[kwlug-disc] What's the best desktop distribution?

[shane.msg at gmail.com]

Having used more than one distro I am not certain that one is significantly better than any other.  But as I say, I hscre tried more than one. 

I don't know about now but three years ago the differences were significant.  Installs were less "user friendly" and required significant knowledge of the underlying system, something I did not have time to learn and get a system up and running at the same time. 

At least then, Ubuntu was the answer.  Canonical seemed to be the only group who understood that many new users had either no time, as in my case, or no will to learn command line syntax, et al. Just to run a compute when all that was necessary to run Windows was to stick a disk or CD ionto a drive and say go.  I saw on more than one message area where Linux so-called helpers claimed that people should be willing to invest time and effort into learning the command line.  Most would not.

Right or wrong was not an is not my business.  What worked was; at the time that was Ubuntu.  It isn't and wasn't perfect but it filled a void, a void that seems to have been recognized and seems to becoming addressed by more distros. 

================
It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.

-----Original Message-----
From: "Insurance Squared Inc." <gcooke at insurancesquared.com>
Date: Tue, 02 Feb 2010 08:57:20 
To: KWLUG discussion<kwlug-disc at kwlug.org>
Subject: Re: [kwlug-disc] What's the best desktop distribution?

When my slate clears later this year, I think I'm going to have to try 
out ubuntu.  I'm not sure what advantages it has over Mandriva (I had a 
look at their website) but given the raves, not just here but even in 
the non-computer type forums I visit, it's likely worth a look.

In terms of updates, my mandriva desktop has an applet. It checks for 
updates automatically, and if there are updates to be had, I get a red 
"!" on my toolbar.  I double click that icon and away it goes, 
installing and keeping me up to date.  Even I can figure it out.




Adam Glauser wrote:
> William Park wrote:
>>     - Slackare uses 'tar.xz' (was: 'tar.gz') as container.  It usually
>>       has a script to do things after extracting the tarball, mostly
>>       creating symlinks.  This is simple, fast, transparent, and robust.
>>       Again, an order of magnitude faster than other distro, in terms of
>>       cpu time and user time.
>>
>>     - Slackware depends less on online depository.  So, you download
>>       original source, compile, install to DESTDIR, make ".txz" package,
>>       and finally install to system.  You can install directly into
>>       system after compiling, but that would make uninstalling
>>       difficult.  Slackware has no "dependency" issue, at all.  Again,
>>       saving me time.
>
> The thing I like most about Debian and its kin is the repository. 
> Having one mechanism to manage security patches to packages is the 
> killer app for Linux over Windows as far as I am concerned.  This 
> probably applies to the Red Hat family now too, given the advent of yum.
>
> How does Slackware approach this problem, if at all?
>
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