[Lvlug] Recommendations on a More Suitable Distro

[Patrick Bartek]

--- On Sun, 3/21/10, John Mc <jmcneill2 at earthlink.net> wrote:

> >>On 03/21/2010 03:42 PM,
> Patrick Bartek wrote:
> >>Debian has the reputation for stable releases, but
> they have
> changed to a 2 year release cycle with 3 years support.
> That's still okay, but I would have liked 4 or 5 years
> support. So, any other suggestions for me to look at.
> 
> >Tom Garland wrote:
> >Ubuntu Studio could be a good place to start to
> checkout the
> capabilities of a Debian based system.
>
> [snip]
> 
> I run both KDE versions of Mint on my two notebooks. From
> what I understand the GNOME versions work just fine, and
> considering you are accustomed to Fedora that is probably
> important. The next release of Ubuntu/Kubuntu will be at the
> end of April. That should be a Long Term Support (LTS)
> version which they do only every two years. The Mint "9"
> release [based on Ubuntu 10.4 (2010-April)] is about 30 days
> later and will also be 3 years of LTS. The current version,
> Mint 8, has an application base of only about 500. They have
> announced that the next release, in May, will be open to the
> entire Debian repository of over 30,000 apps. Mint 8 is EXT4
> compatible by default. The K-Mint versions are KDE4
> compatible, by default.

Installed Mint in VirtualBox last year to test it.  Didn't care much for it, but can't really remember exactly why.  Will give it another look.

> The downside? Probably that it isn't RPM.

Doesn't bother me.  Familiar with .deb packaging, apt-get, etc.

> The upside? For Ubuntu/Kubuntu (from what I've read--but
> don't know) is that ANY of the media codecs, etc. are only
> one or two clicks away from being installed.
> 
> For Mint, any/ALL of the codecs you can imagine come with
> the distro. It works.
> http://www.linuxmint.com/

This is good.  Fedora doesn't have any of the common codecs in its repositories, 3rd party or otherwise.  Have to download the rpm or gzip files, and install manually.

Thanks.

B