[GLLUG] Distribution for new users coming from Windows?

impact impact at absoluteinsight.net
Fri Feb 18 17:23:34 EST 2005


I've switched a few friends over to Linux over the past couple months.  
One to Mandrake, Two to SuSE, and two to Gentoo.  Gentoo is by far the 
best as far as I can tell.  Package maintenance at its easiest, but I 
wouldn't recommend it for people who aren't going to get down and dirty 
and learn whats going on.
SuSE has been great, however I'm fairly dissapointed in getting YAST to 
download packages and resolve dependancies online, so for each of those 
two, I have installed apt and synaptic.  It works nicely, but I'm sure 
its ugly behind the scenes having apt do the package management for SuSE.
Mandrake is nice, but I've had some issues with it.
I would most likely recommend SuSE over Mandrake over Gentoo (if that 
makes sense).
On a side note:  Upgrading SuSE from 9.1 to 9.2 after using Apt was a 
pain, a _lot_ of the programs installed through apt had to be removed 
and reinstalled...
Just my thoughts.
-Dan

Jeremy Bowers wrote:

> So I wrote something on my website about these Windows rootkits that 
> really ought to be the last nail in Microsoft's coffin, even thought 
> they probably won't be:
>
> http://www.jerf.org/iri/2005/02/18.html#P2459
>
> And as I said in that link, I'd like to recommend a distribution to 
> people who are fleeing from Windows. The problem is, the only one I've 
> used seriously in the last two or three years is Gentoo, so I have no 
> good idea what a good Windows-refugee distribution is, although I'm 
> pretty sure Gentoo ain't it; my last experience is with Mandrake just 
> after they forked from Red Hat. (I guess I also used Fedora, but I 
> found it a pain to update or install new software for, and while 
> long-time users swear up and down it can be made easy, I'm looking for 
> something that <i>starts</i> easy, not "is easy after you push the 
> magic buttons on 'yum'".)
>
> Thoughts, and, ideally, experiences with this situation? Answers will 
> be processed, collated, sliced, diced, and used to come out with one 
> or two suggestions. (There's no value in burying them in 
> recommendations...)
>
> (I know I've seen this question before online but the answers keep 
> changing and I have no way of knowing if any given answer is up-to-date.)
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