On Sunday 14 November 2004 21:34, Mark Crean wrote: > Difficult question. The Debian project is wonderful from many > perspectives, but except on philosophical grounds it's hard to see why > an ordinary desktop user would choose it in preference to SuSE, > Mandrake, Xandros or another distro known to be friendly to the new user > and where a lot of effort has been put into pulling the desktop > together. I've just installed SuSE 9.2 this afternoon and it wipes the > floor with my Debian installation (sarge and elements of sid). In terms > of a nicely tweaked, stable, elegant-looking system with full multimedia > toys, open office, KDE 3.31, samba, etc. I am further ahead after about > four hours of SuSE than I was after about a month of Debian.
I am interested to know how the other distributions deal with updating of the software - since I have never used anything other than Debian, and don't have any feeling that there is any need to switch. I started on Debian about 4 years ago when I first started with Linux. I have always had a desktop that is reasonably up to date - I was probably using kde 1 when I started, I now an running linux kernel 2.6.9, kde 3.3.1, all the multimedia toys I could want, open office 1.1.2 - and I have kept it up to date originally using dselect, but now aptitude. Upgrading has never really been a problem (despite using unstable) every few days I just use aptitude to update my list of packages and then tell it to bring the system up to this state. Once I find I don't need a package anymore I can just un-install it, and it and all of its automatic dependencies are automatically removed, so effectively I never really have a re-install. Seems to me that this 'ordinary desktop user' can't see any reason not to use Debian and risk loosing what I have. -- Alan Chandler [EMAIL PROTECTED] First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. --Gandhi -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]