Laurie Brown wrote:
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. <<<
I've also been a SuSE user for some years. I too would like very much to try Gentoo, as more than one user has said such good things about it. So when I upgraded the hard drive in my (Windows) Dell laptop I thought it might be a good place to start. I gave it a 10GB W2k partition (yeah, rank cowardice) and left the remaining 50GB for Linux. Stuck the Gentoo CD in the drive and powered up.
First thing it asked was for me to load some network drivers. How? I have two devices, both CardBus; an Edimax 10/100 and an Actiontec 802.11b. Neither of these are listed and there's no indication on either of them what devices they use (Intel, 3Com or what?) so without the correct driver Gentoo told me they weren't supported. That's my progress; fallen at the first hurdle. Much the same thing happened when I tried Knoppix, I seem to recall; the very first question required knowledge I simply didn't have and had no idea where to find or even what question to ask.
Using a GUI-based distro everything comes up sweetness and light with no baffling questions to answer. My impression is there's a huge gulf between the two types of distro. People like me have neither the time nor the patience to trawl endless newsgroups or cryptic manuals trying to figure out what the software is expecting; they just give up and go back to Red Hat / Mandrake / SuSE / Windows. We have work to do and the operating system is pretty much of an irrelevance as long as it runs the applications we need. It'd be nice to learn more about Linux but not if it means stopping work for a month just to even get the distro installed.
-- GT