On Tue, Mar 11, 2003 at 12:15:58PM -0700, vinayak_hegde@softhome.net wrote:
Does that mean other distros like debian,slackware and gentoo are not good?? Just wondering. In the FLOSS world, it is sometimes hazardous to label one distro better than other. What is liked by one and serves one better may be absolutely useless for another !!!. Just a thought.
You are right in trying to support all the alternatives available in the FLOSS world. But remember that this approach, although it has a good intention, actually tends to confuse and even frighten away the newbies. For a newbie into the free software community, any choice is good as any other - getting started is more important.
If we do try to compare the distros, realise that Red Hat is really easy to use and widely supported in India, thanks to a certain popular computer magazine. By "supported", I mean the presence of a user community that understands issues in that distros, although many of them may be using some other distro they like better.
The point to remember is that free software is no longer a dominion of the geek. GNU/Linux is becoming more and more popular, which means more and more people will be looking for answers that work; they don't want to be told to do it on their own. So for myself, I stick to Red Hat whenever someone asks me "which distro". Later on, if the person is really interested in getting deeper into this stuff, he will have explored other possibilities on his own, thanks to the large amount of community interaction involved.
Sameer.
PS: IMHO, Debian has a long way to go before it becomes the common man's desktop. Red Hat is good.