[NBLUG/talk] Re: Which distro is best for a newbie?

[Clay Carley]

Hi Edward,
I don't think SUSE has a free distro anymore.  Debian may be easy to work 
with, as the apt-get package manager is pretty well set up in most cases.  I 
use Mandrake at work- it's very nice, although the urpmi package manager 
needs to be tweaked for internet sources.  There's also Fedora Core, which 
stemming from Red Hat isn't a bad distro at all.  I think (I'm not completely 
sure at the moment) that you have the choice of yum or up2date for package 
management- usually both work out of the box (or off the CD as it were).  
Debian takes a long time for major O/S updates.  I think it's been two years 
between the "woody" version and the new "sarge" version.  What is really nice 
about Debian, though, is that you only need to download a small amount for 
the install.  You can do the rest of the install over the internet, which I 
find convienent. 

I hope this helps more than confuses you more...

Clay Carley



Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 09:03:51 -0700
From: Edward <roble at sonic.net>
Subject: [NBLUG/talk] Which distro is best for a newbie?
To: talk at nblug.org
Message-ID: <6.2.1.2.0.20050623085942.01ed8448 at mailbox.sonic.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed


About a month ago or so, I joined this list, fuming at the injustices of 
Microbarf Corp. I asked everyone what distro they most recommended for a 
newbie and here is a summary of your responses:

Which distro is best for a newbie? The tally is in! Of all of the distros 
available, this group (NBLUG) recommended mostly just two:

1. Debian (7 votes)
2. SUSE (4 votes)

While Debian was recommended 7 times to SUSE's 4, SUSE also has the 
reputation of being better for newbies like me. So I have to go with SUSE. 
All the other distros got 3 recommendations or less.

Later I can switch. But do I have to erase an old distro from the harddrive 
if I switch to Debian?

Where do I best go to get a version of SUSE?

Thanks again,

Edward 
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