Comments on: Part 3

By: Angelina Mina

Angelina Mina — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 06:24:49 +0000

thank you, really gr8 article. it saved me lot of time.

Angelina
http://www.happy-funtime.blogspot.com

By: Ray

Ray — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 21:55:21 +0000

I would always recommend them in the other order. If you aren’t careful you can very easily invite bloat onto your machine. Debian is good for more experienced users who need an old machine to be revived, but newbies will try to install Gnome or KDE and not understand why it’s not right. Slackware will always try to give you the least by default.

By: MrCorey

MrCorey — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 17:29:51 +0000

That’s the reason why I’ve always been recommending Debian to people who ask on LQ who want to revive an older machine, as its got the installer and package manager, but the bloat only comes if you invite it (Slack is my second recommendation).

By: hari

hari — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 16:55:42 +0000

I recently reinstalled Debian on my laptop with netinstall. It is definitely as barebones (or even more so) as slackware if you want it to be…

but because of apt-get, you can get a fairly feature rich desktop in no time as well.

By: Ray

Ray — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 10:33:16 +0000

Linux still seems to throw out randomness. I have had Ubuntu and Debian on this laptop and both have worked equally well. Ubuntu is quicker to go on, unsurprisingly as Debian installs over the network!

I find Debian to be quicker once on the box - it’s certainly quicker to start up.

By: MrCorey

MrCorey — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 03:25:41 +0000

Tee hee. I DO have Debian and Ubuntu on the same box…as well as Gentoo, PCLinuxOS, and in a few days, Puppy (never tried puppy before). Sorry to hear that PCLinuxOS didn’t work out for you, Ray. It seems to be the only one that can do X right for the R300 chipset. I have 3D without hard locks! Woo!

By: J_K9

J_K9 — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 00:04:24 +0000

What I love about Slackware is its potential for customisation and tweaking without requiring hours of work (as Gentoo does). However, while it’s great for servers, I use Ubuntu as my desktop OS because it makes the process of getting a complete desktop environment so much faster and simpler. I have never tried Debian, but I assume that it’s much the same as Ubuntu…

I’d like to try Debian and Ubuntu on the same box to compare them! :)

By: hari

hari — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 13:17:58 +0000

Yeah, but the other way of seeing it is that the system also *assumes* you don’t want a lot of things :p

The more I use Debian, the more respect I have for it — it’s ported in so many platforms, languages and set ups. There’s even a Debian/FreeBSD version available out there somewhere.

The goals of Debian and Slackware are highly dissimilar so comparing them is useless — not even like comparing apples and oranges, which are fruits and have more in common with them - like vitamin C :)

By: drew

drew — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 12:55:30 +0000

Slackware by default doesn’t setup Unicode but from what I’ve seen, it’s not hard to get working. But then again, Slackware doesn’t do a lot of things, that’s the beauty of it to me. You install, you configure to your liking, then you’re done instead of allowing the system to assume what you want. :)

By: hari

hari — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 03:21:17 +0000

Slackware is also a distro which doesn’t turn on Unicode support by default. Am I right or wrong?

I hope they bring full Unicode support into Slackware in the future.

It must be easy to enable Unicode support in Linux, but I prefer distros which recognize other languages than English :P