[KLUG Advocacy] Re: [KLUG Members] Distro distro ...

Bruce Smith advocacy@kalamazoolinux.org
Thu, 04 Dec 2003 09:26:32 -0500


> > Not being completely happy with Fedora because of a few annoying (but
> > minor) bugs, I started looking at other distributions.  I looked at and
> > rejected a few distros for a number of reasons (I'll discuss them on
> > advocacy if anyone is interested - not here), then I tried SuSE 9.0 ...
> > 
> Yeah I would be interested in hearing what you have came up with the
> other distros.  

Other distros I evaluated.  (more or less :)

First let me say that I do NOT like switching distributions.  
It takes a lot of time, and I don't want to do it very often.

First I discounted Mandrake without even looking at it.  Reason:
Every few months they seem to be crying that they are running out of 
money, and if they don't get some donations they will close their doors.
I was afraid that if I switched to Mandrake, they would really close
down the next day and I'd have to switch distros again.

Next I looked at Gentoo.  It's a neat concept and seemed to be a nice
distro, but the install process was too much work for the number of
machines that I need to convert.

Debian:  I would have looked at it harder, I could have gotten the damn
thing to install.  (that was before I heard about the new/beta
installer)

What am I missing?  Probably something....

> I would also like to hear more on what you did not like about Fedora.

A bunch of minor things that bug me.  Overall it's "acceptable", and 
I'd be sticking with it if I hadn't found SuSE to be so much better.

Bugs like the calendar in Evolution keeps giving me trouble.  I click 
on "calendar" and I get "tasks" (no calendar shows up).

And the other day I plugged in my Firewire disk drive that I use to
backup my laptop, and Firewire is no longer working (worked in RH9).

And my laptop HANGS during shutdown when stopping iptables, unless I
manually stop iptables before shutting down.  This started around the
time I recreated my firewall settings with the Fedora GUI.

All three of my "desktops" (home, work and laptop) need ALSA for sound.
It's a major pain to recompile/reinstall ALSA every time a new kernel
update is released on Fedora.  ALSA is supported "out of the box" on
SuSE 9.0.  Plus a lot of other "extra" software comes standard on SuSE,
making my life easier (Adobe Acrobat reader, OpenVPN, APC UPS monitor).

 - BS