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What distro would you select if you just wanted a single newbie end user gui internet access terminal ?

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You might want to take a look at BeatrIX, a "Small. Simple. Elegant." distribution.

  <A HREF="http://www.watsky.net/" title="watsky.net">http://www.watsky.net/</a watsky.net>

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What distro would you select if you just wanted a single newbie end user gui internet access terminal ?

Ubuntu. Debian that holds your hand.

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Ubuntu does not hold your hand, it's easy to use. LFS holds your hand, bart is hard (comparatively) to use. Hand holding is telling what to do (e.g. complete documentation that only goes one way instead of giving you many options); ease of use is the ability to sit down and use it.

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Actually I prefer SUSE or Mandrake for a start. Anyone who is irritated with the idea of a harddrive install, may try live CD of SUSE or Mandrake.

If you are not convinced you should seek advice from other users.

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will see how it goes, thanks for your advise!

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What distro would you select if you just wanted a single newbie end user gui internet access terminal ?



I seriously doubt there is such a thing.



After 8 years of RedHat-style handholding, I consider myself finally savy enough to pick another distro. I've settled on one that doesn't hold my hand at all: Arch Linux. Makes me feel so grown up<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:-D



Arch gets all the headachie stuff out of the way (e.g. package management) but lets you do everything else just the way you like it. Arch and a set of my own install scripts (bash) are all I need.



It also leaves packages alone. So for example, rather than getting a bastardized KDE, like you do with RedHat, you just get the real McKoy. Very nice!



The author is right, though: There just isn't a "perfect" Linux out there -- not even for a newbie to try out. Fortunately, though, there is a Linux distro for just about every personality type. I think that's what's so "perfect" about Linux, in general.



Once upon a time, the only automobile a working stiff could afford was a Model-T Ford. Linux makes the computing market seem a lot more like today's auto industry -- full of variety!

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for sysadmin/advanced user - ubuntu

for beginner - suse/mandrake/fedora and ubuntu if they are using the whole pc - but most people want a gui if they are going do any fancy partitions.

I still think ubuntu is the best overall - I installed it for a few people and it never once croaked and recognized all hardware which is more I can say for the other three and once it is setup a newbie can use for day to day use.

so if a newbie has someone to install it then they should go with ubuntu - but if the newbie is doing the install then they are probably going with a gui install.

Me personally I like the install of unbuntu - it is easy and it flies and just goes to work - and best of all I only have to do it ONCE.

apt-get into it.

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newbie: linspire or xandros

mainstream user: suse, mandrake, fedora

linux geek: ubuntu, debian, gentoo...

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I agree. I work in a public school system. We've been slowly introducing FOSS apps for Windows (i.e. OpenOffice.org) and I've already changed all the servers over to Ubuntu. I'm testing Ubuntu on the desktop now and have received only positive feedback from the end-users so far. Switching to Ubuntu has already and will continue to save us hundreds of thousands of dollars each year which translates to saving the tax payers money. It's very easy to use and setup.

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I have been using Linux for almost 3 years now, starting with Red Hat 8 and then going from 9 to FC 1-3. I liked each of the Red Hat and Fedora distros except for Fedora Core 3. That one blows big time. I finally became so frustrated with it that I switched to Mandrake 10.1 because I couldn't get anything to work properly. KDE wouldn't activate the screensaver, the sound was turned off by default (who's stupid idea was that!) and it was a mess to figure that out. But most frustrating is the dependency hell that so commonly follows Red Hat distros. All of this caused me to try Mandrake 10.1 and it just flat out works. No huss no fuss. I'm not saying that Mandrake is the defacto standard that everyone should use. It just works for me! Hopefully Red Hat will get on the ball and make FC4 something worthwhile, then I may try it out.

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I have had a couple of friends who were tired of working with Windows, they wanted to learn linux. They came asking me (I have been using linux since RedHat 7.3). I gave them one website to learn linux. http://www.slackware.com. Sounds harsh, but I like to give slackware to Noobs because it teaches them to be indepented when wanting to fix some thing. It also teaches them how to go out and find the things they need to get linux to where they want it at. And so far it has worked for the both of them

~Alan Moser

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I took that route eight years ago, but only because I didn't know better. No way would I recommend that to someone, except in revenge.

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I've tried Red Hat back on 1998 until now, Suse on 1999, then used Mandrake 8.1 until 9.2, used Fedora Core (recently), used CoLinux with a Gentoo ISO and fell in love with it and then i installed Gentoo on my system, however, a friend recently made the mistake of asking me "What's the best distro?"... The looks of his face was amazing when i began enumerating possible uses of the different distros. My way to see it: RedHat = Stability for Servers with Graphical Interface, Suse & Mandrake = Desktop user, Gentoo = Power User's Desktop & Low administration server, and Fedora goes to the garbage bin where it belongs to... LOL, not really, but i like to use KDE and Fedora has funky bugs in its KDE..... Power to the Linux....

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I agree. I have used Red Hat since 8.0 and up to FC3. FC3 needs to be thrown in the can, because version 3 is horrible. FC1 and 2 were pretty good, but not 3. I was so disenchanted with FC3 that I switched to Mandrake 10.1 and haven't looked back. I really want to like Fedora, but when nothing works properly and dependency hell is at it's worst...what else am I going to do but go to a distro that is much more organized and a little less bleeding edge.

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I found that MEPIS was easy to use and install. It "just worked" on both my dev system and my laptop WITH wireless cards functioning write off the bat, wahoo! Pretty good forum as well and of course a book about linux that ships with the disk, which is nice. Your option of gnome, kde, etc. I agree about package management though, wish I could do a nice "Linux Update" like windows and just get the goods without having to look through 3,000 packages and versions and dependancies. I run Fedora on my server though since that is the system I'll most likely have to use if I ever move off windows developement job into a (silent prayer) linux one. If I had my choice though I'd be running freeBSD on the server hands down. Mahalo
see, I answerd the question. now was that so hard?

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I agree about package management though, wish I could do a nice "Linux Update" like windows and just get the goods without having to look through 3,000 packages and versions and dependancies.

It's about 2 clicks with synaptic.
Synaptic is a much better tool than anything Microsoft makes.

Click "Reload Package Information"
Click "Apply marked changes"

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Well, that's 3 clicks more than Microsoft automatic updates.

No, this is not meant as a troll. I *can* write cron jobs.

It's great you can find so many packages to install through Synaptic, and get them all updated, and almost always work afterwards. But there's still an unsatisfied need for the auto update equivalent.

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Well, Mepis did not work on my laptop, and didn't run the wireless card. It was the distro in the Book about point and click linux. Well, it didn't work, whereas SuSE and Knoppix did, and FC1 and FC2 didn't.

Noobs just don't install software. WYSIWYG. Whatever is on their distro, whatever got installed, that is what you get. Maybe Linspire works for easy install/upgrade but I didn't try it as it has cost and I didn't know if it would work, and I don't know if they want more subscription money every year. So they are out of my trying criteria.

So we want a lot for no expense, and hate paying and getting something no better or a little worse than what is free for the download. Hey, if what you got for $100 was $100 better than what you can get for free, OK, great, sign me up. But if what you get for $100 is a little worse than what you get for free, what's going on there? Marketing I guess. Yes, the SuSE support is quite limited. You better have the right problem or they don't support THAT (your particular problem). I guess I have never called for support from Microsoft, but then, MS always allows my laptop to sleep and wake up just fine. SuSE does if you know to set UID, and Knoppix works from the start. Fedora, well that just doesn't yet. FC3 pretty wild. FC1 not bad for stability.

Is it just my experience, or is 2.6 still not ready for prime time? Grab the copies of distros that still have a 2.4 kernel if you need stability.

SuSE was pretty good at 9.0. Then apparently 9.1 has the early 2.6.3 kernel, and that must not work very well because you can get DVDs of that professional distro as part of the purchase of some Linux magazines, and as the included DVD for a couple books. For SuSE to release thatprofessional distro for almost free, it must not have been that good. 9.2 from the DVD has a lot of little quirks and bugs, and the 2.6 kernel only, and it dies sometimes.

Maybe we need to wait for 2.6.20 before this will be OK, as they are trying to integrate USB2.0 and many other cool things that just are not good for stability, but are good for consumers. Will we have Consumer Linux with the stability of ME and professional Linux with the stability of win2K? Microsoft would applaud that development, now wouldn't they?

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I'm using SimplyMepis on my laptop and it detected and configured all of the hardware no problem. Wireless works great, as does ethernet and everything else.

I used SuSE and Mandrake for several years, and got sick of the dependency hell of installing software. I tested several Debian based distros and found SimplyMepis to be very easy to install and use. Hardware detection and configuration was automatic without any problems. Nice desktop.

While I edited the sources list to suit me, it's good for a new user as-is. I'd highly recommend it for a new Linux user.

But I also agree with the author in that there is NO perfect Linux distro out there today. We find one that suits us and stay with it. Personally I'll stick with the Debian-flavored distros from now on.

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I recommended Gentoo to two of my friends but I walked them through the install so they didn't have to "figure it out" alone. So far they like it a lot and portage makes it very easy for them to try out new programs. And of course they can call me if they have problems.

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i like slack cause its not loaded with useless soft. and its not so gui dependent like many other distros

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Eerrr... After reading the article, I got the feeling that the author hasn't tried apt-get at all: it always works and completely solves the dependancy problem. If he likes some GUI-work, then he could try Synaptic or Ubuntu Grumpy's Package Manager (the version after the soon-to-be-released Ubuntu Hoary). Debian and Ubuntu packages are usually very well tested, unlike bleeding-edge distros such as Gentoo (unless you use unstable)

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(unless you use unstable)

Debian "Unstable" has always been pretty bugless for me. Not totally, but then, what is, when you've got 1815 packages installed?

Synaptic is confusing. What could be simpler than

    # apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

    log out

    log in

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... and then have sit and answer questions about which version of a config file to keep at random times during the next few hours<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:-(

I currently prefer apt for rpm because it just gets on with an upgrade without stopping to ask me silly questions all the time while I can go and do something else. I can look for<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.rpmsave,<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.rpmnew and<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.rpmold files later if I want.

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"Assume yes" fixes that.

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Another good thing about apt-get is that you can get it with Debian which is the largest distro. I have tried many distros and found they all did the job but managing software is just easier with Debian and apt-get. A clue to the solidity of Debian is that it is the basis for a bunch of distros with great reps like Knoppix and Ubuntu. The apples do not fall far from the tree.

About the only niggling problem I have had with Debian is that in the switch to AMD64 I do not have OpenOffice except in a 32bit chroot. That is not Debian's fault. The guys at OpenOffice think 32bit runs fast enough. Problem is, I need to run a bunch of thin clients off one 64bit machine and I need all the zip I can get. For servers, 64bit is wonderful and OpenOffice is a server app for me. My people work on very large documents and reformatting several at once pegs the CPU metre. I will try AbiWord.

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If you do not like any distro, make you own, or help others (i.e. publish constructive criticism in devel forums, not just on public sites to scare new-comers). Show the world, HELP the world, don't just back-talk.

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Hard drives are so big and cheap that it's possible to put 5-6 distros on one drive and test drive them all out. Of course, putting multiple distros on a drive won't be the easiest of things for newbie though. But the Grub bootloader certainly makes it easier than lilo ever was.

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Without broadband Mandrake
With broadband Debian (sarge)

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Without broadband Mandrake
With broadband Debian (sarge)

Mandrake's RPM Hell is what drove me to Debian.

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Given that they're fairly new, I have been recommending LiveCDs, from SLAX to Knoppix, and have a friend that positively lives for DamnSmall.

They're a great way to get your feet wet with the UI differences and generally get used to the Linux way of doing things without committing to anything more than burning a CD from an iso.

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Live CDs are a good idea. I've given out several Knoppix CDs to teenage computer users as a way for them to broaden their computer knowledge, although I don't believe any of them have actually used the gift..... However Live CDs to me seem to miss lead a bit. They "just work" on the live CDs and that is what people like me like, however getting an install to do the same is never as easy, but if you use a Live CD at least you can work on gaining familiarity with Linux's way of doing business.

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What is wrong with SUSE? That the best help is in German? I suggest you, Sir, that you subscribe to the English mailing list.. And anyway if you are Aunt Tillie you should only use Linspire or Xandros.
I have learned almost everything by myself in SUSE and I have always found plenty of info available (ever heard of "man 'application'" or Google?

Re package managers: what is wrong with APT? It does a lot better than the Redmond OS has ever dreamt of (no mess with the register, DLLs, and so on)
Fedora has a buggy KDE? I agree, but then don't use Fedora.

And finally I disagree about (not) trying many distros. Everybody learns in a different way. I tried more than one hundred, and in the end I have come to the firm conclusion that nothing is better than SUSE, followed by Debian.
However, if you are braindead, you should stay away from computers. Would you agree about driving without a licence?

