Hi Dmitry, You do bring up some valid points. I was a Debian user for a very long time mainly due to the very wide range of packages, unmatched by any other distro I tried (I have all my servers running Debian or Ubuntu LTS, including an academic computing cluster). I am though, almost totally Distro agnostic. If it's GNU/Linux it will be familiar enough not to get in the way of doing stuff, and there will be a way to get what I want, it basically just comes down to the amount of effort. I moved to Ubuntu which at the time (may still be the case) had less packages, if I wanted something obscure it was far more likely to be packaged in Debian, but I moved never the less, as Ubuntu required less configuring and for the most part required less effort.
Moving to Mandriva is much the same. It is GNU/Linux so has all the tools and capabilities I am after, as for range of packages, so far it has had everything I wanted and more, if there are some more obscure packages that it does not have, then on balance, overall I would still be happy to use Mandriva and build/package the 1 or 2 programs I want, though as I said, there is nothing yet that has not been available. As far as preinstalling the games, part of the fun for him is being independent and searching for games, he seems to find it quite rewarding being able to do this himself. If he breaks something, no problem its his computer. He then gets to do the install process, more fun and learning. It's not a choice between a distro and time with my son. His computer is in the living room and fully supervised at all times (even youtube can be disturbing at times). The whole distro change was totally done in consultation with my son, every choice was confirmed by him. In time, if he is interested and wants to learn, I will teach him how to do things on the command line, and hopefully how to program. The computer is not used as a babysitter, it is very much the opposite, it's a chance for him to learn by looking things up, or learning how to use it. I didn't even make the decision for him to use Linux, I gave him a dual boot system (with windows7) and he chose to use Linux only, as he used windows at school, so his logic was he could learn something else at home (I was very proud!). We end up discussing aspect of computing in general, or FOSS. I certainly wouldn't call Mandriva "impaired". Anyway, it's interesting to hear different points of view, but for my son right now, Mandriva is the right choice. If next month he prefers Debian, or OpenSuse or Fedora or Ubuntu or gnome3 over KDE then in this fantastic ecosystem called FOSS, he is empowered to change, as often as he likes. The only criteria is that it is what he wants to do, even if its just to try something different, or just for fun. Cheers Tuxta ________________________________ From: onlyjob <[email protected]> To: Steven Tucker <[email protected]> Cc: SLUG <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, 3 July 2011 11:36 AM Subject: Re: [SLUG] KDE gui package manger in Debian Perhaps I'm missing something obvious but why not just preinstall all the games? I prefer keeping kid away from package management besides the fact that some games' setup in ScummVM, Wine or Dosbox may be quite not trivial. In the old days when I didn't know about Debian, Mandriva was looking attractive but nowadays I wouldn't recommend it because it would mean a lot less flexibility. Did you compare amount of games available in Debian and Mandriva? What's the numbers? Does Mandriva make any sense if it have no game you like when Debian have it? It appears to me that least important criteria was used for choosing a distribution. There are also some benefits of having the same GNU/Linux on all home computers. Synaptic is not so difficult after all and maybe all the effort ant time spent for experimenting with package managers could be better spent for teaching and training? If choosing between spending time together with kid helping to learn how to install software and spending time with impaired GNU/Linux distributions the first seems to be a better investment of time. Regards, Dmitry. On 3 July 2011 10:08, Steven Tucker <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > >>Thus spake Steven Tucker: >>> For some reason there is a huge issue with Kubuntu and his hardware that >>> I have given up trying to fix, so I have installed Debian (wheezy) and >>> we both absolutely love it. The problem is it does not come with >>> something like software center on KDE, and he is not about to start >>> using apt! (least not till next year). >> >>Can you not run software-center on Kubuntu or am I missing something >>obvious here? > > If Kubuntu ran on his machine this thread probably would not have occurred. > The part I think you may have missed above was the line > "For some reason there is a huge issue with Kubuntu and his hardware that I > have given up trying to fix, so I have installed Debian" > > We ended up settling on Mandriva, my son is able to keep it up to date and > install software through easy gui tools. It installed easily, everything > worked and with the PLF repo's we have everything we could want software > wise. I have found urmpi to be a capable alternative to apt. I'm so impressed > actually, I am considering making the move on my workstation. > > Cheers > > Tuxta > > -- > SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ > Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html > -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
