[aclug-L] Re: SuSE vs. Mandrake

["gLaNDix (Jesse Kaufman)" <glandix@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I have used Debian fairly extensively on servers and such, but (for me at
> least) it doesn't seem to be a worthwhile desktop distro.  Mandrake seems
to
> have everything gui'd that I use, which can be a great time saver, (and
> waster) and appearance is important to me on the desktop.  urpmi can use
> external sources (like the PLF and tex repositorys) so you can do similar
to
> apt-get.

there are also things like apt-rpm that are praised pretty heavily in some
circles... no experience myself...

> I would definately agree with Jesse on the closedness of SuSE, but
> with Mandrake in chapter 11, what's a Penguinisto to do?

well, at least they're coming out w/ a 9.2 (if they haven't already... been
behind in keeping up) to replace their pathetic excuse for a release, deemed
MDK9.1...  don't think they're completely out of the picture just yet...

meanwhile, as i said, i'm trying out gentoo...  been an interesting venture
so far...  got the system installed, emerged the gaming-optimized kernel
source and recompiled (with P4 opt flags, of course!) and still working on
getting grub to work (well, it sort of does, it's just not "pretty" like i
want it to be yet :P)...  lots of things reminiscent of slack and freebsd,
but at the same time, it's not nearly as hard (so far) as the webpage seems
(to me) to make it out to be...  kinda fun, especially if you're wanting to
really get to know the in's and out's of your system....  talkabout being in
full control... i'm doing a stage 3 build, which means most of the hardcore
system libs are already compiled for you... if you start w/ stage 1,
EVERYTHING is compiled from scratch w/ your opt flags... great if you
really, really, really need that extra bit of speed, but good god... a
friend had his stage 1 install take well over a week!

and just to throw out some more opinions, here's my reasons for not choosing
one of the "major" distros:

1.) Red Hat - i use it every single day and know it backwards and forwards
(thanks to our distro being based on it)...  too boring... and TOO slow...
missing support for many multimedia codecs (tho', if anyone's interested, i
did write a PyGTK app that downloads/installs mp3, dvd, etc codecs w/ a
click of the mouse... http://getcodecs.sourceforge.net ... should work on
most RPM-based distros, but has only been tested on CPUBuilders OS)

2.) SuSE - still have a bad taste in my mouth from the first time i tried it
(7.2? 7.3?)...  too closed for my taste...  interesting side-note: according
to the SuSE employees, it's pronounced soos-uh

3.) MDK - too cutting edge...  lacks a lot of testing... and has anyone
looked at their naming schemes for RPMs?  (especially libraries) geez...
looks to me like a bad hack on a bad hack (RH)...  used to be my desktop OS
of choice, but got frustrated with the 9.1 release...

4.) Debian - just don't like it...  seems like it would make a good server
OS, but for me it wouldn't make a great desktop OS...  some great features,
but still...

5.) Caldera - can you say SCO? ;)

6.) Xandros/Corel/Lindows/etc - WAAAAAAAAAAAAAY too closed...  hell if i'm
gonna PAY to install GPL software!

7.) Slack - dunno, i should really try out 9... heard it's pretty
impressive...

8.) *BSD - unfortunately i haven't found any *BSD support for AC3
passthrough on my SBLive card, which totally defats the purpose of this
machine (aka dvd player)

anyway, just my few bucks of input... would be interested to hear why others
chose / didn't choose any distro(s)

gLaNDix

-- This is the discussion@xxxxxxxxx list.  To unsubscribe,
visit http://www.complete.org/cgi-bin/listargate-aclug.cgi