[ale] Building the perfect Linux end-user systems.

[Dan Lambert]

I have to agree with you, Mike. I am running Ubuntu on an IBM laptop, 
and everything worked fine for me first time out. I did have to reload 
the wifi drivers, but that was partially my fault, I think.

At any rate, I've never had any distribution before I found Ubuntu 
Breezy that would load on my laptop and just work. I have loaded and 
used a variety of Linux distributions over the last 10 years (including 
the first Linux distro I ever found that loaded from (if memory serves 
me) four floppies). I went through all of the previous "premier" 
distributions from Red Hat to SUSe, and from Mandrake to Xandros.

All of the were good, but none was at a point where i could do real 
world, day-to-day work on them, and allow me to have only one 
distribution to work with. I have a network in my home that always has 
at least 8 computers on it, and usually I'm working 10-12 boxes. I had 
no less that 5 Windoze computers on that network due to the fact than 
many of the services that were required weren't convenient or even 
available on a Linux box. (Think Windoze specific applications.)

I had real problems with all of the RPM based distros, and never was 
really happy with Yast. When I first discovered Debian, I really liked 
the apt utility, and was very comfortable with it. I just needed a 
usable user interface.

When I discovered Ubuntu (Breezy), I felt like this distro had real 
possibilities, and when Dapper was released, I felt like I could make a 
real world use of the interface, and the OS. About this time, Windoze 
totally crashed on my laptop, and after doing a restore and reloading 
everything, two weeks later it did the same thing. I'd had it!

Dapper was loaded as the only OS on my laptop, and I haven't looked 
back. At this point in time, I have one Windows server that I have to 
keep running for company compatibility, One XP box that I have to use 
for the company's interface, my wife's XP desktop (I haven't convinced 
her to come away from the dark side yet), and everything else on my 
network is an Ubuntu box.

The ONLY thing I've had any issue with getting to work right out of the 
box is the wifi on my laptop, which I had to reload once to make it 
work. Otherwise, I'm now at 11 for 11 installs with no issues.

Dan


Michael B. Trausch wrote:
> James Taylor wrote:
> 
>>At the risk of starting a distro-war, SuSE has been the distro that
>>I've used because almost everything I've ever wanted to do has "just
>>worked" out of the box, or has has had distro-specifice RPMs
>>immediately available.
>>
>>I see a lot of traffic relative to Ubuntu that revolves around how to
>>get things to work that I just use out of the box.
>>
> 
> 
> I suppose that I need to pay better attention -- most of my stuff just
> works.  Including my WiFi (which I have never seen happen until I tried
> this).  In any case, I will never use an RPM-based distribution again;
> RPM is burdened with issues.  I recently saw someone using an RPM based
> distribution, it told them it was time to upgrade, and an hour later it
> finally finished calculating dependencies -- and it was missing one.
> 
> No, thanks.  I'll take no packages at all before I will take RPMs ever
> again.  It is a shame, IMHO, that LSB made RPM the standard, and not
> DEB/dpkg.
> 
> 	-- Mike
> 
> 
> 
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