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Well since I can't answer the question as the suckingness will have to go in the direction most suited to the user, I let a script answer the questions for me:
<A HREF="http://eedok.voidofmind.com/linux/chooser.html" title="voidofmind.com">http://eedok.voidofmind.com/linux/chooser.html</a voidofmind.com>
-EEDOK

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Clever little tool

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I couldn't agree more. I tried many, many distros, and I have stuck with Ubuntu. I was using Libranet 2.8.1 for a while, then stumbled across Ubuntu over X-mas. Ubuntu has its issues, but the key is that I can tolerate those issues. You have to get it in your head that NO OS IS PERFECT...Winders or Linux.

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Hey,
I was a pretty happy gentoo user, too. It bugged me that I had to build all the packages from source - especially when installing a workstation.
I switched about a year ago though. I am now using Archlinux, which is pretty similar to gentoo. It's package management is similar but uses prebuild packages. Maybe you should try it and it might be the right one for you too!
Anyway - I hate the war different distro users fight - everybody like a different one!!! Thats the answer in my eyes
Have fun, Henne

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Gentoos power lies in the fact that everything is built from source. You evidently dont understand the concept if you hate it. Other distros pre-built packages are built on machines that sometimes have no similarity to your machine, when building from source you know it was built with your system in mind, so there cannot be any hardware incompatibilities.

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I have never seen so many nonsense’s in such a small article....:/
Brian my friend, it would be nice to think first before writing all this useless info.
Big mistake here: comparing Linux distros... they are simply not comparable (that´s why there is different distros J )
Is it only me or after having used so many distros you don’t know how to use any of them? Weird.
Package management? Did you forget to mention RedCarpet? Or OpenCarpet?
All the big Linux distros are more than ready to be used by “the simple user” by now.
The only thing that you have to do is “Open your Mind!”<nobr> <wbr></nobr>;)
<A HREF="http://www.suselinuxinfo.org/articles.php?lng=en&pg=230" title="suselinuxinfo.org">Switch to Linux</a suselinuxinfo.org>

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Omg another blind geek. So you can't compare Linux distros now? Wow..Have you tried living in China? I'd bet you'd love it there.

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I agree with the article, pick one and stick with it ~ unfortunately it is not easy to stick on one distro before trying and advice from others. And since 6 months ago, I've sticked on SimplyMEPIS - a Debian derivatives. It is very easy to install, most of the hardwares work, and it is very easy to have update (using Synaptic - a GUI front-end of apt-get) as long as good internet connection is avaialable.

With guidance of forum both Mepis forum and Debian forum - it is quite ok to solve problem.

rgds,
antonius aji
www.openesc.com

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Use whatever distro you can get real life help with.

In my case, I used to pass around Mandrakelinux cds, and I even built a website to help get some friends started.
I can't agree more with the idea to just pick one distro and stick with it - see also my learning-linux article.
It really annoys me to see that people get adviced all the time to use another distro if some things were not to their complete liking. Just here I read a comment of someone moving to debian to get away from Mandrakelinux' dependency hell. Ahm, as a longtime Mandrakelinux user, I can tell you that you're really not getting urpmi if you have big issues there, and for the few packages that are borked since the packager didn't manage to included the necessary dependency info, you could have easily found a fix.

Stick with a distro (unless, maybe, if some hardware is not supported at all - please realise that most distributions offer alternative kernels that may well work fine with your hardware..) and fix the issues you face - every issue you fix is one less. Have the distro makers fix the issues, and in the next release you won't have to do anything anymore.
Switch distro and you get a whole new pallet of things to fix and/or cope with.

Back to my opening statement; I think there are a lot of easy novice friendly distributions now: FC, Mandrakelinux, SUSE, Ubuntu, to name the usual suspects.
Pick any one of those, if possible one that a friend/colleague etc has experience with, and fix any issue that you come across.

My 2 Rappen,
aRTee
<A HREF="http://www.mandrake.tips.4.free.fr/" title="4.free.fr">http://www.mandrake.tips.4.free.fr/</a 4.free.fr>

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You are right. I started with RedHat 5.0, I stopped using Redhat at 7.2 (8.0 and above Fedora included were not good for me). I switch to Mandrake (9.2, I still use), I tried Debian (stable but old), SuSe (unable to get an iso), Slackware (stable but no help), Genntoo (too hard to install), couples of livecd (slax, knoppix, feather). Linux had, has a Kernel compilation nightmare, so I stick with the one installed by the installation process (too long, time consumming, etc). And one day I switch to FreeBSD 4.11 stable and I am happy (I tried NetBSD 1.6.2 and 2.0, OpenBSD 2.6).

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It's sensible to say that no distro is perfect and that patience and learning the distro make sense. Jumping into bed with a different distro every week is a recipe for disappointment.

It's nonsense, however, to say to choose *any* distro and do this. It really depends on what kind of person you are. I, like many people, have tried many distros until I found one I was comfortable with. It was like when I bought a car... I did research to narrow things down to a small group and when I test drove them, there was one that just felt right to me, end of story.

I think it's also accurate that a person will appreciate different distros depending on his maturity of experience with Linux.

For the record, I've settled for the last year on Debian Unstable (on four machines) after having tried Caldera, Redhat, Mandrake, Suse, Lycoris, Linspire, Slackware and Gentoo (Gentoo being the only other one to last about a year and be installed on more than one system).

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IF your objective is to really LEARN the ins and outs of GNU/Linux software, then starting out with a system that doesn't do TOO much for you forces you to learn. That's not always helpful if the entry point is too difficult.

I got my Linux start in 1995 with Slackware, and that turned out to be a good starting point FOR ME because I was already conversant with UNIX systems; I'd been using and programming on UNIX systems since 1982.

Just because that was MY experience doesn't make it right for everyone else. That's why we have so many choices, and I personally like and applaud the choices.

While on one hand, I would readily acknowledge that every system could stand improvements in one way or another, the fact that there are so many options available is an advantage, in my opinion, rather than a problem.

A few years ago, I always used to recommend MandrakeLinux to new users. Why? It is really easy to install, it has decent hardware detection, you can run a really basic installation and it coexists well with Windows, yet as you grow, you can start to use command line utilities instead of the drak utilities Mandrake provides, and things still work fine.

However, MandrakeLinux is hardly the only game in town. Today, I tend to recommend using Live CDs (and there are MANY to recommend) for those coming over from Windows systems. Knoppix is well known, but it's one of many to choose from. SimplyMEPIS is my favorite in this category, you can run it as a Live CD, but if you like it and you want more performance, you can install to your hard drive. It sacrifices a bit of initial flexibility for simplicity, but almost anyone can install it.

