Re: [Nolug] Distro suggestions

Mark A. Hershberger wrote:
> Tim Kelley <tpk@23rdward.org> writes:
>
>
>>Well, I don't think debian is "rougher around the edges" than any other
>>distro, it's more polished if anything. The installers just a little
>>plain.
>
>
> Yeah, that's what I meant. Still, it doesn't always work
> right-out-of-the-box the way some other distributions do. And the
> text-based installer shocks some people who think that without a GUI
> they're stuck 50 years in the past.
>
> But if you can see beyond that, there is a real nice polish on most
> of the software. They've done good work.
>
> Mark.
>

Well, that's what I like about Slack. While a GUI install should give
you confidence that a GUI will work, it's not always the case. And you
*know* that a text based interface will work on your hardware. I find
GUI's more cumbersome to use, esp for repetitive tasks, such that you
would find in a long list of packages.

And yes, what's important is what's being install, not what the
installer looks like. Debian have the luxury of not having to worry
about polish if they so choose, and focus on the innards, where RHAT,
Mandrake, SuSE, et al need to look good while they're doing it, if for
no other reason that to inspire confidence in their customers, many of
which are new to Linux. This is to Debian's benefit, and they seem to
have chosen wisely, to the benefit of their users.

I've never had an install work right out of the box, always due to weird
hardware (3dfx cards, sony picturebook) and advanced demands (bleeding
edge kernel features like acpi, swsusp, tigl, etc.) But when I went
looking for recipes on how to get linux on my picturebook (with no cd),
the two distros that had the most success were deb and slack. This says
a lot to me about a distro's flexibility.

-- 
Alex McKenzie     alex@boxchain.com     http://www.boxchain.com
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