Re: Need Distro Recommendation

[Ole Laursen <olau hardworking dk>]

Jlawrence tacenergy com writes:

> Being somewhat of a Linux newbie, I have always defaulted to Red Hat since
> it was the easiest to install and get up and running.  Now that I have a
> *little* experience under my belt, I would like to try something different.
> I am somewhat miffed about RH 8.0 and how it customizes Gnome for you, so I
> would like to get some people's recommendation for a distribution that meets
> these requirements:

If you are adventurous, you could try Debian. Pros: easy, continuous
updates; good packaging (usually) with a policy for doing things the
Right Way; tonnes of easy-to-install packages (the distribution is
centralised so you don't have to hunt for RPMs); Gnome packages are
usually updated within a few days of their release; a well-organised
community for getting help and requesting package improvements (there
is a mailing list for everything).

Cons: the installer is actually OK, but some of the questions it asks
are hard to answer if you are new to the GNU/Linux universe (but you
only need to install it once, and there is a very nice manual); if you
want bleeding-edge Gnome, you need to use the so-called unstable
branch (there is stable, testing and unstable) - with unstable,
sometimes a package is broken and you have to wait a few days
before updating.

I think the plan is to have Gnome 2.0/2.2 in testing soon, but it
doesn't seem to have happened yet.

-- 
Ole Laursen
http://www.cs.auc.dk/~olau/