[wellylug] Re: Distrowars (was OpenOffice 1.1.1)

[JP]

 --- Damon Lynch wrote: 

Firstly, I'll happily concede that Mandrake is easier
to use if your hardware is natively supported and you
don't strike beta-bugs.

Secondly, use what you like.  That's one of the
driving philosophies of open-source software.  I was
just laying out the reasons why someone looking to get
into Linux might want to consider a system which hides
fewer details, or makes it easier to get to them
without risk of conflict with distro-specific tools
(the drak wizards).  

Now, to answer your questions:

> 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?
> 

Well, the LSB is quite a loose document.  It does not,
for example, specify the program used to choose which
runlevels at boot script runs at (it gives Redhat's
chkconfig as an example but explicitly states that the
standard doesn't cover this).

It also, to my knowledge, doesn't specify the exact
location or name of various config files, although the
FHS says they should be somewhere under /etc.  

So just being LSB-compliant doesn't mean everything is
"standard".

You are right that it's not what I am used to and this
is part of the problem.

> 
> 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'll wager you that on a given computer system, I can
run a Debian system which runs KDE 3 + OpenOffice
1.1.1 + Mozilla 1.6/1.7 with less memory use and less
HD use than a Mandrake system with the same
functionality.  This is because Debian has saner
dependencies and lets you start with a cleaner
install.  Consider this a slap in the face with a
gauntlet -- we can meet at dawn to decide this bet.
:-)

For low-resource systems, Debian is a very good
compromise between:

1) difficulty of use (Slackware, Gentoo et al).  The
install is the difficult part of using Debian, but
apt-get makes life relatively easier from there on.

and 2) resource-hogging (Redhat, Mandrake et al).  I
can't even install Redhat 7.0 on one of my systems at
home (inadequate RAM), but Debian works a treat.  Yes,
a 'from scratch' systems is faster -- I have tried it
-- but installing additional software is quite
inconvenient.

Cheers
Tony

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