To anyone new to Linux, the sheer diversity is, frankly, scary. I have had subtly different advice from most people I have asked. The additional complications brought on by sub-flavours (for instance I though Mint 11 was an Ubuntu) make it even more confusing.
I am sure that to the cognoscenti, and for specific tasks, each flavour has its good points. As a general user I'm still bewildered. When I started on the exercise I did not understand that when people said that a version was subject to rolling updates (as Linux Mint Debian is) that really did mean many things would be incompatible with it. In the Windows world, this type of problem is, in my experience of normal home-use software from Windows 2 onwards, quite rare, even though Windows is updated every month. When I discovered that SBS would not run at all because there were incompatible versions of PERL (which I had previously understood to be a long-lived, stable, and reliable bit of software) I was shocked. Surely newer versions of something as fundamental as this should almost always attempt to support older user software, or at least provide an easy upgrade path? I then read about arguments about new Ubuntu GUIs, and think that all this choice and variety is not for me. I just want to use stuff. I have no idea whether a newer version of SBS may soon fail to run on one or other older recommended flavours of Unix in the near future. So apart from one old laptop mainly used for web browsing I shall not be treading in Linux waters for a long time. -- PasTim Server on Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit, 2 CPU, 2GHz, 4GB, FLAC files. Touch on Ethernet (in another room). Analogue out over 'a bit of wire' to ageing Quad Hi-Fi. An old (wireless) laptop controls the server using Chrome. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ PasTim's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=41642 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=90827 _______________________________________________ unix mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/unix
