[CLUE-Tech] Man, this guy really hates SuSE 8.2!

[Collins Richey]

On Fri, 25 Apr 2003 09:46:02 -0600
Keith Hellman <kehellman at yahoo.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 24, 2003 at 10:59:39PM -0600, Jed S. Baer wrote:
> 
> This guy doesn't seem to like any of the distributions:
> 
> <quote>
> Which would not be such a pity if the underlying distribution weren't
> remarkably good, or at least hadn't in the past been so. The
> alternatives are tragically limited. One can become a slave to Red
> Hat, one can attempt to take Mandrake seriously -- a losing
> proposition -- one can become a monk of the Debian cult, or turn into
> a Gentoo zombie, or pretend that Slackware is still mainstream. Or one
> can (try to) use SuSE
> </quote>
> 
> This guy writes with a disgruntled style, and I think the above
> paragraph demonstrates this admirably.  I also think he's doing quite
> the disservice to his readers.  

Yeah, I've learned to be pretty distro agnostic over the years.  At
present I'm one of the Gentoo zombies (not), and it's the best distro
for my particular needs.  I've also used Mandrake (ok, but it starts
every bloody daemon ever invented for linux by default) and Redhat (not
bad either, but it assumes that everyone wants sendmail).  I've even
installed the most recent Slackware (I rate it #2 behind Gentoo, alas
Slack too is in love with sendmail), and it is definitely mainstream.  I
haven't tried SuSE in a long time, because I've never been a fan of "all
configuration parameters in one pot with YaST"), but I've heard lots of
people praise the current offering.

At least, if you buy the full disk set, SuSE provides all the packages
you ever need.  The major problem that I have with Redhat or Mandrake
or with SuSE post install is that the vendor mostly only supports the
core linux packages, and you have to descend into RPM hell to find other
packages that are compatible with the quirks of Redhat/Mandrake/SuSE. 
Slackware is slowly but surely developing a substantial base of Slack
packages.  The major reason I run Gentoo is that almost every package
I've ever dreamed of is there and ready to install and kept up to
date (stable or bleeding edge, your choice).

In other words, you can put up a decent system with any of these much
maligned (by the jerk) distros.  You pays you money (in my case zippo),
you takes you chances.

-- 
Collins Richey - Denver Area
gentoo stable - ext3