Hardcore enthusiasts, the ones that really want to find out what's under the covers, probably wouldn't go for Mandrake, and they almost certainly wouldn't go for SimplyMEPIS. Those are the kind of people that are better off starting with something like Slackware, Gentoo Linux, or Linux From Scratch.

Where do I stand? What's my ideal system? Well, I have several, I use more than one to meet all of my needs. If I could only have one system, I'd use Libranet. That's my main system. It's Debian based. I find I can install, update, and maintain easier with a Debian based system, and I find I can get a faster start with Libranet than anything else. When I just want to use a simple desktop, I use either SimplyMEPIS or Mandrake.

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In my earlier message, I failed to mention another really great system for starting out. It's ultra easy to instell, is comfortable for people coming over from a Windows environment, yet as you learn and want to customize (or even cannibalize) it, the system will go with you. The reason that is true is that it is a Debian-based system. I wanted to mention that all of my top favorites today are based on Debian packaging, and that's why I now prefer others over Mandrake (though I still like Mandrake).

So what is this other system? Xandros OCD 301. It was just announced at the recent LinuxWorld. I think it is one of the easiest systems to install to hard disk (SimplyMEPIS and Xandros are pretty close). Xandros looks professional, it's easy, a former Windows user will be comfortable with it, the choices of applications that are provided produce an immediately usable desktop environment, and yet it's still flexible. You can buy Xandros software to get more commercial applications (including a CodeWeavers application that allows you to actually run Microsoft Office and other Windows applications), or you can stick with only completely free software provided by the Debian project.

Great stuff, highly recommended. Again, the hands on people probably wouldn't go for it, but the consumer crowd ought to love it.

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You still didn't answer the question. So, as an example, here is how I would:

If you want to LEARN Linux, try Gentoo. The learning curve is steep, but once you've succeeded you will know a great deal about Linux. If you want to USE Linux, try Mepis. Debian based, sensible defaults, well executed. A great desktop OS.

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The state of slackware gnome is this:
Pat is going to consider dropping gnome as a Desktop enviroment, and anyone who wants to use Gnome on Slack has to use Dropline (www.dropline.net/gnome).

That said, anyone who uses Gnome on slack probably already does this, since DLG is lightyears ahead of the standered Slack Gnome.

HTH

David

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"Maybe you like GNOME? Well, then you have to stay away from Slackware..."

Here's the situation as I understand it:

Patrick Volkerding dislikes GNOME because it's a pain to package. He claims that he was spending about one-third of his development time packaging GNOME.

He's not entirely wrong. I've built a few GNOME binary packages for Slackware (customized gnome-vfs, fam, and metacity packages, specifically), and the main problem is that GConf doesn't honor "--prefix=/new/path" in the configure script, nor can you use "make install DESTDIR=/new/path" with GConf. On the other hand, once you've figured out that you can relocate GConf schemas with the "--with-gconf-source=" configure option, it's not that hard to write a build script.

Anyway, the most popular third-party GNOME for Slackware is Dropline (www.dropline.net). However, Pat is not going to make Dropline the "official" Slackware GNOME, and he's not going to include it on the Slackware CD distribution.

A common complaint about Dropline is that it replaces many official Slackware packages and does a few things differently than a default Slack system. For example, Dropline uses PAM, but Pat refuses to put PAM in Slackware.

As a result, a small group started the GWare project (www.gware.org) to make a "less-intrusive" add-on GNOME for Slackware, but GWare is early in development, whereas Dropline has been around for a while.

It is likely that an obsolete version of GNOME will linger on Slackware for a while and eventually be dropped completely with no "official" replacement. In a recent IRC discussion, somebody asked Pat about GNOME, and he basically said that if you like GNOME, you should just use Ubuntu instead of Slackware.

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Arch Linux is number one in my book! The package mngt system, pacman, rocks!

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Too much of a good thing could be a bad thing...



Where open source give you a freedom of choice and that is great I do believe that too many options could be a bad thing. If have seen this numerous times where sometimes when a developers find a tool that does not do what they want it to do, they would go off and right their own version, instead of enhancing the original tool in the first place. Sometimes this has to do with the fact that the learning curve of making chances to the original source is higher than it would be to develop it from scratch.



But this action leads to instead of having one product that works with less bugs and issues and more features, you end up with the 2 projects with less features and more bugs. Prime example if this would be the package management tools.



This is one complaint I have heard numerous times, "... but in Microsoft Windows you only have to do this and this and it works, why do have to do this that and this if you want this or if you want that then you need to do that this that that and this in Linux". In the end it just confuses the hell out of the end users and he ends up not using the system at all, no matter how beautiful it is technically. The reason why Microsoft just works (these days) are:

• They have unified development team


• One goal


• They have one product (be it a Word Editor, Media Player or IDE) but all of these products are feature rich and way less buggy than any open source product I have every used.

Could you imagine uniting all the open source developers around the globe to work on one operating system (kernel), one desktop environment, one office suite, one mail client, one browser, one database server, one VPN client, one package management, one config tool, one IDE, one etc. You would truly have a force that is able to overthrow the market as we know it today.


Where some people might see the number of different Linux distributions as the success of Linux, I see it has its major downfall.



I am not saying lets remove competition or choice but I think the open source market needs to have a global focus instead of branching at every change it gets.


Just a thought!

#

They all suck. What good is a stupid resource hogging window manager for your window manager? Just run XP or OS X.


  Learn to use the menu structure of your window manager and a little bash and you can make those borkn gnome - kde setups look sick and slow.


  I click 'connect' and it connects me. To do that in gnome or kde I have to click at least three times.


  To watch a video I right click on the background get a menu, click video/music/the-title and it plays.


  Arrggghh I hate that fancy crap they try to make you use *nix like windose.


    PenGun

  Do What Now ???<nobr> <wbr></nobr>... Standards and Practices !

#

I think I wrote this message poorly; it was not supposed to sound like a shot at Dropline. I'm sorry if I did. "Intrusive" is GWare's word, not mine.

Dropline is doing a great job of building GNOME for Slackware. As somebody else pointed out, the changes made by Dropline, such as installing PAM, are done for good reasons. <A HREF="http://dlgwiki.dot42.org/index.php/Frequently%20Unasked%20Questions" title="dot42.org">http://dlgwiki.dot42.org/index.php/Frequently%20U<nobr>n<wbr></nobr> asked%20Questions</a dot42.org> Also, Dropline keeps up with GNOME releases and has a friendly and helpful community in the forums.

