is very positive all in all. I did an install this morning on this Pentium 4 3.0ghz box with 2g of memory and an nvidia card. I think the new stuff is very fast and the new desktop is decent; although I prefer other themes and colors then the red and browns. With a few changes to my /etc/apt/sources.list I was able to get some Adobe Arroread happiness, mplayer and its cousin the mozilla plugin, java/jre, and a few other goodies. I like being able to get all the stuff one needs for a desktop and also not have to go hunting around for dependencies or using Yum which still seems awfully slow compared to apt-get. Synaptic is okay; but I think when I want to add a package or two, I just want to do that. I don’t need some beautiful and exotic graphical tool. Give me a terminal and a package and give me apt-get! RPM distributions really seem to lag behind in this quick give me a package and I don’t want no foolishness department. Even the nicest one being Yum seems to slog through finding things, parsing its repositories, kinda checking. The most frustrating part is to have a nice, rich repository set for Yum only to to do a search and there is nothing. Yet you know that package should be there. Then you download that package onto your shiny FC5 desktop; but it needs something else. There is perhaps an easy solution with RPM that stops one from descending into that Hellish state of looking for various and sundry dependency RPMs.
Debian just makes a better desktop, server, laptop. Ubuntu Dapper Drake also has my vote since its debian under the covers too. I added up the amount of time to render my new Ubuntu desktop functional and what I did on FC5. Lets just say that FC5 lost miserably :) Its not a bad OS but its doggoned slow getting updates. If you want some more speed, supposedly Yum can run as a service. I never did see this work right. But cron-apt does run nice.
My forecast, FWIW. The current group of commercial Linux distributions will be down to one less in another year. I just don’t see what they offer as compelling stories compared to Debian. I bet we see a RHEL reality only by end of 2007. Will Novell be able to breathe life into SUSE for that long? I don’t know. Its wierd that when I started there was a plethora of commercial distributions out there.
In other news…
There is no other news.
