Vic,
I'm entering this thread a bit late, but these days I get to check
PLUG mail only a couple of times a week. You've already made a
decision, so go with it, but I'll add my own perspective FWIW.
The suggestions made by some people, while intrinsicalliy worthy,
suggest that we all have lots of time and available gear to sit around
playing with, trying available distros, installing and configuring
them. That's not true for everyone. So ideally, a person needs to make
an educated guess, based on the input he gets from experienced users
and from personal research, and then be willing to live with it for a
while.
That's the position I was in for a long time while working from home
as a contractor. Making a wrong choice had potentially disastrous
economic consequences if I suddenly found myself not operational when
I was supposed to be getting some work done.
Also, I find that even under the bet of circumstances, even if a
person can come up, be reconnected, and have his user files installed
fairly quickly, it still takes a few days for the pieces to stop
rolling whenever switching to any given new installation. It's not
unlike moving into a new house. How often do we like to move? Vic, I
know where you live and how long you've been there!
I've been working Unix systems almost exclusively since 1983, and that
remains my experience.
Now that I'm working full-time once again in an office, for a company
whose business is the creation of Linux for the embedded marketplace,
I'm again immersed in things I though I had long ago forgotten or did
not dare to play with while I was isolated.
Here we have to support the products we create on a wide variety of
Linux development platforms, and installed on an enormous number of
target devices. We have opportunity to look at a pretty wide range of
things in the Linux world.
And each engineer who comes to work here makes a decision as to what
distro he will install on his workstation. For that matter, the very
hardware in our workstations is mostly a matter of personal choice, as
some people buy a bucket of parts from Fry's, some are running PPC,
and who knows what else. There is no standard distro here, but I think
more run Debian than any other. A few run various versions of Red Hat
/ Fedora, and two of us that I know of are running SuSE, on of which
is me. (Of all the people in our office, I believe there is only one,
a manager, who runs on Windows.)
I liked SuSE 9.1 Pro when I installed it on my system at home. When I
started here I ran over to Fry's and got the boxed set of 9.2 to
install on my AMD64. It's lovely in almost every way. Not long after
that, I was able to build a virtual clone of my work system at home,
except with more memory, more hard drive, and a snazzier graphics card
to drive my Sony DVI LDC. Haven't seen 9.3 yet, and probably won't
bother with it because from what I read the changes are not that
important.
Most significantly, I made my choice and that's what I'm going with,
at least for the next year or so, until some good reason comes along
to change my mind. I can build and destroy test systems all I want,
but I just don't have the time and inclination to do so on the system
I have to base my work from. Anyone who has ever remodeled a bathroom
knows what it's like to try and live in a construction zone.
--
Lynn David Newton
MontaVista Software
Tempe, AZ
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