[CS-FSLUG] Why?

[N.Thompson]

I can't find a distribution I want to stick with its been like that 
since I stopped using Mandrake 9.1, I 've found some that worked but 
none that worked well and rather then complain I want to know why 
everyone in the list thinks some of the distributions they've tried were 
good or bad and what they think of my observations on the distributions 
I've tried.

I'll start ;-)

Mandrake 10.0 worked but I didn't like it because I couldn't find the 
software I wanted. I had Qt-Designer and Gambas but I wasn't pleased 
with it, I couldn't find any good games and when there was a software 
package I wanted to install such as Juk I couldn't find a Mandrake RPM 
for it. Sure I could get the rpm package but getting a Mandrake Club 
membership but I do not like the idea of paying for a subscription just 
to get RPMS for a ditribution I hadn't even decided on keeping yet. Also 
the difficulty in changing GTK themes was very annoying, I did manage to 
change the themes with ease but the colour scheme Mandrake applied was 
there to stay and that drove me up a wall.

SUSE Linux 9.1 was a little better then Mandrake, there was more and 
better software installed by default, the games were much better and 
there was no issue of a club, I would much preffer to buy a boxed set of 
a distribution at a local store then have to worry about sending money 
in the mail every month/year for a club membership. SUSE had its 
problems though, for as long as I've been trying the distribution its 
never had propper support for my USB jumpdrives and 9.1 seemed slower 
then any other distribution on my computer also SUSE's attempts to apply 
a global thinkeramik theme across all applications disfigured the 
OpenOffice.org user interface a little. Aside from that I would have 
decided to stick with it in a heartbeat if these problems had not been 
present.

Slackware Linux took me hours to get set up but I had it working more or 
less, I knew how to install software but I didn't know where to get it 
and I was missing a lot of peace of mind not knowing where the 
configuration tools were, not knowing whether the defaults were save and 
not knowing whether or not I had a working firewall set up or how to set 
one up. Using Slackware was very frustrating, either I didn't know what 
to do next or if I did I didn't know how to get it done.

Gentoo took way to long to install and since it was all manual I didn't 
even know if I had done it right, had I even managed to get it installed 
I imagine using it would be as difficult as using Slackware.

Debian was a mess of packages, it had way too many installed by default 
and most of the packages were very outdated. I also couldn't find any 
configuration tools except for dselect and xf86config.

Fedora was a step up from Debian, it was more polished but I didn't like 
how Red Hat had removed packages from KDE itself and tried to fill the 
void with Gnome applications, also package management was no less clumsy 
then with Debian and software was difficult for me to find because there 
was no way for me to find out what I even wanted nevermind where to find it.

Lycoris, am I the only one who'se tried this distribution? I never hear 
anyone else talking about it. Anyway Lycoris has some very old packages 
such as KDE and a price tag like that of Windows, if you want to get 
from Lycoris what you would get from any other distribution or even a 
base setup of Windows XP you would have to spend more on Lycoris 
Desktop/LX then on Windows because of how they broke up the packages and 
put a hefty price tag on each group of applications. Lycoris to me 
seemed like a scam they took packages which they didn't even put any 
work into and packaged them up into groups that costed anywhere between 
$20 and $50 or more USD.

Lindows/Linspire I got a free version on CD and it was absolutely bare, 
there was literally nothing in it except for a text editor, web browser 
and e-mail client. A subscription to the Click 'n Run warehouse would 
have fixed that but I didn't know what was available and I can't stand 
distributions that are insecure (ie no root password, logs in 
automatically) from the point of being installed, even if that can be 
changed with a little configuration it takes away any peace of mind I 
may have had concerning security in that distribution.

With all distributions my main problem is the availability of up to date 
packages, most of the major distributions right now for example do not 
have the X.org X11 packages, Qt 3.2 or newer or KDE 3.2.2 or newer and 
if they do its because they're a difficult to use (most likely source 
based) distribution. Also configuration tools should not just be 
installed but they should also be easy to find or have a simple naming 
scheme or even a central program for findind and starting each one like 
OLM in Onebase Linux.

Those are my thoughts but since I already knew them I'm waiting to find 
out what the rest of you think.