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On Mon, 2006-04-03 at 13:18 -0500, Kelsay, Brian - Kansas City, MO wrote:
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<FONT COLOR="#000000">Who in our group is actually using these distros? I'm interested in</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">the ease of updating and stability after doing so compared to Mepis, HDD</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">installed Knoppix and regular Debian or any other Debian-based distro.</FONT>
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I run Ubuntu Dapper Drake on my laptop and love it for it's "no-brainer-ness". Everything just works. But I run Debian Unstable on my desktop to track development and do development myself. It's more work to keep it up and running but I have access to the huge amount of software in Debian at the latest version. I use the Gnome 2.14 desktop on both.<BR>
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<FONT COLOR="#000000">I've tried tons of LiveCDs, used Mepis quite a bit and never had success</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">with plain old Debian installing as a desktop. I like Mepis out of the</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">box, though like any distro you find little bits that don't work or you</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">don't like. Mepis is switching to the Ubuntu repositories with the next</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">release, in order to get more stable updates.</FONT>
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Probably more "current" releases instead of "stable". Debian Stable is solid as a rock. But their next release isn't until December of this year.<BR>
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<FONT COLOR="#000000">The point of this is, I still consider myself a Mepis user, but I'm</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">concerned about the quality of the Ubuntu repos if I stick with it.</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">Also, if I were to switch to Kubuntu, will I run into apt-pin problems</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">when I try to add software not included on the distro disks? That has</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">been a problem on Mepis with the Debian unstable repos. I tried the</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">64-bit Kubuntu last week and it looks great on my newish desktop PC, but</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">I also wonder how it will do on a PIII-500 with lots of ram. An older</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">Mepis was OK on it after I turned off the flashing and bouncing</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">mouse-busy cursors. Haven't had the guts to try a newer Mepis or</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">anything else on that PC. I need a Linux with the games working for my</FONT>
<FONT COLOR="#000000">kids when they are over.</FONT>
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Ubuntu's repos are formidable because they are largely based on Debian's. In additional, there's a laudable backport effort that works to bring newer software to older Ubuntu releases. The quality is great. Adding software from outside the distro is fine as long as it comes from the right Debian release.<BR>
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As far as resources are concerned, there won't be any difference between distros. You should use Gnome 2.14 if you're that worried about it. Gnome just went through a gang-busters optimization release cycle where they re-engineered a lot of their internal data structures for speed and efficiency.<BR>
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-- <BR>
Jason D. Clinton <<A HREF="mailto:me@jasonclinton.com">me@jasonclinton.com</A>>
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