Peter Hunter wrote:
For that reason I have been thinking of changing the distro to something else. But what? I have seen discs with Fedora core 4 (or something like that) and Mandriva, as well as Debian, and many others. I would be pleased to hear what YOUR views are (and anyone Else's for that matter).
I had started using Linux with Slackware way back in 1998 (release 3.5 IIRC) and was very impressed.
I stuck with my Slackware until kernel 2.4 was released, and since then I have moved between a number of distributions.
I used Suse for a while, then Mandrake extensively both at home and at work.
Feeling brave (i was under the mistaken impression it would be difficult) I tried Debian on my desktop in about 2002, and haven't looked back since. I now have three production servers running Debian Stable (which has just moved on a level to the current version "Sarge") which I find excellent from an admin point of view. The other advantage of running Debian is the huge user base, and great tech support that can be had from them - I am sure many ALUG-ers run debian or one of the numerous debian-based distros such as Ubuntu, Progeny, Mepis, Xandros etc.
Following my success with debian, I decided that my test servers and my desktop machines could teach me a thing or two if I went to a more source-based distribution, which I hoped would give me the grounding I needed to run some more bleeding edge programs so I am now running Gentoo on both test servers (in stable only configuration) and my desktop (in a hybrid stable and testing configuration).
By the largest margin, I find the documentation with Gentoo to be the best software documentation from the 'get it to work' point of view, and if you can get your system running how you want with the ebuilds (gentoo's pseudo-package system) and you don't mind waiting for everything to compile in the first place, the software is tuned to run very closely with your hardware which has left me with none of the dependency hell problems I had experienced with Mandrake and I can run with the latest geek-toys available by compiling from CVS when I feel brave enough.