Last year, somebody posted an email from Patrick Volkerding in which he mentioned that he may drop GNOME and let Dropline do it, which suggests that Dropline would be the de facto official GNOME for Slackware. <A HREF="http://www.dropline.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3430" title="dropline.net">http://www.dropline.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=34<nobr>3<wbr></nobr> 0</a dropline.net>

Somebody posted a log of the IRC chat where Patrick made his Ubuntu comment: "GNOME heads: there's this thing called Ubuntu..." <A HREF="http://ximpul.ath.cx/log.txt" title="ximpul.ath.cx">http://ximpul.ath.cx/log.txt</a ximpul.ath.cx>

Here's a forum post where people talked about Pat dropping GNOME and whether or not the dropline installer might make it into the official distribution: <A HREF="http://www.dropline.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3808" title="dropline.net">http://www.dropline.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=38<nobr>0<wbr></nobr> 8</a dropline.net>

There have been a couple other efforts at GNOME builds on Slackware:
<A HREF="http://linuce.free.fr/slackware/10.1/gnome-2.8.3+/" title="linuce.free.fr">http://linuce.free.fr/slackware/10.1/gnome-2.8.3+<nobr>/<wbr></nobr> </a linuce.free.fr>
<A HREF="http://gsb.sourceforge.net/" title="sourceforge.net">http://gsb.sourceforge.net/</a sourceforge.net>

#

There are some other options for GNOME on slackware.

Linuce: http://linuce.free.fr/slackware/10.1/gnome-2.8.3+<nobr>/<wbr></nobr>
GSB: http://gsb.sourceforge.net

#

I think Pat should remove both Gnome and KDE and leave only XFCE and include E17.

Who needs bloated software?

#

Haha, I think it should just be a base install of say 1 cd that includes all the basics to run linux, and others should be compiled by the user.

#

"Patrick Volkerding dislikes GNOME because it's a pain to package. He claims that he was spending about one-third of his development time packaging GNOME."

Patrick's unwillingness to continue packaging Gnome is entirely understandable. Since the Gnome developers have very finely grained where each project ends and begins, it's comprised of *many* tiny little packages which makes packaging it fairly labor intensive. Frankly, I'm almost suprised that he kept up with it for as long as he did. I've been building Gnome from source for years (I'll freely admit I have a streak of masochism) and around release times, it becomes far more than one person can reasonably handle alone (48-hour packaging binges are counterproductive to quality).

"He's not entirely wrong. I've built a few GNOME binary packages for Slackware (customized gnome-vfs, fam, and metacity packages, specifically), and the main problem is that GConf doesn't honor "--prefix=/new/path" in the configure script, nor can you use "make install DESTDIR=/new/path" with GConf. On the other hand, once you've figured out that you can relocate GConf schemas with the "--with-gconf-source=" configure option, it's not that hard to write a build script."

No, you're wrong. (Apologists beware, I have no tolerance for your kind!) GConf honors that configure script directive just fine, and it's makefiles (being automake-generated) utilize DESTDIR as well. You should look more closely at what it's doing with the schema files in the installation target of the Makefiles and then you'll understand more clearly what's going on.

"Anyway, the most popular third-party GNOME for Slackware is Dropline (www.dropline.net). However, Pat is not going to make Dropline the "official" Slackware GNOME, and he's not going to include it on the Slackware CD distribution."

The Dropline developers are cool with that (oh, did I happen to mention I aligned myself with Dropline when Todd K. moved on to focus on his education?). Sometime after the Gnome Desktop 2.10 release (and we have some time) makes it's way into the public's hands, there's going to be a careful audit and a few minor modifications/fixes that should make it installable from it's own CD using the normal Slackware installer as a Slackware diskset as well as with the custom installer.

As to it's "intrusiveness" and the PAM thing,
let me mention also the following link that answers a number of criticisms about Dropline. Just pardon that it's a little crude (since it's a first draft) and is mainly targeted at engineers. <A HREF="http://dlgwiki.dot42.org/index.php/Frequently%20Unasked%20Questions" title="dot42.org">http://dlgwiki.dot42.org/index.php/Frequently%20U<nobr>n<wbr></nobr> asked%20Questions</a dot42.org>
The short of it is that while we also have our reservations about PAM, it eliminates a number of long-standing problems with using Slackware as a desktop, and it's definitely not being included on some supercilious whim.

#

If you have tried many Linux distroes and they have all failed in one or another place, I suggest you trying a true Unix; FreeBSD

www.freebsd.org

#

I use debian sarge for the base system, then build from source on my linux systems.

But for the average user i still think debian is the best, i've rarely had apt-get fail unless i was using the experimental repos.

But for any real productions systems like my server i use FreeBSD

#

I started supporting Linux about 2 years ago and my biggest problem was finding a distro that I could use to set-up a 'minimal' installation. eg. If you want a dedicated Samba server, you don't want KDE or Gnome, but you need to be able to update easily etc.

I found Debian to be the best for this because of BACKPORTS. That is where the latest releases of software are compiled to run on the stable (older) release of Debian. It's at www.backports.org.

Debian is the best distro for server installation.

#

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#

The OS is now a commodity. Just pick one and make it work. Just keep your data on a usb flash drive and boot whatever the hell you want to.

#

If you don't want to use a distro, you might want to look at the Slashpackage-Foreign system.
http://code.dogmap.org./spf/

- package files grouped in one dir; no<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/usr mess
- use existing file utils for package management
- easy, atomic upgrades/downgrades
- huge list of supported packages

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#

...your only practical choice may be Debian. Many of the newbie-friendly distros are restricted to booting the installer from a CD, and don't provide boot floppies even as images on the CD. So if the target machine doesn't have a bootable CD drive, you're out of luck. Some newer distros require X Windows to work during installation, which can be a show-stopper with some older video boards and monitors. This excludes a lot of old machines that are perfectly capable of running up-to-date open source software, if you could only get it installed.

Debian is rapidly outgrowing its long-time reputation as a tough install. With the new installer that's been in beta test for the last few months, it's considerably easier. See www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer. Its ambition is to install on anything, and its versatility is unrivaled. You can boot the installation process from CD, DVD, floppies, or a bootable network board. It runs on many different CPU architectures. On an X86 it works on the oldest display hardware. After booting, you can read in the software from CDs, DVD, a mounted ISO image file, or a local or remote Debian mirror. I usually install from the net and don't bother burning CDs.

The downside is that this is beta software, and some capabilities are still missing. For example, it doesn't auto-detect some older boards, such as the AHA1542 SCSI adapter and the NE-2000 ISA network board. You have to know how to load those modules from the command line after they've downloaded. Unusual situations such as two network boards of the same type can make it necessary to spend some time with the manuals to get everything configured. But you can get there with Debian, where you might not be able to with any other distro. The other downside, at least to less experienced users, is that getting this versatility comes at the price of more direct involvement with the software you're installing, the hardware you're installing it on, and the installation process itself; however, you come out of it with more understanding of what's really going on in your system.

