[Techtalk] New to the list

[Teri Solow]

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Andrew imparted (2004-10-31 @ 23:14:43 -0500):
> 	 Well now, did I hear the word *Mandrake*?  (-:
> 	And May I kindly ask... of the person who suggested Gentoo to a
> nubie... Are you kidding???  (-: ( And I think you were.(-: )

I'm not the one who suggested it, but I think Gentoo _can_ be a
wonderful distro for a newbie.  It all depends of course, on what that
person wants to get out of Linux.  If they are honestly interested in
the way things work, and a bit of a control freak, then a more
'hands-on' distro may be a better choice than something that holds
your hand every step of the way.  It may be harder for them to wrap
their heads around at first, but they will definitely get more out of
it.

Of course, I personally think that Slackware is an even better
distribution for this than Gentoo  :)

For the less adventurous, Debian is probably a good choice of a
distribution for newbies and oldies alike (though not for me
personally).

> 	OK Now down to business. Mandrake is the best. (period)  Well the best
> for a person coming over from windows I think. I've never used windows!

A word of caution: from my personal experience, Mandrake is a *horrible*
solution for people coming over from Windows.  It tries to do things as
well as Windows does them (not to say that's a very high goal) and 
doesn't quite make it.

Of course, things may have changed in the past 4 years (I hope).  All I
know about Mandrake is that my roommate installed it on my system
because he thought it would be a good way to ease me into Linux.

Well, suffice to say that it turned me off of GUI administration hacks
forever.  I remember logging into the administration panel, looking
around, _not_changing_anything_, and logging out, only to have pretty
much everything configurable from that panel suddenly become completely
unconfigured, making my system completely unusable.

That turned me off from Linux altogether (I figured it was all that
broken), until a co-worker showed me Storm Linux (a short-lived
distribution based on Debian), which was a distro that actually worked.
I used that for a while, until they went out of business and I hosed the
system trying to use Debian repositories to upgrade it (which turned me
off of package management systems and dependency checking altogether,
but that's another story).

So then I turned to Slackware (admittedly after having a non-trivial
amount of Linux experience by this point) and didn't use anything else
until earlier this year, when I switched to Gentoo.

*phew* that was an uncalled for rant, I guess.  Anyway, the long and the
short of it is that there is no "one best" distro for anyone or
anything.  Each has it's merits (I'll take your word on it for some of
them :)  ).  Trial and error is probably the best way to find what works
for you, and starting at a nice 'middle of the road' distro (e.g. not
trying to be overly simplistic, while not trying to be enitrely DIY
either) may be the onlhy way to find one you are really happy with.

- -- 
(n_ 	Teri Solow
//\ 	http://terisolow.com
V_/_ 	

To err is human.
To blame someone else for your mistakes is even more human.


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