tlug: Distribution War!!!

["Marcos Campos" <marcospbc@example.com>]

Hi anyone out there,

Recently there was some e-mails commenting different distributions without 
the intention to start a distribution war. However, new messages with people 
showing their preferences for this or that distribution is always running 
around so, I decided to start a declared distro war!!! I hope you 
experienced guys can give me some light about (I am the other newbie, Scott, 
you are not alone!)

I have a couple of distribution at my house, the RH6.0 and Caldera 2.2. I 
installed the first in my laptop and the last in my desktop. This week I 
just received one of those "all-in-one" packages containing the latest 
version of the mos famous distributors (RH6.1, Caldera2.3, Suse6.2, Debian, 
Slackware, etc...) and I got a little overhelmed about which one give a 
shot! I have the impression that all Linux fans really enjoy installing over 
and over again the new distributions to feel the evolution of Linux, but I 
just want to try one and keep it, at least, a couple of months without 
upgrade...

I noticed that a lot of guys are really standing for Debian. I also read a 
couple of articles saying that their policy is to release just the very 
tested program and kernel and their reliability is very high. Also I read 
that their GUI environment of choice is AfterStep and some one commented in 
this list that it's very easy to configure the Debian distribution to work 
with Japanese characters. Well, all of these is just what I'm looking for. 
The problem is that Debian is not using the kernel 2.2 yet, wich means no 
APM and no USB support (fundamental for my notebook). In their homepage they 
strogly warned against upgrade of the kernel only because it could interfer 
with the other packages installed.

Caldera is extremelly easy to install and all the packages installed appear 
automatic in the menu of KDE, making things really easy (and also including 
StarOffice and WordPerfect). But it's too much automatic and I cannot make 
any choice about partition and select the packages that I would like to 
install... That's bad enough to risk it out of my list. I installed it once 
but return to Redhat quickly later.

Well, RH6.0 is doing a good job in my laptop but... A lot of people out 
there (and here in this list) are not too suportive to their 6.1 version and 
policy of distribution...

The list is big and I don't wanna to spend your time to much... I just would 
like to listen one or other advice and comments about the distributions, 
mainly about Debian, Red Hat and Slackware. BTW, despite be a newbie, after 
a couple of months installing and reading (a lot) about Linux as well as 
some TLUG visits, I think there is no problem to manage partitions, 
instalations and compilations.... So, extremelly easy instalation and 
"everything-is-ok-out-of-box" is not in the top of my priorities list (as 
Scott, I'm overconfident too!).

Ah, just one more question: What is the big difference between the AfterStep 
and WindowMaker? They look pretty cool and I like them, but cannot 
understand the differences (excepting for some icons...). The version 
numbers (1.6 for AfterStep and 0.6 for WindowMaker) indicates a more 
developed version for AfterStep, but Windowmaker has some coll features 
(well, at least they wrote that in their HP) and looks as stable as AS. Some 
one experiencing some of this GUI environment?

Thanks for advance and sorry if some of these questions was already answered 
in this list...

Marcos


PS: forgiven my broke English....

PS: Here in my office, 7 months ago just I used Linux and at that time I was 
just trying to learn about it. Nowadays, the Linux users are 5 out of 25! 
And everybody is using it seriously, developing programs, writing text, 
etc... I think it's a nice example of how much the Linux is becoming a 
reality on the desktop environment!

===========================================================
Marcos de Parahyba Campos
Ph.D. Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering
7-3 Kanagawa-ku Shirohatanishichou
Satsukisou 205 Yokohama
Japan 221-0074
Tel/FAX: 81+045-434-4490
E-mail: marcospbc@example.com
Home Page: http://www.geocities.com/capecanaveral/hall/7631
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