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

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> First let me say that I do NOT like switching distributions.  

Same.

> It takes a lot of time, and I don't want to do it very often.

yep.
 
> First I discounted Mandrake without even looking at it.  

I tried mandrake twice. Both times made me wonder if they even have a QC
functionary.  I would be a pretty cold day you-know-where before I went back
their.  If you can't get glibc/nss right; your just hopeless (IMHO).  Could be
great now,  but that plus the incessant whining turns me off cold.

> 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.

Just too wierd.

> 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)

Not supported AT ALL by commercial packages I have to to use.    Maybe someone
needs to make an "Enterprise Debian";  with sensible names for releases and some
happy medium between stable/stale and unstable.
 
> 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).

Doesn't have anything to do with Fedora, I saw this as well in XD2.  It is/was a
bug in 1.4.5 itself.  It exists in Ximian's bugzilla.

> 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).

Suck!  I'm about to get a firewire PCMCIA card, any suggestions?

> 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.

Wierd.

> All three of my "desktops" (home, work and laptop) need ALSA for sound.

I need ALSO for full-duplex 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).

If I never have to build MDB Tools (included in SuSE) again, I'll be happy.  And
reiserfs and XFS and LVM are all supported in the installer!!!!!