Ray, Your frank comments are very much appreciated, especially for such a nuisance question as I posed.
> Rather than pretend to an expertise I don't have, I'll try to be > helpful by commenting on how well Debian fits with each of your > criteria. I'm inclined in that direction, so your comments helpful. > I use the minimalist X wm Blackbox myself, so I can't comment on > these heavyweight X wm choices, beyond noting that they are all > available in Debian. I'm in a situation where I'm constantly typing, cutting and pasting, not only with emacs, but other applications as well. I've mo moral objection to the mouse, but find it very annoying to have to use the keyboard and mouse simultaneously, so prefer to do as much as possible with the keyboard. Another consequence is that if I type into a file and then another, the original disappears below other windows, and if I forget it, I'm likely to save it and overwrite my work. What I need is stacked windows, not queued windows, and I know that enlightenment can handle that. Otherwise I'm comfortable with gnome. I get the impression that under Debian, one can run enlightenment under gnome2, while in RedHat, that can be difficult and risky (mileage varies). > Hardware *detection* is a different issue, and on that score, Debian > fares poorly ... unless you use very mainstream stuff, you have to > tell Debian a lot about your hardware. By "mainstream," you do mean machines (Dell, Gateway, etc.) or components (Maxtor, 3M, etc.)? My impression is that the mass assembled machines sometimes use odd components, and so adapting to the machine or the component can have quite different results. > In the past, the Debian package manager set up PPPoE for me just > fine Good to know. That side of things can be a real pain. > Debian is OK on ease of installation ... not awaul, not great, and > more suited (in my opinion) to custom installs than to "standard > workstation" installs. (Debian uses a set of dummy "task" packages > to provide some standard configs, but I stopped using them years > ago, finding them a bit bloated for my taste.) I used to worry about customizing package selection, but handicaped by not really being sure what they are. My salvation (if one call it that) is the low price of giant hard disks these days, and so I can just load everything (HOWTOs in Japanese, etc.). Is debian informative about what the various packages are? > I don't think there are a lot of Debian users here on this list, but > there is an active (for me, too active) set of Debian help lists. > You might want to subscribe to one or a few of them, as well as > similar lists from other candidate distros, to get a sense of which > offer the kind of help you would like. Thanks for the useful information. > I can't comment, of course, on unnamed "standard applications", > except perhaps to note that if they really are standard, then all > the distros will support them fairly well (that's almost the > definition of "standard", I would think). > I would say that your question, as posed, does not have an "obvious" > answer. Non-obvious answers are actually very helpful. > I would limit my range of choice to the distros that are active > enough that they get regular updates, so the core apps are current, > as bugfree as possible, and not vulnerable to security threats > ... you mention none of this in your list of criteria, but it's hard > for me to think about software choices without considering these > issues. I mentioned security, and since I'm on line all the time, I'm especially concerned about it. I've probably been bitten once or twice, but now use Bastille, which may be an example of a "non-standard" application. Since I'm suffering (I suspect) from bugs in RH8.0, I'm not impressed with waging a fight against them by using the newest releases ;-). RedHat keeps me pretty well informed about security issues as they come up. > You might ask yourself to what extent your problems with RH come > from trying to use the free version of a distro intended to make > money Do you mean a compromise of the distribution's integrety in order to capture greater market share? If so, I suspect I may be a victim of that with RedHat 8.0. > I'd be *very* cautious about a "retreat" to RH 7.3, unless you can > satisfy yourself that it gets good security updates ... with a DSL > connection, you are vulnerable to attacks from the Internet pretty > much all the time, right? As I mentioned, I think I was subject to attack under RH7.3. Other than that, however, the distributions 7.1 and 7.3 proved to be was very solid for me. However, besides security issues, backtracking is likely to break things unless I do a fresh re-install. But then why not simply go to gentoo, Debian or Slackware? Thanks for your comments. They are more helpful than you realize. 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
