BenE wrote:
On Fri, 1 Aug 2003, Ben Francis wrote:
[SNIP]
I think the manually-editing-config-file problem arises from a lot of people (on this list anyway[1]) use distros that don't have the GUI front ends for doing a lot of system stuff. Personally, I started off with linux on suse 8.0 but moved on to linuxfromscratch after about 5 months. I've
[SNIP]
I started seriously using Linux with SuSE 5.3, and progressed through various versions up to 7.3, the last one I installed. As my knowledge increased, my frustration with GUIs and their attendant restrictions grew. The final straw was RPMs and dependencies, and messing about with RPM libraries etc., etc. It simply became too difficult to manage the systems practically, especially with self-compiled software (however many programs SuSE put on their CDs/DVDs there will always be something else one finds and needs, and that'll clash with the stuff the distro needs).
I fell into the arms of Gentoo about a year ago, and have never looked back.
In conclusion, there is and will be a place/case for packaged GUI-based distros on the desktop, (although if I were rolling a lot out I'd build one in G2 and clone it), but the lack of a GUI, and text based config files is a major, major advantage Linux has over GUI-based server systems (accepting that on Linux the GUIs edit text files).
Cheers, Laurie.