OT: "Best" Linux Distro?

[Roger Merchberger]

Rumor has it that Jules Richardson may have mentioned these words:

>It's a lot of work to not install bloat, though. Packages for all modern 
>Linux distros tend to be very coarse grain and you get lots of junk that 
>you don't need.

Yup, you *cannot* install Redhat or SuSE without installing X and then KDE 
or Gnome (or both), and some things in Gnome are also crosscompiled w/KDE 
libs, so it pretty much gets installed anyway.

And paring things down sometimes breaks things, too; I have a webserver 
that went unstable when I klobbered a metric buttload of unnecessary (or so 
I thought) RPMs... Ungh. What a PITA.

>(I'm curious now as to what a "wallet management tool" is... my wallet's 
>in my pocket - what on earth about it needs managing on my computer? :)

It's for managing online passwords & account information.

>Comments on how well OSX handles this would be welcome.

Can't comment on that yet, still don't have much time to diddle with my new 
(to me) iMac w/Linux & OSX on it.

>I suspect the Linux lot missed a trick about 5 years ago and should have 
>designed and built a desktop environment up from scratch rather than just 
>lifting concepts from Windows.

Pffft. Lifting concepts from Windows? You couldn't be further from the 
truth on that one. Every WM I ever used had multiple desktops, OSX just got 
'em, and Winders has yet to have that.

Oh, and there's Afterstep, FVWM (my favorite, and ontopic, it's ancient! 
;-) and for minimalistic sake, TWM... It's just that when most people can't 
double-click on an MP3 file to make sound come out, they think said WM 
sucks & get lazy. :-/


>>p.s. I typically go around using console mode for at least a couple of
>>hours everyday. Console mode with framebuffer at 1024x768 is great!!
>
>Heh. A graphical email client just works better for me,

Text would work fine for me if I had time to convert my 7 *years* of Eudora 
filters over to Mutt... Not exactly high on my priority list...
;-)

>  and I couldn't do image editing without a desktop

I thought there was inroads to making the Gimp work directly on the 
framebuffer... but that thought might've been a side effect of having too 
much blood in my alcohol system... ;-)

>  or a graphical web browser,

links -g www.google.com. Works with DirectFB and the SDL library. It looks 
pretty darned good, and doesn't need X whatsoever. (I also have lynx for 
text-only browsing when one needs to highlight text, because when the 
graphical links browser takes over the mouse, you can't highlight text 
anymore.)

>  but other than that I tend to just have five or six shell windows open 
> for doing most things.

I have the Sun font compiled into the kernel on all my Linux boxen, because 
it's just so durned freakin' kewl -- fell in love with that font on the 
first Sun I ever saw, back in '89.

Anyone know of a Sun font I could use for terminal windows in X? That's the 
biggest thing I miss of all... ;-)

Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger

--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger   | "Bugs of a feather flock together."
sysadmin, Iceberg Computers |           Russell Nelson
zmerch at 30below.com          |