Linux Vs. FreeBSD Obscurity, linux
Debian's not a bad distro. I'd go with Ubuntu or the etch net install though, unless you've got 14 beer coasters and a lot of time on your hands.
As for YaST, whatever trips your trigger. I prefer editing .conf files myself.
Michael Heiming *Strictly speaking,* nothing. However, if we look at things from the end user's perspective instead of from the technical perspective, and again, the context of this discussion is...
KDE, IIRC, has a shell scipt that downloads and compiles the entire desktop. I don't recall it being particularly foolproof, though.
I have encountered the strange problem. I have garbage on the screen (square patches) when I play DVD which played good on older kernel. I used RH9 with 2.4.26 kernel and Xine and movie...
I personally use Gentoo, where everything's compiled from source using a handy-dandy Python script. It handles dependencies about as well as apt (i.e. a hell of a lot better than anything else), and has a *lot* of packages available (even quite a bit of closed source stuff and custom installers for proprietary stuff). It does take a while, though. KDE takes something like 12 hours to build from scratch, and when I upgraded to GCC 4.0, it took ~36 hours to recompile my entire system.
Sadly, that's the way it is, and that's likely the way its going to be. On top of the usual RPM-DEB stuff and the handful of BSD-inspired source- based distros, it seems like every couple of months, another peeant Mickey Mouse distro decides that everybody else is doing it all wrong and they've got the answer everyone is looking for. At least it's not as annoying as paying Linspire 20 bones a year for a dumbed-down synaptic with pretty pictures.
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