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I'm not competent enough to run Debian.

Two days ago I installed OpenSuSE 10.1 on a spare partition. My first impression was how fast it was. Konqueror showed me pages from internet faster than ever and Gimp sharped images faster than ever to. For me it was a better Linux experience than ever. That maked me wonder if I was competent enough to run Debian.

Then I installed OpenSuSE everything, except partitioning and language, was chosen and done by the installer. After that I had a system with lot of unnecessary applications and deamons running but still a faster OS than I have ever come close to with Debian, Sarge or Etch. I use to install really striped down systems with only things that I know I need. Maybe that is the reason why my Debian systems is slower than OpenSuSe. Maybe I have excluded some essential package. I don't now. But I think the main thing is how the system is configured. Now I'm absolutely sure that OpenSuSE's installer is more qualified than me and the Debian installer together.

On Debian I used to use the optimized K7 kernel. On OpenSuSE there are no such optimized kernel but a kernel common for all 586 processors. But still; OpenSuSE is faster.

With Debian I have never succeed with my goal to make Gimp save images with our specific Swedish characters in their name. I have spend lots of time reading the Debian Reference and other stuff on the net about localization but without luck. OpenSuSE did this configuration by default.

Now I have installed OpenSuSE as my main system. I swallowed my pride and, in this case, my anti-commercial ideology yesterday and chosed this semi-commercial system. I understand that a commercial system is more targeted against not so technical people than the more nerd targeted Debian that needs a lot of know how. I have read a lot and tried to learn the Debian system but now I have give up because a linux system it to complex and it's to much to learn. Therefor my conclusion is that; I'm not competent enough to run Debian and will probably never be.

This is how I see things right now. I have not used OpenSuSE much at all. And it's possible that my mind will change and I will come back to Debian creeping on my knees.

What do you think about my thoughts??? I'm very interested to read you opinion.

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I know I'm not competent enough...

Submitted by Seaslug on Mon, 2006-10-16 19:43.

... and that's why I run Debian - because it's easier IMHO to reconfigure a Debian system than any other distro I've tried.

Some of the best pointers I've ever received have come from Fedora, LFS, and Gentoo people, and my hat's off to those guys, but it takes me less time to slog through a configuration problem on Debian than anywhere else.

--
Jai yen

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Use whatever tools suit you

Submitted by pinniped on Tue, 2006-10-17 02:11.

Unless you have some ideological reason to use Debian, use whatever tools work for you. While Debian concentrates on packaging Free software according to its rules, other groups (like Ubuntu) make Debian friendlier for other people. The actual differences between desktop distributions in my opinion is small, and it is mostly free software (except for a number of device drivers). The only things to seriously consider are security updates and general software updates, and the general software updates are usually not that important - how often is it that you actually use a new feature in software? (The usual exceptions are the graphical arts-related packages and rapidly developing packages like Scribus and Inkscape.)

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Nothing is like the good, but not perfect, Debian. ;-)

Submitted by MagnusBerg on Thu, 2006-10-19 15:12.

Here I am again with a new fresh install of Etch done with the nice graphic installer.
First SuSE gave me problems then I tried to install and run the Nvidia driver. But that was a minor problem. But then suddenly I couldn't start Gwenview and KdeTV. I removed the .KDE settings with no luck. And reinstalling SuSE, a process that takes 6 hours, was nothing to think about. It wasn't fun any more.
Then I gave Kanotix a try. I absolutely prefer it instead of Kbuntu. But nothing is like the good, but not perfect, Debian.

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