[wellylug] Distro of choice

[David Antliff]

On Thu, 17 Jun 2004, Nick Jensen wrote:

> >If you have a reasonably large HDD, you could set up a few partitions and
> >run a different distro on each (I did this for a while until I settled on
> >Gentoo). You can share /home between all of them, and switch backwards and
> >forwards until you find what you are looking for. Takes a bit more work of
> >course, but it pays off in what you experience and learn.
>
> Thanks alot for that. Very helpful - so far I'm tossing up between Debian
> and Slackware. I like your suggestion of multiple distro's on separate
> partitions, but for now I'd like to concentrate on one at a time.
> As far as Debian goes, why do people tend to use unstable rather than
> stable? Is stable much more out of date?

As I outlined previously, I like to keep things fairly recent (libraries,
headers, etc) so I can compile anything that takes my fancy, so that's why
I use unstable on my Debian machine. It's 'unstable' in the sense that it
changes all the time (rather than being unstable in the sense of crashing
a lot - for that see Debian experimental). The stable releases are similar
to Redhat releases - a set of packages that have been tested together and
form a cohesive and fairly static distribution. You tend to find more
support for this too, since everybody has much the same set of packages.
There's no reason you can't mix unstable and stable packages however, but
things can get a bit messy and you end up going to Unstable anyway :)

Those are my reasons anyway.

-- 
David.