At risk of spawning a distro-bashing....

> > Wow, I think this was the post I needed to get off Ubuntu and try
> > something else. I was having so many problems with Ubuntu 9.10 on my
> > laptop, even after doing a fresh install, I then tried openSuSE and
>
> managing family.  Yast and Yum just didn't do it for me.  I went back to
> the
> basic, vanilla debian 5.
>
> Have you (or any other UUGer) got informed opinions of Debian Lenny (5?)
>
> Personally, I like the stability.  I'm not ready for KDE4 until the KDEPIM
> (kpilot, kitchensync/opensync in particular) is debugged further.
>
> Most packages that I want (noteedit, xsane, firefox, lilypond, and gimp)
> are
> full featured enough that I don't miss the bleeding-edge stuff in
> (K/X/U)buntu.  I'd like to have OpenOffice3, and maybe Amarok2, but not
> enough to leave Debian stable-branch.  The proprietary packages (dvd-css
> and
> nvidia drivers) were easy enough to install.
>
> I really loved SourceMage a few years ago (2005, maybe) but their
> installers
> have gotten more cryptic and difficult.
>
> I use Debian pretty exclusively. It is more difficult to run than the "It
just Works Distros" (TM), but I much prefer the flexibility that Debian
offers, even if it means that I have to set-up the graphics card on my own.
Most of the time my Debian boxes don't even have a GUI (out of the 50 or so
Debian boxes I run only 2 have GUI). Lenny is a good version of Debian, but
a lot of packages seemed to be removed since Etch, and a lot have been
reintroduced in Squeeze. It seems that there has been a lot more packages
introduced in Squeeze lately (or at least it seems like the apps that I want
are being put in). Squeeze is going through a lot of changes lately with the
dependency start-up, major changes to udev, new version of GRUB, KDE4,
conversion to dash from bash, and more. I've had to submit a lot of bugs and
patches against Squeeze, but there are good things in the pipe. Unless you
like to fix things often, stick with Lenny until Squeeze is frozen. I find
Lenny and Squeeze to be much more out of the box than previous versions
which is a good balance between flexibility and compiling your own kernel.

Robert LeBlanc
--------------------
BYU Unix Users Group 
http://uug.byu.edu/ 

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