Malcolm Johnston wrote: > All this may be just me. I haven't had a decent look at distros like Ubuntu, > and this is why I ask my question. What, in a nutshell, is their appeal? > One one level it's all Unix, of course, but, given that, what are the > appealing differences?
Above all Ubuntu (and I believe Fedora) offers a 6 month release cycle and the ability to upgrade from one release to the next relatively easily. That means its relatively easy to keep up-to-date with current developments without too much pain. In addition, the packaging systems of all the Debian based distros (including Ubuntu) also track dependancies so if you try to install X that requires Y to work correctly, the packaging system will check for Y (and if its not available install it) before installing X. Fedora also does this. I don't know about Slackware. FWIW, I would consider any machine running a 2.4 kernel as rather out of date. Erik -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Erik de Castro Lopo http://www.mega-nerd.com/ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
