[CS-FSLUG] Distro commentary

[N. Thompson]

I've been thinking about distributions and whether I want to stick with 
Slackware.

I've had a fair chance to try it, with the help of lynx, google and the 
man pages I've manage to get every aspect of my wheel mouse working, 
I've configured and compile the 2.6.5 kernel from source not once but 
twice both times with different features and I've fixed a great number 
of missed dependencies which were causing instabilities in KDE and were 
keeping XFCE 4 from even running. I've even configured my HP deskjet 
straight from the cups www admin tool via lynx so yes Slackware is 
working nicely except for sound and the Nvidia drivers which don't come 
for the 2.6.5 kernel yet.

The problem is that right now I'm working for my computer right now and 
not the other way around, sure I could get it working the way I wanted 
but for what I need I'm doing much more then what is necessary and I 
could be at this for days, furthermore I'm going to end up doing much of 
it over again later on anyway as I want to explore more of the options 
available in the kernel. Right now I see my most favourable options as 
being Mandrake and SUSE because both are the closest things to being the 
ideal easy distribution.

I'm not saying slackware is too hard, it was very easy and straight 
forward as long as I could find the right information, certainly the 
Linux from scratch book was a big help as was the book on slackware 
available at the slackware site but in the end it was just a matter of 
how much work I wanted to do compared to how much free time I wanted to 
have. Durring the last two days of my spring break I learned a lot about 
Linux which will be usefull in the future but at the same time I've been 
regretting not being able to spend that time working on my programs and 
getting school work done.

Trying Fedora Core 1 and Slackware has been an excellent learning 
opportunity and the distributions aren't bad but there is a reason I 
like SUSE and Mandrake and that's convenience, right now Slackware and 
FC just don't meat my needs. I've satisfied my curiosity, I've seen what 
a distribution that installs software frorm source was like (and I did a 
lot of that without pkgtool too) and I've had a chance to see what 
Fedora Core was like. I also got to see whether I could run a 
distribution with no configuration software and I've had an interesting 
time doing so but realistically SUSE and Mandrake are the best 
candidates for me, I'm very accustomed to both (moreso to MDK which I've 
used the most out of any distro) and both suit my needs, it seems 
logical to me to switch back to one of those two.

With what I've learned in FC and moreso Slackware I doubt I'll be having 
too much more trouble with Mandarke and SUSE, I've learned how to get a 
system going from a terminal and base install with KDE, I've learned 
that source based distros are no more on the bleeding edge then the big 
distros such as MDK, SUSE, RH and Debian are (and they are not 
necessarily as stable either).

I think after this experience I'll finally have satisfied my curiosity 
enough to stick to that ideal distro when I find it if I haven't found 
it yet. Who knows whether I'll stumble across something I like better 
then SUSE or MDK but for the time being I think I could finally be happy 
to pick one and stick with it (probably MDK if their 10.0 official 
download is decent, if not then SUSE or maybe Linspire [Lindows] because 
I've gotten two free copies already in promotional giveaways by the 
company and with tweaking I'm sure it could be made sanitary ;-) ).