too many choices (distros)

[Siri Amrit Kaur]

On Thursday 06 October 2005 11:15 am Siri Amrit Kaur wrote:
> I started with Mandrake 8.0. Tried a lot of different distros
> because I wanted to learn. It wasn't until my second try of
> Slackware that I really started learning much.

I sort of misspoke. I tried a lot of distros because no one distro 
would work completely. The fonts rendered badly in those days, or the 
modem or soundcard wouldn't be detected, or the printer... I couldn't 
figure out how to fix those problems if I couldn't fix it through the 
"user-friendly GUI". So I decided to try Debian or Slackware to 
really learn Linux. 

After 8 tries, I couldn't get Debian to install. 

My first try with Slack was a disaster, but after months struggling 
with it, feeling like a stupid failure, I went back to Mandrake and 
found myself bypassing the GUI and editing files in /etc to fix 
things. Mandrake still didn't work for everything, so I went back to 
Slack and loved it. 

I finally left Slack and settled on Kanotix. It installs to Debian 
Sid. This was because the last version of Slack I tried did awfully 
on my computer. I also wanted easier package management than Slack's.

I tried a bunch of live-cd distros that could be installed if I liked 
them. SimplyMepis was great, but could never detect my very ordinary 
soundcard. PCLOS was beautiful, but there was something that I 
couldn't get to work. Ubuntu wouldn't let me set up a dialup modem. 

Finally found Kanotix, and it was the only distro I've ever used that 
configured absolutely everything correctly without any work on my 
part. The only configuration I had to change was putting a little 
script into the Xsession file to get it to delete the session after 
logging out. And that was only a problem because my default runlevel 
is 3 using "startx" from the terminal, not runlevel 5 from a GUI.

I want to try Frugalware when I have the time because it's based on 
Slackware but has the great Pac-man package utility from Arch. It 
also comes with Gnome, which Slackware dropped. I don't use Gnome, 
but I like the Gnome games :-)

Siri Amrit