[wellylug] Re: Distrowars (was OpenOffice 1.1.1)

[JP]

 --- Damon Lynch wrote: 

> Did you know about urpmi before?  It seems quite a
> few Debian users have
> never even heard of it.
> 

Debian was the first distro I used, but I did try
RedHat and Mandrake a couple of years ago (maybe more,
can't remember).  At that point, it didn't seem there
was a decent equivalent for apt.

There might be good options now (urpmi), but I went
back to Debian at that point and have been quite happy
there ever since -- no reason to try anything
else...yet.

My biggest beef with Mandrake is what to do if the
thing you want to do doesn't come 'built-in'.  At the
installfest, for example, we were trying to install a
PCI modem (known to work with Linux) on a new Mandrake
system.  The Mandrake wizard thingy couldn't find a
driver and it wasn't clear how to add one in manually.

With Debian, and probably slack/from scratch distros,
I can do so quite happily, since those systems force
you to learn where everything goes.  Mandrake and
RedHat seem to use non-standard locations for their
config files, and you're always afraid of breaking
whatever configuration engine is used by making manual
changes.

I'm not knocking Mandrake, and I'm pleased to hear
that an apt replacement is available, but there are
definite advantages to running a Debian system. 
Mandrake holds your hand, but when it can't solve the
problem, it's hard to do it yourself.  Debian does
little hand-holding, but it is easy to do something
'outside the square' with it because of that.

Debian also gives you the advantage of running on less
powerful systems.  I have kde(2), OpenOffice(1.1),
Mozilla(7?), TV/radio viewing/listening/capture, a
switchable Japanese language environment and a full
development environment (gcc, auto* etc) on a P700
with 128MB RAM using just under 2GB of HD space.  They
all run speedily and -- so far -- with very rare
crashes.  I reckon you'd struggle to do that with
Mandrake.

Source-only distros will take you even further down
the path of efficient use of machine resources, but
with the disadvantages of download and compile time
(Gentoo) plus the inability to easily update when
security issues arise (From Scratch).

</rant>

Tony


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