Gentoo, now, is even more versatile than Debian, because it doesn't use an installer at all. You do everything from the command line in full control of everything that happens, and once you know your way around Linux, you can cope with just about anything. Gentoo doesn't have boot floppies, but you can install an older distro that does, then cross-install Gentoo from there. But if you're short of disk space, you won't be able to compile enough of it to do anything useful. Compilation time gets pretty unreasonable on anything less than a 1 GHz machine, too. So if you want to put an old 486 or P1 to work as a print server or firewall, and stay up to date with security upgrades and bugfixes as they come out, Debian just might be the only remaining distro in the world that you can actually install.

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#

So I know how you feel. I have been using Linux since RH 7, used RH till 8.0 then gave Gentoo a try (before Gentoo was the 1337 thing to do, started in spring 2002) and really liked the learning. I have recently tried Suse 9.2, and think it is a great place for a new person, the manuals that come with the pay for version are pretty decent (all about 1400 pages of manuals). I found that RH didn't seem how I wanted, and Gentoo is moving in a direction that seems not so good to me, so I'm currently trying Linux From Scratch.

Yes, I'm crazy. But even though the LFS project seems like a daunting task, I am liking it so far. The documentation is far beyond any other distro that I have used, they actually explain what the heck all the packages and programs do. If you are a seasoned Linux person, give LFS a try. All you need is about 2GB of free space to slap a partition, gcc and some other devel tools.

Give it a try<nobr> <wbr></nobr>;)

#

MS-Linux is pretty good.

#

I like Arch.. pacman is a pretty good package manager. Granted it's repo isn't as expansive as other distros, but for everything a n00b needs its pretty much all there, and it's not too hard to make the package yourself with Arch.

Though I'd suggest a lot of reading beforehand. A noob might get confused when all they see after they install arch is "#Login: "

#

I first chose to try out debian. it didnt like me. i attempted to install it 4 times. I felt that i accomplished something after i tricked it into having an x window system error. so then i had to configure the x window system using the x window system(seemed to be working fine to me). I was thoroughly frustrated and i had heard lycoris was for beginners. i installed lycoris without a problem. lycoris was too simple in my opinion, and it refused to connect to my windows network. i looked online and found xandros, which was supposed to connect to windwows networks easily. i installed it and havent looked back. it is debian based, so it can use all of its packages (which i had liked before), comes with everything you would want, and i think that it is a great OS for beginners.

#

Good advice. Just get slak, although it may be too good for you, you may grow into it<nobr> <wbr></nobr>;).


    PenGun

  Do What Now ???<nobr> <wbr></nobr>... Standards and Practices !

#

Too much of a good thing could be a bad thing. .


Where open source give you a freedom of choice and that is great I do believe that too many options could be a bad thing. If have seen this numerous times where sometimes when a developers find a tool that does not do what they want it to do, they would go off and right their own version, instead of enhancing the original tool in the first place. Sometimes this has to do with the fact that the learning curve of making chances to the original source is higher than it would be to develop it from scratch.



But this action leads to instead of having one product that works with less bugs and issues and more features, you end up with the 2 projects with less features and more bugs. Prime example if this would be the package management tools.

This is one complaint I have heard numerous times, "... but in Microsoft Windows you only have to do this and this and it works, why do have to do this that and this if you want this or if you want that then you need to do that this that that and this in Linux". In the end it just confuses the hell out of the end users and he ends up not using the system at all, no matter how beautiful it is technically. The reason why Microsoft just works (these days)

• They have unified development team


• One goal


• They have one product (be it a Word Editor, Media Player or IDE) but all of these products are feature rich and way less buggy than any open source product I have every used.

Could you imagine uniting all the open source developers around the globe to work on one operating system (kernel), one desktop environment, one office suite, one mail client, one browser, one database server, one VPN client, one package management, one config tool, one IDE, one etc. You would truly have a force that is able to overthrow the market as we know it today.



Where some people might see the number of different Linux distributions as the success of Linux, I see it has its major downfall.


I am not saying lets remove competition or choice but I think the open source market needs to have a global focus instead of branching at every change it gets.


Just a thought!

#

"They have unified development team

  One goal"

This is a common misconception. MS don't have unified development - server and desktop releases are out of sync, WinCE is a different code base to Windows, and the "Office System" is still a bunch of separate products. Office:Mac is a totally separate code-base again... There is not even a consistent look-and-feel across and all MS products.

You get more a consistent desktop from the best GNOME implementations (Ubuntu and Red Hat), even though GNOME integration in OpenOffice and Firefox is not perfect.

#

It does not matter if they dont have a global microsoft team but they do have a unified team for each of their products. They have one> team for Microsoft Office, one team for Visual Studio, one team for Sql Server etc. They dont have two teams developing two different versions of Office.



My point is that is not about consistentancy either, my point could be summarized as:



Less of the same Product = More Feautures, Less Bugs, Bigger Development Team

OR

More of the same Product = Smaller Teams, More Bugs, Less features

#

I could not agree more with your synopsis. The everyday user wants something that just works and they do not have to mess around with very much. Easy installation, automatic updates, antivirus, easy email, internet, unfortunately required product registration and Windows compatibilty.

Agree on a distribution, develop it, enhance it, then market it. Make a product you can pitch to Dell, Gateway, HP, and IBM. That's my thoughts.

#

Knoppix is really really good. You can load the CD and run the knoppix-installer and have a workstation in 5 minutes. Plus its debian, just use apt-get update and apt-get upgrade and always get the latest updates.

Fantastic distro.

john

#

most newbies want to know which distribnution is better for a specific hardware configuration. I.E., new VS old hardware; fast VS slow PC.

#

While you discuss what distro is better "once" again, Windows XP got more users, got stability, got more applications and won the war.
The question isn't what's the best distro, the question is if it's worth the trouble to even install Linux at this time. I think the answer is: not anymore. I want to be productive as soon as I install my OS. I don't care if it's Linux or Windows I just need to start do my work on my system, and XP is the obvious solution for this purpouse. I was Linux user in the past and liked it very much but while Windows doesn't even make a single error and accept all my valuable hardware, Linux is a pain in ass to correctly configure all my stuff, so it's gone to the Recycle Bin.

#

Yeah, right. I believe you, be happy, I already am with my XP system. I'm 100% productive now and never again will go back to Linux in my desktop.

#

Be happy and good luck with the spyware, malware, viruses, security vulnerabilities, backdoors, etc...

