Debian et. al.

[Harold Crouch <hcrouch@mchsi.com>]

Mike> RUXperienced? Try straight Debian.
Mike> 
Mike> Want Nice'n'Easy? Try Xandros, Knoppix, Lycoris, Libranet or
Mike> Lindows.


Debian

No, that installer will *not* ever get any better. I'm convinced that
Debian likes it just as it is.  It's a Rite of Passage with them. 
Anyone unable to survive that gantlet is deemed too stupid to be
using Debian. 


Lycoris

It's based on Caldera. (Thus spake Distrowatch.)


Xandros
  
Noooo!  Bastardized Debian packages! I regularly visited the Xandros
forum for a couple of months, and that company has done really *weird*
things to Debian. If you like KDE, then you definitely will *not* like
Xandros.  It runs an old version, maybe pre-3.x, and updating it to
3.x wipes the Xandros "improvements." My humble opinion is that Debian
Sarge and Xandros 2 will be released within a month of each other. 
RUN AWAY!


Lindows  

Nooooo!  Worse choice than Xandros.  With Xandros, at least you're not
running all the time as root. And Lindows customers shell out monthly
for access to the click-n-run repository whilst remaining completely
oblivious to the existence of standard Debian repositories.  
RUN AWAY!  RUN AWAY!


Libranet. 

I fought with Mandrake (and periodically the Red Hat and Debian
installers) from mid '99 until April '02, when I purchased Libranet. 
Libranet is Debian with a decent installer, good hardware detection,
and the most up-to-date packages of any Debian-based distro.  Fer
instance: Libranet 2.8 uses version 4.3 of XFree86.  Debian Unstable
is still on version 4.2.1. Libanet also ships with a *wonderful*
application called Adminmenu (and XAdminmenu) that makes many aspects
of Debian configuration childs play. If anyone using a Debian -based
distro wants to try it, let me know and I'll post a link to an older
version (free beer *and* speech). 

I'm one happy camper since I switched!  :-)


Knoppix

Haven't tried it, but know many people that have.  They all
love it!  I haven't heard a single discouraging word.  In fact, there
are posts on the Libranet forum reporting that Knoppix detects and 
configures hardware which the Libranet installer can't handle.  The
Knoppix load-and-run-from-CD feature has impressed *lots* of people.  


Got to go now!  It's 7:54 Saturday morning, and MST 3K will be on the
air in six minutes. 



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