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Re: [LUG] openSUSE 10.2 review

 

On Sun, 10 Dec 2006 12:24:04 +0000
Jonathan Roberts <jonathan.roberts.uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Infact after reading some of what Groklaw has to say I've edited the
> post again! I will be changing from openSUSE. It is a good distribution
> but I'm not prepared to stand up and support it in the face of the rest
> of the community likely as a result of my ignorance!

Just make sure that whenever you talk about your distribution you use
the full name: OpenSuSE, not just SuSE. Does groklaw have a particular
problem with opensuse?
http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse/2006-08/msg00091.html

> Basically, I still don't claim to understand the problems with it so
> much as I think Novell makes a good case, but I don't think I should sit
> on the fence and I'd rather stay on the side of caution and support the
> rest of the Free Software community.

opensuse do seem to be more "open source" than "free software" - that
does concern me because of the inherent weaknesses in so many open
source certified licences. (JMRI again.)

>
> Any recommendations? I liked Fedora but that was soo slow to boot. How
> unstable is Debian unstable?

It's not!
:-)

In 4 years of running Debian unstable I have never had an unusable
system. I have 2 incidences in that time where X failed to start but I
was still able to login and use the system to fix the problem.

Debian unstable is for developers really. There are occasional problems
with packages that won't install and occasional problems where a
package upgrade breaks that package or breaks other packages.

These issues are handled by not allowing such packages into Debian
testing which therefore acts as a proving ground for packages prior to
each Debian release (stable).

Most users are fine with Debian testing. You will be 10days behind
Debian unstable in terms of packages that are good enough for testing.
Packages that do get into testing and then break are removed from
testing so that isn't a problem either.

Debian will continually upgrade itself (use cron-apt) which, IMHO, is a
huge benefit over the freeze-and-upgrade system used by Fedora and
others. Things may have improved since I last used such a distribution
but not once did I manage to successfully upgrade Fedora or Mandrake, a
reinstall was always necessary.

:-(

Mandrake 8.0 to Mandrake 8.1 was so bad that I moved every machine to
Debian!

--


Neil Williams
=============
http://www.data-freedom.org/
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/
http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/

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