[ale] What makes a good distro?

[Dow Hurst]

I want the best support for the latest common hardware and SuSE usually 
hits that well for me.  I like a distro that has lots of presetup 
functionality.  I am playing mostly on the machine to see what can be 
done except when at work.  There I just want to have stability and 
particular functions.  So far, SuSE 8.0 had met my needs better than any 
other distro I have tried.
Dow


Vernard Martin wrote:

>Periodically, someone asks what distro is the best or what is good about distro
>X or distro Y.
>
>I have been using RedHat for many years now mainly because it just worked for
>what I was doing. In particular it uses the rpm system which I find I like and
>Ximian red-carpet would let me keep it up to date in a nice way. However, I'm
>not as happy with RedHat as I used to be and I'm about to start reviewing
>other distros again.
>
>What I want to know is what things are present in your distro of choice that
>really makes you happy? 
>
>The things that I used to like about RedHat was that 
>1) I could do an install fairly quickly. Most of the average hardware out there
>was auto-detected and just cam up and went. No editing files after the fact to
>configure things
>
>2) It was relatively small. Before the days of KDE and GNOME, I could easily
>get a nice desktop distro on a 2GB hard drive with a few hundred megabytes to
>spare. 
>
>3) There were binary distributions built for it. Yes, I know that I can get a
>src rpm and I kow that I can get a tar ball but sometimes for just plain
>expediency, I want to just pull down a binary and go. Especially for some
>applications where compiling it locally on your machine requires a dozen or so
>inter-dependent libraires where some of htem are very unstable. Every tried
>compiling evolution for example?
>
>4) It included some really nice apps that were quite useful like ImageMagic and
>enscript and ghostview and things like that. These apps aren't part of a
>windowing desktop like GNOME or KDE but are very useful. 
>
>5) It followed the SysVr4 standard of where administrative files were places so
>that I could use some prior skills that I had to help keep the machine running.
>My understanding is that with the exception of BSD, there are no current unices
>that follow the format anymore.
>
>V
>  
>


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