Hi, I'm relatively new to linux, I began with Slackware, which a friend of mine provided me, but that proved far too difficult for a veritable n00b like myself, and as such, I purchased myself a copy of SuSE 9.3 professional and it has served me well, the YaST2 setup tool has proven invaluable and I'm afraid to part with it, but I feel that because 1. I've been having problems with updating old programs and libraries, 2. I would like to expand and augment my understanding of linux in general and I feel that that can only occur upon weening myself off setup tools and actually exploring the bash shell, and 3. my system, as it stands, is relatively stable, and being the nerd I am, it doesn't feel right to me when everything is running smoothly; I would prefer to have problems configuring hardware and stuff .

For all of these reasons, I have begun the long and tiresome search for a new distro, which must fit these specifications:

1. MUST support prism2_usb wireless adapters with relative ease (I know I said that I like configuring hardware and fixing problems and such, but I HATE CONFIGURING NETWORK INTERFACES)

2. Must be very robust; I have the drive space, no sense wasting it.

3. Must be very configurable, and most of all, pretty (which means KDE only )

Please suggest a new distro for me, I would really appreciate the input of you seasoned linux veterans.

Thanks.

Take a look at distrowatch.com and pick a few to test if you have free disk space.

hrm.. well.. you could always upgrade to SUSE 10.0... and you aren't required to use YAST.. you can certainly to everything through the console if you wish..

I don't know what all distributions support the prism2_usb, but prism 2 should be supported I think...

If you like tinkering and getting everything working nicely, you can check out gentoo... the initial installation is a little daunting, but if you follow the handbook pretty much word-for-word, you should have no trouble to speak of.. However, Gentoo is source-based, so just remember that you have to compile everything from source... KDE takes about 15 hours on my Pentium 4 2.4Ghz & 512MB DDR RAM notebook...OpenOffice was quite a bit longer..

If this is a desktop machine, it shouldn't really be a problem.. I just couldn't handle the compile times on my laptop anymore..

Debian is good, stable, but it doesn'treallyinclude the latest and greatest packages. If that's not your concern, then I would recommend trying it.

You may also want to check out the BSDs... good luck.

I have done the same. I had slackware, for some reason I think it's not up to date and slow. I moved to suse 10 . It's cool , but I would like to know what's happenning. I have an extra system in the house I keep missing around with. I have installed FreeBSD 6. It's actually where you discover what's going on .

debian could be your answer. Apt is for me the best package manager there is, with perhaps pacman (Arch).
Gives you the latest KDE (with no tweaking, just the original). You have whole books about debian, once you get into it, it's very nice.

I think I will go ahead and give Debian a shot, but keep suggesting things in the mean time.

Thanks.

Hello,

Here are a few suggestions for getting under the hood:

1. Slackware: I know you left this distro because it was too overwhelming, but the fact is that Slackware is the true distro for nerds (in fact, that is probably why your friend introduced you to it). You may have initially rejected it because you needed to do a lot of configuration through the CLI, but isn't that what you are looking for now? Slackware does not do anything that you didn't ask it to. It is a very simple and straightforward distro - if you ever have any problems, you can immediatly track down its source. For Linux tinkering, the Slackware community is probably the most knowledgable around - even if you're not using Slackware, try posting a thread there. You'd be surprised.

2. Gentoo: This is the ultimate do-it-yourself distro. Everything, including the kernel, is compiled from scratch. You have complete control over what is going on. I have never used it myself, but from people's experience, it is not as hard as it sounds. It is just very time consuming downloading all of the sources and compiling them.

3. Debian: I know they mentioned this before, but I just want to add that a few points. Debian is a very interesting distro, because it is very up-to-date like Suse or Mandriva, but provides enough flexablility for professional Linux users. And of course, the package system is the best out there, so you won't need to worry about compiling as often as other distros. In other words, you can pick and choose what you want to configure manually without taking apart the whole system.

Good Luck,
Murdock

I would also recommend browsing the Distro Reviews section here on LQ.org
Perhaps you will discover a distro not yet mentioned here that you'll really like. Who knows? Good luck with it!