[rescue] This Just In: HP to buy Compaq

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Wed, Sep 05, 2001 at 12:55:42PM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:
>   I run Redhat on my Linux box because that's the distribution that I
> always hear about.  Is there a better alternative that I should be
> running?

It depends on what you are looking for.  At school debian is used because
key people feel that apt-get works better than the redhat
equivalent.  Mandrake and suse seem to be more aggressive about supporting
the cutting edge desktop features, which probably cuts into stability a
little.  Slackware seems to appeal to do it yourselfers.

Redhat generally seems to be the vanilla choice.

The reality is that all differences are cosmetic and if a program supports
Redhat only, a few hours of rearranging should force it to work on any
linux.

Myself, I used to use Slackware (when it was the only real choice), but
then switched to Redhat because I wanted a newer distro and that is what I
was given.  Redhat 6.0 heavily modified and upgraded is what is currently
running on my file server.  I more recently tried debian for apt-get, but
I've found it rather disappointing.  I probably am just stupid, but I just
can't figure out how to force a package to install when the depencies
haven't been met (usually because I chose to install a package via source
code).  I will most likely go back to Redhat the next time I reinstall,
but Mandrake or Suse are also possibilities.

I really don't expect to be installing anytime in the next year at least
though since I don't plan to install until a new PeeCee arrives, and that
won't be for quite some time. 

>From what I hear, NetBSD and OpenBSD look really great.  I rather like GNU
everything, but that can be installed ontop of *BSD.  The only problem is
that desktop features that I want aren't as well supported.  But that
shouldn't be a problem with most RISC boxes or server boxes.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd