Re: [Hampshire] Which Distro ?

Russell Gadd wrote:
> I am trying to decide on a distribution to use for my home PC and would
> welcome comments on the following.
>
> The background is that I am slowly getting into Linux, intending to drop
> Windows eventually. To date I have installed Debian Etch and Ubuntu as
> trials, multibooted with Windows XP. Also have installed Debian on a
> different (older) PC used solely for internet surfing - using XFCE4 as
> window manager. I have dug into the internals a bit now, and am
> comfortable with for example config files, regular expressions and some
> bash code. So I am reasonably confident that I can set up a system and
> tweak it as necessary.
>
> My natural choice would be Debian Etch. However, although it is by no
> means the only package I want to run, a major problem is that I need to
> run Gnucash version 2.2 so as to use the data files I have set up in
> Windows and the version in Etch is only 2.0 which is incompatible. So I
> am looking at present at 3 choices:
>
> Debian Lenny:
> - upside is that I am comfortable with Debian, its reputation and
> philosophy; have experience of its packaging (aptitude as well as
> Synaptic), has Gnucash 2.2 and will be the next stable
> - downside is that security updates are slower, I am very keen on
> security so am sensitive to this problem although have no experience of
> what this might mean in practice - perhaps I could consider using Vmware
> Player running a browser for my internet surfing,
> - also how unstable is it in practice?
> - not sure how to manage updates - in order to get more stability,
> should I ignore all but security updates if I am happy with the software
> as it is?
>
> Ubuntu
> - upside is it is Debian based, has Gnucash 2.2
> - downside is I'm not convinced of its stability - (I think it is
> based on Debian Sid?). I am very keen on stability. I know when Gutsy
> came out there were shouts from Gnucash users of it causing problems
>
> Fedora
> - upside: major distro, has selinux support, presumably benefits from
> Red Hat connection
> - downside: haven't run this, no experience of packaging system, have
> heard a comment that it is used by Red Hat as a test bed for new things,
> so how stable is it?
>
> Russell
>

I'd like to recommend PCLinuxOS as an extremely new user friendly
distribution. GNUCash version in 2007 is 2.2.1 and it's a livecd install
so you get to play with it first.

James