Re: Which Linux distro

[Paul Sladen <gnome-uk paul sladen org>]

On Thu, 16 Mar 2006, David Lodge wrote:

Hello David,

> 1) Easy package management (a yum alike would be fine)

I'm told that Debian's 'apt' does a wonderful job at this;  ...such a good
job that after about 10years it was copied and called 'yum'.

> 3) Wireless support

I'm told that Ubuntu has a policy of "If it doesn't work", that's a bug and
people have said various things about Ubuntu's wifi support.

> 4) Sensible file system format

The FHS might disagree;  '/opt' is a wrong place to put stuff in this day
and age.  Packages that are installed by the package manager are going to go
in the correct places in {,/usr}/{s,}bin.  You are of course free to dump
whatever you want in '/opt'---that's the reason it exists as a legacy hang-
over, safe in the knowledge that it won't clash with Packaged packages.

> 5) No crap packages (e.g. isdn, ppp ad nauseam)

People in Germany need ISDN to work out of the box;  People with *DSL often
need PPP and the rest of world wired only with low-grade copper string
certainly require PPP.

> I've tried Ubuntu, but it has in built package dependency hell.

Could you expand on this please.  I think there are people who might be
inclined to disagree and certainly, if there's any packages with incorrect
Build-Dependancies then it would be good to get those fixed;  Please file a
bug at:

  https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+filebug

Of course, since the whole system is automatically built by the
auto-builders then generally the package will not have compiled if the
depenancies were incorrectly specified.

One known way in which people have been getting their systems upset is an
anyone who (intentionally and explictly) went and installed 'automatrix'.
This is not related to Ubuntu and is known to do a fairly good job of
toasting the user's package and filesystem setup.

	-Paul
-- 
Britain is just cold, in a pesky way.  Southampton, GB