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Re: Rh 6 Vs Other Distros



On Sun, 29 Aug 1999, [iso-8859-1] &mem;&yod;&qof;&yod; &het;&yod;&vav;&tet; wrote:

:hi List
:
:Can Any body recommend a Good linux Distro
:and DOes anybody else think that red hat is taking linux to the extrems by
:sticking alot of junk in their basic install which makes linux slugish and
:more like WinXXXX
:Alot Of TimeS My Xserver Just Got Stuck and The Reset Button Was my only
:hope
:tnx and Cya

First: there is a "Distribution HOWTO", which does compare some of the
distibutions. 

Now, my opinions. There are many RPM based distributions, which include:
Red Hat, SuSE, Caldera, Mandrake and more. I have seen only RedHat
(5.x[^5.9] and 6.0) and Caldera (1.2 I think, it was very old). Of those,
Red Hat seems to play major role, although Mandrake has produced an
brilliant (according to other people, I did'nt use it myself). 

RedHat is fairly simple to install, and many times its guesses are very
sane. On the other hand, this has it's drawbacks: You have to install
installation program as well. And this adds python to nnessesity list. I
do not use PPpython at all, since there are too many languages I know
already, and I do not see much delight in having Python (many megs
installed). Second (very major:) drawback is its determinisstic approach
to versioning. While I am using E o16 (a snapshot), thhis does not imply
that I want to have latest Emacs, cc and jdk installed. RedHat is known
(to me, at least) for pushing a fresh and sometimes pre-beta quality
software as the only choice. Hence, there are successfull versions, like
5.2, where there were few buggy packages, and less successfull versions,
like 5.0, which was not recommended when it came out, and quickly was
fixed up to 5.1. Note that ALL versions of RedHat use latest software, in
sence that this software was latest when the release came out. And
sometimes this just do not pays to have a latest release, but the most
stable of reasonably latre is far better.

Since I did'nt use Caldera for a long time. i"ll skip my opinion.

I do use Debian (2.1) at home, and like it pretty much. The drawbacks of
Debian are: late releases (Debian says thet it is one of their highlights
though, and there is a quite large bit of truth there) and awkward
installation process. The l;atter is the drawback I only heeard of, since
I did like the installation, and dselect, Debian installer, seems to me
much more user friendly than RedHat installer. For example, you can not
select a package on RedHat without selecting all prerequisite packages
before. On Debiann, not only you get warnings, you get them in place and
not in the end of installation, but also each package tends to recommend
you other packages, like documentation for it. This allows to split
important packages, like perl to many small packages, and thus to grant
user much finer control over his/her system. 

Well, still there are people who frown at Debian annd can not make
themselves a good system.

Slackware, of course is a good distro too. The only catch is that instead
of being Linux distro on its own, it is more like FreeBSD distro with
Linux kernel thrown into. 

I could sound a very ProDebian, but this is not true. The truth is that
distro quality has a little effect on installed system quality. Even with
best distro (Debian 2.1 for me and now) you can do a very bad
installation. On the other hand, many of knoledgeable users ofteeen wind
up with their own distro: they change a lot in the distro and the changes
make up a system to be completely different look and feel. Well, this is
what Linux good for.



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Omer Mussaev tel: 051308214 | finger for public key



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