[GRLUG] The battle of the distros

[John-Thomas Richards]

On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 02:27:14PM -0500, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> > I won't be correcting you, I think both the Fedora and Ubuntu team's
> > have done an excellent job of just getting things to 'work'.
> > I'm not an expert on compiling and to me it's really frustrating to
> > find common applications or packages that I HAVE to compile for my
> > kernel, to often find using make && makefile has errors or something
> > goes... I just don't have the time for it.
> 
> I'm curious what applications those would be?  I've used LINUX as my
> primary desktop for a decade,  and I haven't had to compile an
> application in years.  And I'm pretty sure I haven't built a kernel in
> at least five years.

I'm with you; I've used Linux as an end-user (only) for eleven years and
have not had to compile an app (other than e17, which is in heavy
development) in a long time.  Part of that reason, though, is I run
Debian; Debian has probably a larger number of apps in its repository
than any other distro.  (There.  The onslaught begins.)

> > I'm sure there will be the onslaught of people telling me why Debian,
> > or Slackware are more fit distributions... but maybe I'm not 1337
> > enough to handle them ;) .
> 
> Nah, I don't care what you use. :)   I settled on openSUSE back on
> release 10 and haven't seen any reason to change.  Generally, distro
> hopping/shopping is a colossal waste of time.

If a user would settle on a distro and learn it's quirks, life would
become a lot easier.  Part of the reason I love Debian so much is I know
Debian.  (The rest of the reason is Debian is better than
[insert-distro].)  When you boil it down, Linux is Linux.  If a user
will take the time to learn the quirks of openSUSE, openSUSE will likely
meet his needs.  It could be Ubuntu or Fedora or Mandriva or Puppy or
whatever.  Make a decision and take the time to learn the distro.
-- 
john-thomas
------
The Lord prefers common-looking people. That is the reason He makes so
many of them.
Abraham Lincoln, 16th president of the U.S. (1809-1865)