MEPIS vs. Ubuntu

[Brian Durant]

On Fri, 11 Feb 2005 01:43:40 -0500, wallijonn
<ulist at gs1.ubuntuforums.org> wrote:
> 
> If he had asked me which distro to suggest for a
> from-Windows-World-to-Linux-newbie I would've suggested SUSE. No matter
> what version of MS Windows I run I have to tweak and Ubuntu let's my
> tweaker side go wild. I no longer do KDE and much prefer the newest
> GNOME. But that's just me. People who are new to Linux usually start
> with KDE as it initially looks better. Now if I were a geek, I'd
> probably like Gentoo more, along with going back to Slackware. But my
> Gentoo days are over and Slack had dropped GNOME support.
> 
> I'm sure that Mephis is a great distro - and there's plenty of room for
> everyone, from BSD to Slack to Ubuntu to Gentoo and everything in
> between (like SUSE and Fedora for the main liners).
> 
> I find that people don't necessarily choose a distro by what it does
> but by what hardware it can get working. When I couldn't get Fedora and
> SUSE to work with my ATI video card and 3Com NIC, they worked fine with
> Ubuntu. I was home. Gentoo VidaLinux does GNOME and XOrg with my ATI
> but the compile times - oy ve, no thank you - maybe if I had a cable
> modem...
> 
> No, Ubuntu isn't for everyone. A distro for everyone might be SUSE. But
> Ubuntu is for me - and I don't see myself switching back to SUSE,
> Fedora, RH9, Slackware, FreeBSD, IPCop, Bit Defender, Mandrake, or
> Immunix anytime soon. If I were to try any other distros it would have
> to be Libranet, Yoper and Memphis - but I won't. Why bother? I love
> Ubuntu. ymmv.

I've done the Fedora, SUSE, Mandrake thing as well. You are right when
you point out that the first issue newbies want to get solved is find
a distro that supports their hardware. In my experience, there isn't
any distro that supports everything (I wish there was). What most
newbies need to be aware of is RPM hell. That is why I stick to Debian
based distros now. Xandros can be good for some, but I think it is a
little too vanilla flavored. Too much is hidden under the hood and
made generic. This is the first distro I have tried with GNOME and in
many ways, I actually like it. If there is a reason I would consider
leaving Ubuntu, it is some of my hardware problems that I can't seem
to find a solution for on the list. Where would I go? Probably back to
Libranet, whe version 3.0 comes out. Why? Because they provide "up and
running" support and it is Debian based. If you can't get your
hardware to work, Libranet support will work with you personally for
as long as is reasonable. Even providing custom scripts and drivers if
your hardware isn't too weird. First after your system is running they
way it should, do they hand you over to the user list. All for the
price of a CD.

Cheers,

Brian