Machine plants 6023

snips

On Thu, 17 Nov 2005 19:20:03 -0800, tab

Way too freakin' often - is your hardware screwed up? My Linux machines run until *I* shut them down, apart from hardware failures.

Well, firewall; the rest isn't necessary.

Debian has something like 11,000 packages in its full repository list. Even a less rich distro typically includes between several hundred and a couple thousand packages, including media players, office apps, development tools, games, database servers and more - virtually all of which work out of the box, unless you a) forget to configure some requisite item, or b) insist upon trying to install conflicting packages.

I rarely find that to be the case anymore. With older distros, sure. With a few odds and ends, possibly. This machine here, though, has seen SuSe and Mandrake (and Mandriva), Gentoo, Debian, Knoppix and Ubuntu, and possibly others... and as far as I can tell, the only thing that doesn't work "out of the box" is the web cam - boo hoo.

You mean if you use unsupported hardware, it's unsupported? Golly gee. Tell me, does that expansion card for the Amiga work well under Windows? It's supported, right? No? Golly gee.

Which is more than offset by the reduced frustration in having tools that don't require invasive licensing, don't try to play big brother, don't give a rat's rear if you're running a workstation or server, don't care if you're serving 10 people or 10,000, and whose configurations don't magically decay simply by using them.

Linux is big on flexibility. KDE. Gnome. Fluxbox. Blackbox. Sawfice. Icewm. Ratcontagion. And more and more and more.

Choose the one that suits you - the *real* benefit of standardization instantly becomes apparent... you can switch up UIs at the drop of a hat, yet the applications keep right on working.