switch distros???

[me at mattgillen.net (Matthew Gillen)]

Bill Mills-Curran wrote:
> I have an opportunity to get my wife to consider switching from
> Windows to linux, but I don't think Fedora is the right distro for
> her.  I'm wondering about Linspire/Freespire (Freespire is to Linspire
> as Fedora is to RedHat?)  or Ubuntu.  (I've been using Redhat & Fedora
> since '98.)  I've also been frustrated at some of the compatibility
> problems (like wireless) with Fedora, so I'm considering switching,

In general, whatever driver issues you're having with one distro, you'll
almost certainly have with another, since they all use the same base (and
most distros push fixes and improvements upstream so that all distros
eventually benefit).

I suppose different distros may make using NDIS-wrapper-based drivers easier
than others, but sometimes it's just a matter of knowing where to look (have
you tried Livna's repo? (http://rpm.livna.org ; check the packages starting
with "kmod-")  (YMMV, I haven't needed to use those Madwifi drivers in a
while...)

FWIW, I've never had a good experience switching distros.  Whatever killer
feature that attracted me to something else inevitably ended up being
outweighed by a deluge of little gotchas that eventually made it not worth
the hassle.  It always amazes me just how different distros that are based
on the same software can be (and not in improved functionality; I mean
annoying things like layout of /etc, which files are used by default, what
various default settings are, the methodology to obtain "unsupported"
software or drivers, etc).

Well, you can see how set in my ways I am ;-)  I'm sure it's not as bad as I
make it sound, but learning how to bend-over-backwards isn't as fun the
second time.  Who knows, maybe things are better since the last time I tried...

Matt

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