LinLog

I've been thinking for a while that I might change distributions. It was setting up that Xandros box for Sarah that really made me start getting serious about it. Although I don't think Xandros is for me, there were some really nice things about it, including the package management system and the nice, polished look of the desktop.

I've heard that many Linux users try out new distributions like there's some sort of contest for using the most. In fact, a couple of weeks ago, I was a thread on LQ where a guy wanted opinions on his list of favorite distributions. I mean, he had an actual list of something like ten different distributions that were his favorites.

I'm not like that. I've been a serious Linux user for around five years, and I haven't tried ten different distributions in my entire life. In fact, I canlist them out right now: RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake, Slackware, and Xandros. I also installed Kubuntu on VMWare at work just to see what it looked like, but I don't count that because I only used it for about 10 minutes. The point is that I'm the type of person who likes to find something that works and stick with it. My personal experience has been that the "search for the perfect" anything is a fool's errand. The best course of action, in my opinion, is to find something that's good enough for your purposes and stick with it until you find a compelling reason to change. Trying every new thing that comes out might be fun if you're into that sort of thing, but otherwise, it's a waste of time.

That's why I've been a Slackware user since late 2000. It was the first distribution I stuck with long enough to get used to and I haven't seen a good reason to change since. I was originally attracted to it by its "no frills" nature: no special tools, no custom setups, no non-standard package. Pretty much everything in Slackware is generic. The up side of this is that, if something doesn't work correctly or if you want to change the system configuration in a way that isn't directly supported by the distributor, it's no problem - just refer to the documentation for the appropriate package and you'll find the information you need. This was in contrast to my experience with the likes of RedHat and Mandrake, where they included lots of handy configuration tools, but when the tools didn't work, you were pretty much out of luck. Oh, I'm sure it's possible to sort out the various custom scritps and configurtion files that make everything work under the hood, but when you're a new user, it's not really an option. However, with Slackware, the generic instructions and tutorials all still apply, which makes things easier to mess with.

However, I'm no longer a newbie. In fact, the more I learn about how things work under the hood, the less I find that I care. Sure, it never hurts to know the details, but I've reached the point where understanding the minutia of configuring various packages no longer seems like a productive use of my time. I'm a programmer, not a system administrator, and I have no desire to become one. These days, all I want is a reaonable system that's easy to manage for routine things. I don't want to learn any more configuration file formats, I don't like compiling software I didn't write, I don't think the command line is "cool," and I don't care what my system uptime is.

This is basically the same reason I moved from the ROX desktop to KDE a year ago. ROX was a nice environment, but the simple fact is that it was and is marginal and non-standard. It doesn't have wide support, it doesn't integrate well with the rest of the system, and it's somewhat lacking in application coverage. KDE, on the other hand, is just the opposite. It is widely supported, comes with a wide array of applications, and even the default configuration has fairly decent integration with the rest of the system (due, in part, to the massive number of applications included with the desktop). In other words, all the boring work of integration, packaging, and so forth has already been done. Even a stock KDE desktop fully functional and fairly well integrated. It "just works." With ROX, however, I had to do a lot of work setting MIME type associations, creating AppDir wrappers, and even writing some applications myself.

So now I'm looking for another distribution. I probably won't actually switch for a couple of months - until I get myself an upgraded system. However, I'm already starting to look. I want something that does most of the work for me. Hardware detection, a package manager that resolves dependencies automatically, a nicely customized desktop, and decent system administration tools so that I don't have to bother with configuration files. However, I still want development tools to be within easy reach - including things like web and database servers. Plus, I absolutely have to have at least KDE 3.4.0, because I don't want to have to convert my profile backwards. So I'm starting my research now, although so far it looks like my options are limited. It looks like the only major KDE-focused desktop distributions that come with version 3.4 are Kubuntu - which is still pretty young, but sounds good - and SuSE 9.3, which I think costs money. Maybe I'll have more choices by the time I need to make a decision.