#

In some ways I have to agree. Online banking
security and no malware are two good reasons
to continue to dual boot and hope Linux becomes
compatible with all of my hardware and not just
most of it.

#

I am glad that you have a few hundred (or thousand, depending on how serious of a developer you are) dollars to invest in a windows machine. I gave up after I needed to purchase another copy of WindowsXP to use avoid major crashes on an older system. Total cost of installing linux? Three days of interesting learning experience. Also, after typing two commands to update every important piece of software on my system (apt-get update && apt-get upgrade; shutdown -r now) I will never go back.

Enjoy your newfound love in WindowsXP, and I will enjoy my newfound love in what I can only describe as "Awesomness-on-a-CD (TM)"

#

I love Gentoo and have switched from CRUX, another source based distro. I am a programmer, and for some reason I like the idea of compiling everything - weird because that's what I do all day...the speed difference between source and binary is amazing, but not having an installer, or installs taking many hours (days) can frighten some people off.

#

Linux? Say What now in the What What!

Finally, I have decided to upgrade 95 or should I switch to another OS, but which one, I have been hearing a lot about this thing called Linux. Yes Linux that’s it, I’ll switch to Linux, its damn near FREE!
The voice in my head (Supreme OverLORD): “Go to www.Linux.com my child, they will make it all CRYSTAL CLEAR!” Say what? Supreme OverLORD: “Go to www.Linux.com you idiot! Or I will STOP talking to you.”
Off I went! I read and I read and I clicked and I searched and read some more. Had sex with the wife a couple of times went to sleep, woke up and I read some more. Boy those chicken select sandwiches from McDonald are really good.
Unfortunately, Linux.com is loaded with more garbage intended for people who prefer to be called “Geeks!” lets face it I am a Idiot and so is 80-90% of the general public. We just want to turn it on, insert the CD & click Setup? It’s true we don’t read the Licensing agreement; it’s easier to click “I Agree”, besides you want to use the program don’t you? I am so ashamed of myself.

Oh YES! My point: Linux is dying; it has been conquered because it has been divided, and God know how many brands/version are out there:

Which one do I choose?
Why?
How much will it cost?
Will it or data generated by it be compatible with other version of Linux?
Will it be compatible with Windows?
Are there applications out there for that version such that I can do my job?
Is there support available 24x7?
What about security?

In contrast, there is one Windows, One Mac OS that is compatible with every other version of said OS. Get this; there are hundred of thousands of programs out there most can be had for free or next to nothing for these OS.
In summary, I am going to upgrade to Windows XP. Sorry gentlemen, I just want something that works 90% of the time: I don’t want to waste a second of my time reading about partition magic, boot sector, passwd files and GNU and when I create a presentation, I want to make sure that it will work on the computers at my job, otherwise I’ll be fired.

Ps: I JUST WANT SOMETHING THAT WORKS & I DON’T CARE HOW! Yes its cool that you can make that thingy blink and rollover!

                                                                Sincerely, seon.m.cort@netscape.com

#

I'm sorry Seon.

A lot of progressive thinkers that aren't ready for geekdom, unfortunately, go down that path, and that's what's driving much of the resistance to intellectual freedom in the US today. Pretty soon it will be a crime to fast-forward commercials on shows you've taped because it's just easier to click I Agree and shell out some money to be 90% stable and 100% compatible.

Of course the 100% compatible is a myth too, but we won't go there.

I urge you to reconsider before dropping out and giving up. Try this: look at distrowatch and figure out which ones are most popular (you sound like an Ubuntu kind of guy). See if they have a LiveCD. If they do (Ubuntu does), download it and see how it works. Play around with it. Worst case scenario - you can just use Linux off your liveCD and not have to mess around with the boot sector. Best case scenario - you decide you like the control and stability Linux gives you and the patriotic part of you goads you on to doing a full install after consulting a few geeks.

Another option would be to try Damn Small Linux from a $25 USB keydrive. Just don't give up yet!

#

it's an obsessive-compulsive habit to switch distros. blame microsoft, because that's where we developed the need to periodically format our computers.

i've found myself switching distros about once per year, but you could always "try a different distro every month" (see www.distroofthemonth.com )

#

It's a pita to build up as a workstation (i've done it 4 times so far on my laptop), but honestly once I got used to the whole emerge thing it's been nice to run with. But your right, there are things that drive me nuts, like getting my 802.11g wireless nic working (which still doesn't work). But I've switched away from it twice so far and both times have come back. Learning to fix the problem is definatly the best way to go.

Thanks for the article
Aric.

#

I have a feeling your nic uses a Broadcom chip, which has no Linux drivers available. I had a ton of problems getting mine to work. This was in Suse 9.0 (which is the 2.4 kernel), but my experience may help. I also managed to get it working in Mandrake 10.1, which uses the 2.6 kernel (but different versions of ndiswrapper).

First, you need the Windows driver for the wireless card or chip (I used the driver from an XP install I had). Then, you have to install a Linux program called "ndiswrapper". Getting the three (Windows driver, Linux, and ndiswrapper) to work together involves reading a lot of documentation and trial and error. I started out with the latest version of ndiswrapper, and *WENT BACKWARDS* through the versions until I got one that worked (which I think was version<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.7 for Suse; version<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.9 for Mandrake). I don't know why, but the latest version doesn't always work. Also, it seems different versions work for the 2.4 and 2.6 kernels. Again, I don't know why. I'm not a Linux guru. Sometimes, Linux could see and identify the wifi card, but refused to use it. YMMV.

It may not be politically correct to use a Windows driver in Linux, but it works.

If this helps anyone get wifi working then my work here is done.

#

I've read many articles about distro selection but this one is the best I've read so far. Last paragraph made it all crystal clear.

Good work. I liked it

#

I always point new users toward slackware. Especialy pre version 9.0 if they can get it. Nothing teaches you more than having to set up your own video drivers and alike. Granted some people will give up but I find most enjoy the challenge if they can get a little help when they get stuck.

#

The advice that those new to Linux should just pick a distro and stick with it a while to learn its ins and outs is a good one. You can't really compare different distros until you know enough about Linux to know what you're looking at. I spent a year or two working with Unix, and still found this method worked well for me.

After getting to know version 9.0 of Suse, I started looking at some of the others, like Mandrake, Red Hat, Xandros, and even Lindows (so I was curious). I even tried Suse 9.2, before going back to Suse 9.0. I knew what worked, what didn't, and how to fix it (I even had the Broadcom WIFI working in my laptop using Suse 9.0).

You get to know the good points, as well as the bad of a distro. Of course, once you know how to fix those bad points, you may not have a reason to switch. More than likely, you know exactly what you're looking for -- what feature or fix is good enough for you to go to the trouble of moving to a new distro.

Myself, I've been quite happy with Suse. Now if I could only read German...!

#

I basically agree - every Linux ditribution I've tried has some drawback (major or minor). However, considering the alternatives, Linux still comes out ahead in my book - I'm currently running Ubuntu Linux on both desktop and laptop.

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I am a newbie still although I've moved up on the list a little, but haven't cleared the newbie title yet. I loaded SuSE 8.0 as my first linux. Everything was going good, until it got out of date enough that simple things like Everybuddy wouldn't work with MSN contacts, and many web pages wouldn't load on the machine. I tried the YaST to auto update, but I do that over a phone line and it didn't appear to be able to do things in 7 hour blocks. First couple attempts left me with a machine where nothing was linked correctly.
A friend gave me RedHat 8.0 to try and I did, but there were similar issues since it was just as out of date as the SuSE distro I already had.
The guys at work really talk up Gentoo as being the greatest, so I ordered an installation CD and gave it a try. Doing the actual updates wasn't that big of a deal until it came to updating configuration files. After two weeks of constantly downloading stuff (remember I'm on a phone line) I messed up the configuration files and had to start the installation all over. After I learned of the gui update-cfg program I was able to get the updates installed without issues, but it bugged me that after an update all my mail was gone, Internet book marks were gone, etc! Also I spent a year trying to get different hardware items to work, usb thumb drive, internal zip drive, on board audio, Lexmark printer, etc. Most of my computer didn't work during that time.
I had a friend help me do a reload of Gentoo with the 2.6 kernel and a lot of stuff did work when he got done, but I still didn't have a functioning printer, usb thumbdrive couldn't be mounted, and no on board audio when playing music.
So I scrapped Gentoo and went with SuSE 9.2. It loads really nice and most everything works straight out of the box. The zip drive is virtually un usable since if you boot it up with a disk in it, the auto mount opens a window for it every minute or so and eventually you find your machine not working right because of all the windows opened. So I boot it with a disk in it (so that the drive is recognized) then upon entering KDE I kick it out and only push it back in if I need something off of it real quick. I'm too much of a chicken to try the auto update thing again, because I hate having my computer all messed up and un usable, so I've already accepted that I'll be buying the update CD once things stop working again.
My experience is that Linux for Desktop users has improved greatly over the past three years, but there is still a lot of room for growth. I'd like to see more focus on making things work right after an install and maybe a way to organize discussion boards better so that answers given that don't work can get weeded back out, or correct answers easier to find or something. I don't have a solution, I just haven't been impressed.

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I am running fedora core 3 on a lot of computers and suse 9.1 on my nx5000 laptop (it came preinstalled). To me it is no longer a question of what distribution I run but which repositories I use to maintain my computer. I use kde, and while it is true kde is lousy on fedora it is not if you use the rpm's from the kde-redhat project. I use the repositories at freshrpms, dag Wiers and kde-redhat, and it works beautifully. On my suse laptop I use the repositories at gwdg, specifically base update security packman packman-i686 kde suser-rbos and kde3-stable.
The only thing that remains a bit difficult is to find a suitable reasonably conservative set of repositories. I have gotten myself in trouble by using too wild repositories, but now I am very happy. The nx5000 with this set of repositories works absolutely wonderfully. I have written a page on my fedora experiences at http://klid.dk/kde/da/mycomputer.html, and maybe I will add the suse experiences at some point.

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Very valid points. There are things that drive me up the wall sometimes, but then that can happen to you with Mac and lets not mention M$!!! But no I don't see any reasons to hate any distro so far with the possible exception of Fedora, downloaded, installed and disinstalled in my case in less time than you can snap your fingers. I would recommend Mandrake, Suse or Mepis depending on the computer I was installing it, currently I run Mandrake on my server and PC workstation and Suse on my laptop for my own particular reasons. One thing that the author seems to miss is diversity is richness, does he want one single distro and tie us into a the same windows and mac tyranny. If Suse have to compete with Mandrake,Mandrake with Redhat, Debinan with slackware, juk with amarok and digikam with Kalbum aren't they developing better software all the time?

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I'll agree distros have pros and cons to each one. With that said building a distro isn't a walk in the park.

Fedora's community approach is awesome, but I STRONGLY DISLIKE Fedora. So I run Debian Sid for the bleeding edge.

File server and archive(SATA) servers run Debian Sarge. Never had an issue with 2.6.x and SATA.

Debian's installer is kindergarten, so it's fine for Gnewbie's. Probably the hardest thing for the newbie is X and knowing one's hardware. A little learning curve for a secure true multiuser OS is a small trade-off.

Got old hardware - Ditch X and party with ncurses.

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Funny thing, I can't distribute this one but i reccomend it over any of the distro's I carry or use. WOnderfully simple installation, and it recognized all my hardware. A+ in my book

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I personally feel that unless someone is serious about learning the linux OS, they might as well just get a live cd to use each time the distro of choice updates itself to a new stable version.

Most people who ask me about linux when they see me with a book about it are either too lazy or too busy to spend the time necessary to become proficient with it.

Although Windows is the most used OS, it worries me because so many people are getting hi speed, always on internet connections to their computers, and have little knowledge or training on how to protect them. I think that there should be a license needed and an exam necessary before anyone can get broadband.

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I have been using Linux for over 10 years. Over those years I have come to form the same opinion as the author. For beginners, pick one and stick with it, until you are advanced enough to know if the problems you are having are really related to the distro or yourself.

Linux is by far my favorite OS, and the only one I use. I may be alone in this, but I love the fact that we have so many distros to choose from.

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I think the reccommendations are so varied because no one is asking "Why do you want to use Linux?".It seems that a simple chart of basic functions (yes/no) would help us make the proper selection.
The comments here are much better than any other sites that I have visited and I'm now leaning toward Debian or MEPIS.
But, which will work with a AMD Athalon, which will boot from a floppy (thanks for the answer), how fast, etc.... It's no wonder that we newbies end up asking "What do you like?"

Personally, I'm hoping that that Linux doesn't replicate Windows, because Windows is made for those that want to live the way Microsoft wants them to live. I think of it as "Sheepware".
I'm hoping Linux will again give me the flexibility to make it do what I want it to do.
I don't chat and share pictures and I'm certain that many grandmothers love Microsoft when they aren't paying someone to remove their viruses. I want a serious machine that saves me time, doesn't crash and helps me improve the quality of information that I create.
Thanks for the many intelligent comments and I hope that I'll be able to contribute somewhere in the future.

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