installfest distros

[pking123-rieW9WUcm8FFJ04o6PK0Fg at public.gmane.org]

> On Sun, May 08, 2005 at 01:34:03PM -0400, David J Patrick wrote:

<snip>

> So, at the risk of starting a distro war (skirmish ?), might I humbly
> suggest Slackware as an alternate distro. My thoughts here (besides
> the fact that there are five machines around my desk running Slackware
> 9.? thru 10.1) is that there may be some in attendance that are fairly
> adept at these computer things, want to learn about this Line-Ux
> they've been hearing about, and would like a more "hands on/learning"
> oriented distribution.

While I,  a long-time Linux user might sympathise with Slackware as a suggestion, it 
might not be ready for the big-time Joe User. Why Slack is not viable as a beginner 
distro has been elaborated in other parts of this thread. 

For a serious free distro, I would suggest something that has at least some kind of 
package management in it, which Slack does not have. Most people want to use 
their computer to get on with other work; unlike us they don't wish to spend a solid 
week reading manpages, info pages, and kernel docs in order to get their system to 
do what they want it to do, which might only be something like using Firefox or Open 
Office. And if there are bugs in the distro, then you have to worry about upgrades and 
managing package clashes, which Slack expecs you to do on your own. If your full-
time job is to understand package relationships, then that's OK. But for a novice, that 
is probably not the goal.

We are not here to turn the computer world into a world of Gurus and sysops, as 
much as we would like to. To most people, the computer is an appliance, like a 
washing machine or a toaster. It does humdrum tasks that saves people many hours 
of work, and in doing so gives them time to do other things. If we now present them 
with an OS that seems as though it requires the reading of more manpages that 
most people can lift if it were printed, then we will scare them off. Bill Gates himself 
could not have thought of a more powerful way to promote Microsoft than that.

Paul King

> 
> I recognize that we don't want every machine to have a different
> distro (do we?) but a couple of different mainstream categories should
> be manageable.
> 
> Just a thought?
> 
> Allen
> 
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