linuxgeek: Re: [LINUX_Newbies] What distro's to try.

Just a couple more small points re: newb distros (& stuff :) ):

On 09/05/10 02:53, Scott wrote:
>
>
> On Sun, May 09, 2010 at 12:44:54AM +0100, Jane Delawney wrote:
> > Duh. Have been a watcher but not contributor to this list for ages; so
> > don't know what the accepted format it. Top post or bottom post?
>
> Inline. :) That is, answer point A under point A, point B under point
> B.
> That being said, as you've noticed, people post in all sorts of ways,
They do indeed, which is why I asked; and I'm sure there are others out
there who have been equally confused, not having access to the knowledge
of who might be the 'most technically orientated' or otherwise.
>
>
> -just note again that the majority of the more experienced are more
> likely to read a properly formatted post.
'properly formatted' well there is the rub indeed - I've many years of
experience of reading and contributing to message boards, mailing lists
and usenet groups, and have been slapped upside the head by 'experts'
all over the place for top posting ... or bottom posting ... or *most
often actually* for posting inline 'because it's confusing and bad for
people on Digest Mode'.

If as an 18+ yr netizen I can't win what can real noobs hope for?

>
> Wow, no one mentioned Mandriva? Hrrm, I should have thrown in a mention
> of it.
>
>
> > I'd highly recommend this underrated, French RH derivative
>
> I think it lost popularity for several reasons--they were charging for
> it
Mandrake / Mandriva have indeed charged for their product, but only for
the full on professional version of the distro which includes months of
technical support (which one could argue is what they charge for).
Personally I have only ever used free download versions of Mandrake or
Mandriva. They are fully functional and if you want a pure free software
version, you can get such a version of Mandy with no trouble. Their
website gives full instructions and information about the versions.

Even if you want to use a few proprietary modules eg. NVIDIA drivers,
you don't have to pay for them, they are free as in beer (but possibly
not as in freedom).But that's the same with all distros.

> which bothered people, they put in non-open source things, meaning
> it was actually useful, back before that was popular, and so on.
> However, yes, it's an excellent beginner's distro, that is also used by
> the guru. And yes, originally it wsa an RH derivative, the big
> difference at the time, back in the late 90's, IIRC, was that they
> wanted KDE vs. RH's Gnome.
No way I'm going to get into a KDE vs Gnome discussion :)

>
> > I have a netbook that uses Asus's own little distro, though they now
> > seem to have stopped supporting this, which is rather a shame (it's
> > Debian by any other name though).
>
> I never did use it--it was Xandros, a commercial distro based on Debian.
> >From what I understood (never having used it, only hearsay) it was
> somewhat crippled though.
You had to do some savvy googling to avoid setting up repositories which
would kill your OS because they'd provide incompatible packages via a
plain old apt-get update.

However even without updates the Asus distro still *works*, and supports
my mobile broadband dongle fine. Just don't expect it to keep up with
the smartphone :(

> > Dunno if any of that is helpful - but yes, if you're not fond of the
> > CLI, it IS possible to use Linux as a GUI OS. I've been doing it for 10
> > years with Mandrake / Mandriva, and I don't regret a moment.
>
> Yup agreed. I'd say the same for most of the desktop distributions now,
> which of course, aggravates the heck out of we dinosaurs who prefer
> command line. It's not bad to have GUI tools--what aggravates we
> dinosaurs is when they tie things like networking to the GUI.
Who is 'they' here? I'd always supposed that my complete inability to do
networking via CLI was down to my lameness, not to anything the distro
developers have done. But I'd definitely be the last person to work it
out if that was indeed the case.

All I was trying to say was to the original poster: yes, there is at
least one more option for you, beyond Ubuntu and the others you
mentioned. If I can use a distro as a near-pure GUI OS for 10 years,
anyone should be able to use it. Anyone! I'm not advocating the demise
of CLI linux. I only wish I had the technical nous to use it! But I
don't, I doubt I ever will have, and surely it can't be a bad thing if
someone like me can despite everything manage to be Redmond-free for so
long.

'I'm a PC, and I don't do Windows'.

JD