On Feb 19, 2008 6:02 AM, A.Muller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hello everybody ! > I've been monitoring this mailing list for a couple of months and > received answers to my questions about OO. Thanks to the benefactors. > My experience with OO goes back to 2005 and I'm very satisfied with it. > Now I would like to cross the Rubicon and eliminate, gradually, XP from > my machine. I've read many posts relating this or that bug/difficulty of > OO with some specific distributions of Linux. In your experience, which > one would be the best to start with among the different distros : > Mandriva, Ubuntu, Suse, Debian or whatever ? Thank you for your advice. > A.Muller >
This question will of course generate a response for nearly every distro out there. Personally I think you need to weed through the responses not based on the number you get recommending a specific distro since that will answer (Ubuntu?) will be largest from the largest number of users on a distro. If you can, try to figure out what's important to you and then attempt to pick a distro that meets those needs. For instance, are you comfortable with vi or some other text editor? If not you'd either need to learn it or better pick a distro that allows you to get things configured using GUI apps. Are you comfortable with a distro that might do a major update once a year or do you want access to more recent revisions of software through whatever standard means they give you? What about applications not supplied with the distro? Do you want easy access to some specific class of apps? Do you want to know more about how your machine operates than Windows ever allowed you to see or do you just want it to work? I personally don't think there is any one right answer to these questions. I like to tinker and wanted a distro that never has to go through a major upgrade (I.e. - one where you have to dump the existing setup and reinstall from a new CD.) so I run Gentoo. It's got great documentation and a wonderful user's group. Lots of very experienced and helpful people. that said it's clearly not for everyone. I completely agree with anyone who wants to point out that this distro isn't for everyone but I've got one machine that's been running 5 1/2 years with no upgrades, just updates. It runs a 2.6.24 kernel and everything is about as new as the Linux community can offer. One thing I would strongly suggest, coming as you are from Windows, is that even if you have a 64-bit processor just stick with a 32-bit version of Linux. The multimedia compatibility of Linux 32-bit is far better than Linux 64-bit. I run both here and think you'd be happier with 32-bit. I still am. Again, I think the 'right' answer is the answer that's right for you. Fortunately with Linux you can have multiple distros on the machine and switch between them as you learn over time. Hope this helps, Mark --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
