> I was reading up on other distros and was thinking about changing, but
> the great thing about Linux that I finally realized was that if you use
> a good, reliable and well supported distribution as your base, you can
> customize almost all of them to be exactly what you want. So if you
> start with Ubuntu and realize you prefer KDE, it can be installed and
> ready to be used in 5 minutes.
Ah, the reason that almost everything can be installed quickly and
easily is that you're currently using a Debian-derived distribution.
With pretty much any of the Debian-derived distributions you never
need to hunt for things or compile source. You just go to your
package manager and it is probably already there.
RPM-based distributions traditionally do not provide such variety.
The Ubuntu (LTS) system I type this on has available packages for
13 mail transport agents, 14 CGI-capable web-servers (not counting
the Apache MPM's separately), 15+ shells, 40+ X window managers, 19+
terminal emulators, and for desktop systems there are games unending...
> I realized I can learn a lot more and have more fun by customizing one
> distribution than obsessing over deciding one. So, after all that
> rambling I guess what I'm trying to say is just find one that's known to
> be stable and well supported and play with it until it is exactly what
> you want.
Trying a variety of distributions can be a learning experience. Ideally,
you want to have a separate machine to test them on. (The installers
should allow you to avoid reformatting the /home partition, but if
you're unfamiliar with their installation tools you may not know how to
specify this. Be safe and just use a separate machine.)
I don't know what sort of value would be gained by trying "yet another
XXX distribution", but it can be a learning experience to try one
DEB-based system, one RPM-based distribution, etc. They do things very,
very differently sometimes.
Cheers,
Steven Black
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