[ale] Distro silliness

[Jeff Hubbs]

My personal distribution mojo tends toward Red Hat and its derivative
relative, Mandrake, but my distro preferences are kind of unique in my
little world of likes and dislikes.

I hold no ill will or dislike toward any other distribution.  I've
worked with all the "big boys," to include Gentoo, at one time or
another, but I find that I seem to have some sort of mental block
against Debian.  But, I am 100% sure that this is not Debian's fault.  I
just have a very bad time with it even though I know it's fine.  I bet
that if I actually spent time around people who did Debian all the time,
all of my cerebral cracks would get spackled over and I'd be good to go,
however, I'm accustomed to being the only one around who knows anything
about Linux above a basic "I can install Suse via Yast" level.

I want there to be as many distributions as possible because I want
Linux to undergo natural selection and I also like having a choice, to
include the Linux-from-scratch option.  I begrudge no one for their
particular distro of choice.

Most recently, I tried RH on my desktop after having been using Mandrake
for some time, mostly due to a curiosity as to how far the "leader" had
come.  Four days later, I ditched it.  The absence of anything
mp3-related was a pain, but a manageable one, but what really got me was
that RH 8.0 could not print correctly to my 8-year-old Canon printer.  I
figured enough was enough, for I had no more patience left to debug the
whole print system.  

Before anyone says that this is "just a lack of knowledge," know that I
had been able to print to it just fine under mandrake, SuSE, and even
earlier versions of RH.  

- Jeff

On Sat, 2003-02-08 at 10:51, John Wells wrote:
> What all this opining about distros comes down to is this:
> 
> All the big distros out there are more or less stable.  All are good in
> their own ways.  All have their drawbacks.
> 
> I suspect people who complain about Red Hat being unstable or hard to
> maintain are just facing a knowledge gap...it's not the fault of Red Hat
> that you don't understand how to do a certain thing, or fix a certain
> problem.  We all get roped into our own frames of reference by past
> experience, and going outside that frame is not always easy or fun, or
> possible, without outside help or tons of patience.
> 
> I'm sure Rickman could run circles around me on Slack, and problems that I
> would deem unsolvable would probably be easy to him.  Same for Geoffrey on
> Mandrake or Suse, Thomas on Debian.
> 
> The point is, of course there are bugs in Linux distros.  The developers
> and maintainers aren't gods, after all.  But, more often than not, I'll
> bet my car that the supposed "bug" is actually just a lack of knowledge on
> the part of the user/installer.
> 
> John
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale


_______________________________________________
Ale mailing list
Ale at ale.org
http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale