I've always used Red Hat. My installation of 7.3 began to go sour last fall after a clumbsy video driver installation. Things got more and more complicated, and I ended up having to do a fresh install of Red Hats 8.0. Since then, things just have not worked right and I'm spending all to much of my valuable time doing repairs, often unsuccessfully.
I'm considering a retreat to 7.3, but must also consider changing distributions. Here are my criteria: 1. I like to rely as much as possible on keyboard input rather than the mouse. Red Hat seems to be moving in the opposite direction, and more and more I'm being forced to use the mouse. 2. I must have multiple desktops and window stacking. I don't know that any window manager supports stacking order except enlightenment. Yet I like Gnome's panel and applets. These two applications don't get along well in RedHat 8.0, but do in gentoo; I don't know about other distributions. I've never used Windows, and so don't find anything appealing in a Windows-like interface. 3. I've got plenty of hardware muscle, so don't worry much about speed. It is fairly standard SCSI and USB stuff, hardware compatibility is probably not a big issue. 4. I don't need to be at the bleeding edge in terms of kernel and applications, but I need my stand-alone workstation with DSL connection to be secure and reliable. I've an interest in ham radio, which used to favor one distribution, but I assume there's no significant difference today. 5. I don't find ease of installation to be an issue, and am quite willing to put up with gentoo's notoriously slow compile. 6. I'm quite willing to edit configuration files by hand, but will occasionally need spiritual advice, and so would prefer a distribution that's not too exotic. I find configuration files that are on the move to be a pain. 7. I mostly use a few standard applications, especially emacs. In light of this, which distributions should I be considering? Does one of them stand out in your opinion as an obvious choice in light of my criteria? Haines - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs
