Searching for a new distro… again..
SuSE 10 has failed me. It seems that every new suse release is further behind in kde package version and is lacking another geek package. I end up putting in extra suse sources and searching all over the net for things I want to use. Sorry SuSE, my old friend, it’s time to say good bye. Your default prompts no longer contain the leet aliases of old suse versions. Granted I can just copy my bash profile before upgrading but that’s not the point. SuSE is moving away from a friendly-to-geek-and-normal-user-alike distro to… well… crap. YaST still can’t handle parsing the protocol and path for a source. Several times I have searched yast for packages that existed in 9.3 but have since been removed (Don’t flame me for not having examples. Just trust me that it happens). I have tried fedora in the past but never got used to up2date. Gentoo is a disaster. I won’t get started on source based distros just see funroll-loops.org While I’m writing this my laptop is burning ubuntu. I will let you know how it goes. Feel free to turn this post into a distro flame war with three rules. No fedora, no gentoo, and no suse. Flame on!
March 27th, 2006 at 5:34 am
Packages that don’t suck? Actual easy upgrades without trashing everything or ending up with a disturbing kludge of old and new userland and packages? Why not try a BSD?
March 27th, 2006 at 10:59 am
Oddly enough, I just did 2 Linux installs last night. I started with Red Hat Enterprise WS 4 (their corporate power-users desktop product) and was thoroughly unimpressed. Even after up2date ran its heart out and updated absolutely everything, it still wasn’t able to properly detect my video hardware (a Dell Inspiron 9300).
After tossing those 4 discs in the trash, I snagged an ISO of Ubuntu and quickly installed it. On first boot, I was greeted with my wide-aspect resolution and a properly detected video card. I haven’t had a chance to toy around with anything in more detail, but that’s a damn good start if you ask me. Having to trudge across the ‘net looking for instructions to get my display working properly in X isn’t my idea of a good time, and it’s a poor showing for the most popular distro.
Ubuntu also detected my Intel Pro wireless miniPCI card, even during setup, whereas RedHat (and of course Fedora) saw nothing, even after a full update.
Call it a thoroughly unimpressive 2-minute review of Ubuntu, but so far we’re off to a pretty good start. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on it as I learn more about it on my own.
March 30th, 2006 at 3:01 pm
Keep in mind that managing a large set of ever-changing packages is a pretty large task. Also, stability is favored by some, while cutting-edge technology is favored by others. Certain distros cater to one or the other.
March 30th, 2006 at 8:06 pm
Yes true but, this is my blog so I’m talking about my choice of distro