Re: [tlug] Redhat

[Jonathan Byrne <jq@example.com>]

On Tue, Sep 09, 2003 at 06:19:04PM +0200, Godwin Stewart wrote:

>And Thus Spake "jmglov" <jmglov@example.com> (on Tue,  9 Sep 2003 11:44:33

>> This surprises me greatly! The amount of pain and suffering through which
>> Red Hat forces me when I try to do sysadmin- or coding-related work is
>> nothing next to the cruelty of Mandrake.
>
>Jonathan, where are you? :o)

I'm right here! :-)

>My own experience with Mandrake was extremely unpleasant and only served to
>confirm the "bad feeling" I had about it in the first place.

Yeah, me too.  I thoroughly dislike Mandrake.  I, too, am surprised to
hear that any sort of "hard core" person would be running it, since
Mandrake's target audience is newbies.  That's one of my complaints 
aboutit: they target the distro toward newbies, but ship extremely
bleeding-edge stuff that is often just plain broken (it took them
about three releases to get CUPS right), which is unconscionable when
your target audience doesn't know how to fix the broken stuff you
shipped.  Apart from brokenness, my other major complaint is that they
wrap a bunch of GUI tools around things and do absolutely nothing
to move people from point-and-drool towards the direction of actual
competence.  They're no better than MS on that point, and probably
worse.  At least MS has strong education and certification programs
for it server products (and Mandrake, like other Linux distros is
at heart a server product, just one that is also pretty usable as
a desktop OS, but being a desktop doesn't take the server components
out of it).

>> In my world, hardcore techs tend to use a Linux distro like Debian or
>> Gentoo (or, in one strange case, ArchLinux ;), or forgo Linux altogether
>> in favour of one of the BSDs.

Yeah, that's my experience too.  Newbies and middle-core people use Red
Hat (which I liked fairly well up through version 7.3; they lost me
with Red Hat 8), and then as they increase in ability move on to Debian,
a source based distro such as Gentoo, or some flavor of BSD.

Lindows doesn't have much street cred in the Linux community, owing
mostly to its founder, but it's a much better newbie distro than 
Mandrake is.  However, for people who are and basically want to remain
newbies, I don't recommend Linux at all.  I recommend a Mac running
OS X.  It's quality hardware with an excellent OS, and has graphical
tools that do a far better job than anyone else's, and it's pretty
secure by default.  Mac OS X ships with no ports open, I've read.
Plus, it has great multimedia and other tools that let people moving
away from Windows or into computers for the first time do what they 
need to do, and do so with greater ease than you generally find on
Linus or Windows systems.

>Red Hat is still very widespread in Europe, and Monkeydrake is particularly
>popular in France for obvious reasons. In fact, on some Linux mailing lists
>in France, people automatically *assume* you're using Monkeydrake and tell
>you to "click on Drakconf" etc. before anything else.

Great.  Of course, I'm sure that in Germany, there are more than a
few people who use SuSE because it's German, but on the other hand,
it's also a pretty technically sound distro, better than Mandrake or
Red Hat,

>> Why any technical person would want to use
>> Mandrake for himself is bloody well beyond me.
>
>As a constant reminder of what not to do, maybe? :o)

Well, yes, I suppose we need bad examples to remind us of the relative
superiority of other solutions :-)

Jonathan
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