[GRLUG] The battle of the distros

[Ben DeMott]

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 going to pick on Slackware, because it's the distro I had the most
shortcomings with, most of it was me being a noob, but some of it was the
Distro. My frustration level went from a 10, back down to a 1 after
switching to Fedora - which was thought of as a more user friendly Distro at
the time)
I remember using Slackware in highschool and having to compile a scientific
calculator that I liked, then moving to Fedora for the first time and it
being in a yum repository.
I also recall attempting to get the latest version of gimp to run and just
giving up.
Also pecl libraries never seemed to work with Slackware - You would get
errors about missing arguments, this was most likely at the time someone
failed to compile the pecl library with proper constants, or defaults, I
could never get a PAE kernel to compile on Slackware - worked the first time
I tried it on Fedora, once again - it might have been my own shortcomings.
And that's not to say that fedora hasn't been without a few shortcomings;
now they've gone to a proprietary network manager which means firefox
doesn't detect that it's online (sigh).
I will say that Red Hat's decision to make apache into a custom distribution
called httpd has to be one of the dumbest things they've done, now there are
two sets of documentation for apache; one for httpd and one for 'apache' -
at first I wasn't sure if the same commands explicitly applied to both.

Linux is Linux, you guys are correct, I haven't Distro hopped for quite a
few years now, and I'm happy, chances are if I went back to another distro
now I would have no problems making everything work exactly as I wanted, but
that doesn't discount the fact that becoming a proficient linux user was a
lot less painful on Fedora.

Of course, I'll probably be an early adopter of Googles Linux Distro if they
release it, and I'll be on here signing it's praises (maybe they'll fix
gnome?).

On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 4:24 PM, Michael Mol <mikemol at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 4:21 PM, John-Thomas Richards <jtr at jrichards.org>
> wrote:
> > On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 03:44:52PM -0500, Collin Kidder wrote:
> >> Yes, I pretty much feel the same way, despite the fact that I'm
> >> currently in the distro shopping phase. I suppose the correct rule of
> >> thumb is the same as marriage - play the field, make up your mind, but
> >> darn it stick with your decision once you make one. This, of course, is
> >> not what I did. I got an OS divorce instead! ;-)
> >
> > Let's call it an annulment instead.  ;-)
>
> Indeed. It's only a divorce if the old OS keeps half your data and
> you're *still* making payments.
>
> --
> :wq
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