[wellylug] Re: Distrowars (was OpenOffice 1.1.1)

[Damon Lynch]

On Fri, 2004-06-11 at 18:00, JP wrote:

> 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.

There are a variety of possibilities.  You download the right RPMs, or
you run a script from the linux modems site.  Or you do it all by hand.
I know which I prefer!  

> 
> 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.

Mandrake was the first distro to achieve LSB Certification.  So I'm not
sure what you are basing your "non-standard" on.  Perhaps you mean in a
different place to what you personally are used to?

I suspect a relatively small minority of users like being *forced* to
learn the huge number of small details of system configuration. 
Personally I'm not one of them.  I don't care about CUPS too much.  I
just want to be able to print locally and on a network.

> 
> 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. 

Not when you have some experience with it, which is true of any OS. 
It's not like a band of rogue smurfs have stolen the config files ;-)

>  Debian does
> little hand-holding, but it is easy to do something
> 'outside the square' with it because of that.

Horses for courses.  Debian is not exactly the most attractive desktop
around.  Its menus are all over the place, for instance.  It takes time
to set it up properly.  

> 
> 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.

Depends on the window manager / desktop environment of course.  Any
GNU/Linux PC will struggle with KDE 3 and / or Gnome 2 & OpenOffice on
only 128 MB of RAM, including Debian.

I admire Debian for its strengths.  And I can understand why developers
like Gentoo.  But Mandrake suits my needs very well.  Only rarely to I
come across a problem that really is a problem, like the lack of decent
SFS support.

Regards,
Damon