linux as a workstation

Paul_Melson@keykertusa.com Paul_Melson@keykertusa.com
Thu, 16 Aug 2001 14:15:35 -0400


>My second thought was to suggest that you look at Mandrake for 
workstation
>use. It is built on RedHat and as such does bear resemblence in file
>structure etc. Mandrake appears to me better in providing the bells and
>whistles that most windows folks will look for in a desktop station. For 
one
>thing it has a pretty wide variety of apps that come loaded out of the 
box.
>But mostly I like it for a desktop workstation because of the smaller
>touches they've built into it - slicker appearance etc. I still like 
RedHat
>for servers because it is more stable and robust than Mandrake. Mandrake
>tends to built more on the bleeding edge - occasionally there are
>consequences to that approach.

Really?  I just deployed some bare-bones Mandrake boxes and have been very 
happy with them thus far.  I mean, Linux is Linux, so if you're not 
running a lot of 3rd party apps, most distributions will perform about the 
same.  But it took me half the time to harden those systems as it would've 
with another distribution.  Mandrake's install made it easy to lock things 
down, disable daemons, and install to ReiserFS, so all I had to do was go 
back and essentially enable the short list of features I wanted the 
machine to have.  It was nice.

Not to say that Mandrake wouldn't make a good workstation OS.  It's great, 
I'm sure.

PaulM