I spent a little more time playing with Mepis last night. I have been tweaking it some and for the most part it is a very good second place behind Ubuntu. I guess that stands to reason since Mepis 6.0 has a little Ubuntu under the hood. Ubuntu jsut works form me and the support has been fantastic. It could be argued that Mark Shuttleworth (head honcho at Canonical, parent of Ubuntu) is trying to be the Bill Gates of Linux the way he is throwing all his support (and money) behind this project. One thing is for certain, distrowatch.org has been tracking the various distros and Ubuntu has been the most popular for a very long time.
The major sticking point for me with Mepist is KDE. I am not a fan of the overly busy desktop environment and KDE just appears too busy for my tastes. I am more of a "more is less" person when it comes to desktops (I prefer XFCE or IceWM). KDE has too much going on for me...a little too pretty at times. I know can tweak KDE more than I have, but it won't look like KDE when I am finished if I do :-) . One good thing Mepis has going for it is that one of my favorite add-ons, Automatix, works with Mepis. That made my life a little easier when setting the test box up.
My wife asked my why I had a sudden interest in various flavors of Linux and I guess that is a pretty good question. I am not a hardcore Linux admin nor am I a Linux fanboy (at least I hope I am not) but I see more and more interest in Linux and since IT is the industry I am in, it behooves me to be a bit more knowledgeable about it. If I change jobs and knowing Linux will help me in the new job, that is great. I like to learn and it appears that knowing Linux (at least in a corporate setting) will be of some value. I know that in an R&D environment that is pushing to save money, Linux on X86 hardware is cheaper than Solaris on Sun hardware. The tools are about as good and the enginerds are familair with Linux already since most of them use it at home.
So far, I have only experimented with Linux distros popular with home users. The two main Linux distros for enterprise (Red Hat and SuSE) are still pretty unfamiliar to me (although thanks supporting R&D at work, I am somewhat familiar with SuSE). I guess SuSE sholuld be next if I can find the time to start.
Red Hat has a "open" version called Fedora and SuSE's is called OpenSuSE. Both are free but they do not offer any "formal" support, only what is available online, which is okay with me. I am used to that kind of support. I have all 5 iso's for OpenSuSE at home, I just have not burned them yet.
I still have a couple more personal/hobby Linux distros to try, PCLinuxOS and Mandriva (the former Mandrake distro). There are others (Slackware, Debian, DSL, Gentoo, et al), but they go into the realm of hobbyist and not really desktop user ready/friendly, at least from what I am reading. There are also others that have greater demands (such as Freespire) than I can provide in a sandbox environment, although I do have a couple of spare hard drives I could toss into my main machine (3 GHZ, 512 RAM, Nvidia 5600 graphics card) that would allow me to test the more robust distros. The possibilities are many, but time is short. Maybe I will just keep reimaging the test laptop and see what I like. So far it has Xubuntu, then Mepis...nothing else comes close although I am really gonna have to give Fedora and SuSe a try.
No comments:
Post a Comment