Re: [Pan-users] Mandrake 9.0 RPM also works for Mandrake 8.2

[Duncan]

On Sat 23 Nov 2002 08:34, John J. LeMay Jr. posted as excerpted below:
> I have SuSE 8.1 running on my "old" machine right along side this one right
> now. I'm tired of the issues I have with Mandrake such as font support, 3D
> support, strange package naming conventions, and a ton of other generally
> small issues that just add up.

The package naming is a bit frustrating.  Most of the rest is I likely simply 
attribute to being the way Linux works, since it's my first distrib.  Well, 
that, and on the 3D issues, the fact that I am running closed Nvidia drivers 
AND complicating things with Xinerama, for which certain 3D support isn't 
available anyway.

>  SuSE has really come across as an advanced system suitable for users of any
> experience level []

My main concern re SuSE is that they aren't quite as open source as Mdk.  If I 
wanted closed source, I could have saved myself a lot of trouble and stayed 
with MSWormOS.  All the Drak* utilities are open source, and free to be used 
by other distribs or whatever.  That isn't the case with SuSE's utils, at 
least some of them, and, YES, it DOES matter to me.  ...  Please correct me 
of I got this wrong, somehow.

> I didn't pick Debian because of the install issues, although apt-get is
> awesome. 

That was my initial reason for avoiding it.  However, it might make a good 
second distrib to try.

> I am not going back to RedHat [] because [of] a MS attitude in providing a 
> "simplified" system in a "we know what you need better than you do" []

That's been my gut reaction as well.  I keep telling myself it's all just an 
over-reaction to the fact they are the big one on the block, and that they 
are NOT MS.  Still, the fact that they said Linux on the desktop was dead, 
for awhile, and then suddenly "found religion" again, doesn't impress me 
either.

> Slackware seems to be spinning it's wheels []
> Gentoo seems nice, but I just didn't have the patience to play
> with that one. 

Slack doesn't seem a factor here, either.  Gentoo does look interesting, but 
not necessarily right now, because I ran this Athlon C 1.2 at 1.33 o/ced for 
some time -- at 100% CPU doing Distributed.net, no less, and I had to back 
off, when it got unstable after some time.  I haven't had a compile crash in 
some time, but for awhile, I couldn't easily complete a compile because the 
CPU couldn't handle 100% for that long.  Anyway, a 15 minute compile isn't a 
problem now, as it's stabilized, but I wouldn't want to try compiling my 
entire distrib from the ground up, so Gentoo is out, pending my next upgrade 
(hopefully, to a hammer!).

If you reply, consider doing it off-list.  This is getting a bit far off topic 
for distribution to the entire mailing list.  My address is valid as is.  No 
munging required on my list address, yet (although I may have to change it 
soon, getting spam now, I think harvested from some of my KDE related posts).

-- 
Duncan
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin