While I have not used Ubuntu myself (yet) I focused on your statement that you had looked at a bunch of "the distros in the 90's."
IMHO all the major ditros have moved to simplify installation and basic use of Linux. Virtually all of them now come with either KDE or Gnome or both as part of the automatic install along with a very nice collection of application products like Open Office, Gimp, Evolution, FireFox, XMMS, K3B to mention only a very very few. These desktops and applications have matured a bunch over the past few years for very good reasons: To prove Windows ain't the only show in town! Not everyone wants to play and tweak under the hood. With the current iterations of Linux distros, you still can, but you don't necessarily have to if you do not want to. What I have been seeing as a significant element that differentiates the various distros (for the newbies) is the system they have for updates and installations of new applications: APT, YUM, YAST etc. Some are easier than others, some more thorough, but all in all a vast improvement over basic tar -xzf... and vanilla RPM. Most of the rest is window dressing. One distros flavor of KDE may differ from anothers in small elements, but it is still KDE. Any other views? (Now that was a dumb question, of course there are.) On Fri, 2005-03-18 at 18:12, Gary L. Allen wrote: > Okay --- take two! I just sent the first attempt to some non-existent > entity, named [EMAIL PROTECTED] Geez! > > ----------------------------------- > > Hi folks: > > I'm interested in opinions on ubuntu desktop. I've been trying different > distros for quite a while now. As a deliberately less technical user > (thus far), I've been looking for one that pretty much just does what I > want without tweaking too much. I started picking up Linux User & > Developer because it usually has cool distros and apps packaged with it. > I've found ubuntu to be exactly what I was looking for on the surface > (GUI, installed apps). It even uses a cool text-based installer and > update tool (cool!!!). But I am admittedly not a *nix guru, nor will I > probably ever be. > > Fundamentally, what is the general opinion of this newcomer? Is there a > general opinion? Is it basically a solid distro underneath the covers? I > mean, it's debian based, so a lot of the apps are older... I'm used to > that with debian based distros by now. No problem for me. > > I turned to Linux to get away from the overkill of Windows security and > stability problems. I have not been disappointed with ubuntu so far. > I've tried Slackware, Storm, Mandrake, Red Hat (including Fedora), > Xandros 3 (nice, easy), dynebolic, gentoo, JDS r2, and a host of others > I can't even remember from the late '90s. This one just struck a > pleasing chord with me. > > Thanks for your help! > -Gary > > > _______________________________________________ > RLUG mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.rlug.org/mailman/listinfo/rlug _______________________________________________ RLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.rlug.org/mailman/listinfo/rlug
