMs deal with upgraing config files that are part of packages. Traditionally if there's a newer config file, the new file is silently dropped next to the old one and the service is restarted using the /old/ config file, IIRC. Occasionally there are major changes to the program the config file is for which mandates changes to the config to get the program to work, so restarting the service with the old config fails or the service starts and ends up being misconfigured. Unfortunately in practice I find that "occasionally" becomes "regularly" when discussing /major/ version upgrades. This is one of the things that has made me want to avoid distributions based on RPM packages, at least for servers. [I don't care anywhere near as much if a particular service is down or broken when it comes to Desktops or Laptops, except for sshd.] Distributions based on .deb packages /ask/ concerning what to do with major config file changes /before/ restarting the service, and that gives an admin an opportunity to break out to a shell to merge required changes. [The interface also allows seeing a 'diff' of the old and new config files so one can quickly pinpoint the differences between the two. Often you can tell from looking at this if the new config file can be used as-is, which makes the upgrade easier.] > , and the fact that then the installer > no longer gives you a chance to do your own disk partitioning, though I > may have found a way around this using their kickstart installer. It > appears to me that Fedora is now driven strongly by the server market and > less interested in improving the user interface. My personal perception of Fedora from various mailing lists is that many still run it for Desktop systems, however I also believe Red Hat uses Fedora as development platform for RHEL. > The physics projects I'm interested in have moved on to CentOS so I may > give that a try, but I have not yet tried it. > > I've tried Ubuntu and 10.4 LTS seems to be much better for the desktop, > but I'm hearing from friends that the newer versions also present > difficulties. And again this may be in part because they are only > targeting newer hardware, but I'm not sure. I've also used Debian on > servers so I now know the differences/similarities between Debian/Fedora > which will make it easier to jump from one to the other. > > I'm feeling frustrated with Fedora and cautious about jumping over to > Ubuntu, so any suggestions for something else to try are welcomed. Having tried it before the Desktop Shootout, I think Linux Mint Debian is worth a look. [I tried Mint 12 and Linux Mint Debian, and liked the latter more.] One of these days I should probably take some time to examine Arch -- it's one of the few "top-10" in popularity that I know little to nothing about. -- Chris -- Chris Knadle [email protected] _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) Vassar College Jun 6 - Why the Web Needs HTML5 Jul 11 - Mad Science Fair - Open Hardware Expo Aug 1 - Pimp My Network
