I tried CentOS as a guest Windows 8.1 using VMWare Player, but had some problems with it. Mostly I couldn't figure out what packages were available. CentOS seemed to have fewer rpms than other distributions. The guy who gave me advice on the GNUCobol newbie discussion favored Fedora. I installed Fedora 21 using VMWare Fusion as a guest on OS X. I had some trouble installing GNUCobol, again with missing packages. So I wrote the GNUCobol newbie list again. One reply later, the COBOL compiler installed. I'll try a "Hello World" program tomorrow evening. On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 6:53 AM, Stephen Partington wrote: > I would have to say, pick something stable that doesn't change much, go > with that. Personally for dev environments i prefer VM's because you can > snapshot them and revert anytime you want so you can let your code eat the > VM, see what it did, and then revert and fix whatever needs fixing and try > again. > > Centos is the epitome of not changing much. and that would suggest it > meets whatever you need. Just as a desktop environment of choice and you > are ready to go. > > On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 8:57 PM, Matt Graham wrote: > >> On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 7:39 PM, trent shipley >>> wrote: >>> >>>> What is a good, simple desktop oriented distro not derived from >>>> Debian or Ubuntu? GnuCOBOL currently has a significant bug on Ubuntu >>>> 14. (No. Red Hat and SUSE are not desktop oriented distros.) >>>> >>> >> What, precisely, do you mean by "desktop oriented distro"? I wouldn't >> recommend SuSE for anything or anyone (it's too buggy), but CentOS 6 with >> KDE has worked fine for me on a Dell box as a workstation-ish thing at >> work. (I have been using Linux for a long time, though, so YMMV on this.) >> >> At home, I use Gentoo, because there's no systemd requirement and >> upgrading is incremental instead of "guaranteed downtime while you >> reinstall the whole darn OS every couple of years." Gentoo may not fit >> your criteria of "desktop oriented" though. >> >> On 2015-01-05 20:04, Stephen Partington wrote: >> >>> you could try the fedora "desktop" release >>> >> >> Fedora is not a stable thing. As such, I wouldn't recommend it if you're >> going to be writing code. The *last* thing you want when writing code is a >> system that's b0rked because update 2345 ate libxml2.so.2.9.2, which means >> most of your GUI desktop applications no longer work.... >> >> -- >> Crow202 Blog: http://crow202.org/wordpress >> There is no Darkness in Eternity >> But only Light too dim for us to see. >> --------------------------------------------------- >> PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org >> To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: >> http://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss >> > > > > -- > A mouse trap, placed on top of your alarm clock, will prevent you from > rolling over and going back to sleep after you hit the snooze button. > > Stephen > > > --------------------------------------------------- > PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org > To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: > http://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss >