On 14/06/18 23:47, David C. Rankin wrote:
Had it not been for the deal with the devil in 2008 and the debacle of making the new "Released" KDE 4.0.4a default on 11.0 released that year, I doubt I would have run another distro.
Yes, that is a particular mystery to me. SUSE has the rights to use a Windows-like desktop, and yet, SLE does not -- it offers GNOME 3 with a sort of taskbar bolted on. The whole point of the "deal with the devil" as you call it was to retain the rights to offer a Windows-like desktop, and yet, the enterprise version does not.
Answer: Linux is Linux is Linux...
It's all the same under the hood. (even VMWare is just Linux underneath)
Agreed.
So is one package manager really superior than another. Should that dictate your choice? (answer: No) Whether it is RPM, dpkg, apt or pacman or the various derivatives, they are work well. Just more syntax and different commands to make friends with.
TBH, having switched from the RPM side of the fence to the DEB side in 2004, I have found APT and DEB to be simpler and significantly more reliable. Fedora's implementation, YUM and now DNF, is pretty smoooth -- but the supplementary tooling, such as the graphical package manager, are very poor indeed. Synaptic is still the best graphical package manager I've seen on any OS of any form. YAST's inability to allow the selection of multiple packages to remove drives me crazy.
So is there a difference between the upgrade paths offered by the distros? (answer: Yes). This boils down to "How painful is it to keep my system running -- long term?" There is nothing worse than a forced upgrade as a distro reaches end of life and a new security issue emerges.
Hmmm. Perhaps I have been spoiled. On Ubuntu I have usually found this process very smooth. I rarely reinstall. My current laptop install dates from when I bought the _previous_ laptop in 2013.
So is there a difference in communities? (answer: Yes) You can create the greatest distro on earth, but if your community responds to new users with "If you don't already know, then go **** yourself", the distro is likely to go the way of the Dodo. The community should also encompass what, and how good, the reference documentation is for the distro, and how well and how current it is maintained.
Agreed. Also, formats offered by those communities. For instance, I like mailing lists but I dislike web fora. Mint closed its moribund and near-silent mailing list, for instance, and now Mint users _must_ use the fora.
So rather than ask what should I use, in the days of 50M - 100M internet, you should just go try each one.
Agreed. -- Liam Proven - Technical Writer, SUSE Linux s.r.o. Corso II, Křižíkova 148/34, 186-00 Praha 8 - Karlín, Czechia Email: lproven@suse.com - Office telephone: +420 284 241 084 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org