Well, I decided about a month ago to go taste a few different distributions. I tried out Fedora, Ubuntu, and SuSE. I got to say each has something that I like and each has a thing I don’t like. In the case of FC5, I like the attention spent to the desktop and its looks. What I did not like was having to really work at getting suspends to work with APM instead of ACPI. I also did not like some kind of memory race conditions that rendered my Dell Inspiron almost useless every few days and needing a reboot after things locked up solid. After a week or so of Fedora, it was outa there and on to the next contender.
Ubuntu is a debian thing and its an interesting choice. Hardware works great with is; but the 5.10 release is kinda long in the tooth when you compare it with how fast modern desktop environments ship updates. As an example, with the default sources I could not get a Firefox 1.5.0.3 or recent Thunderbird. But its other management tools make up for this and Automatix really does.
SuSE has what I like and dislike all in one tool. Its YAST. I never did like the tools which claimed everything because they hardly ever do a single thing right. Remember Linuxconf? SuSE’s behavior sometimes is great but other times with its yast software updates and its mantra to always load most of YAST to get any one thing done left me a bit frustrated. Especially with its proclivity to to wipe out changes to system files I just made.
So… It takes me back to a place that I do feel at home. Someone asked me my favorite Linux distribution for desktop use. I had settled on easy ones; but often if you have to work at a thing a bit longer, you get some kinda payback for it. Enter my love affair with regular old Debian. It just does what it says and its fun to run and it comes in three flavors. I most always run Unstable on desktop or laptop systems because I just do. On my 2 servers, they run Testing just for my own sanity. I hardly ever run Stable.
In my non-scientific and personal quest, I name Debian the best. At least for my uses. I still get frustrated with Linux and I tend to wander off and do other things for awhile. But, in the final analysis, Debian’s apt-get and other tools just works for me.
