[PLUG] mandrake to slackware

[Jason Dagit]

On Fri, 19 Jul 2002, r0bbY russell aka MaTcHBoY wrote:

> thanks for the advice...
> I'm vi-friendly...emacs friendly.

Glad to hear that. I strive towards that goal myself.  But I think I lean
more towards emacs in practice :)

> I was more interested in just the actual stablity was that far superior to
> mandrake that I should reinstall my system with slackware rather then use
> mandrake again.

Stability truely comes from within...err the kernel I mean.  If you have
decent hardware the choice of distro shouldn't matter too much, when it
comes to stability.  With one obvious exception, if Mandrake is packaging
a lot of unstable (read development version) software then it might be
frustrating.  This is another reason to use Debian.  Debian maintains 3
branches, stable, unstable, and testing.  Along with security updates.

> I'd almost consider debian, if I had download the ISO for it today and not
> slackware.

Debian has some neat features, apt is really quite nice for automating the
process of locating a compatible version of libraries and installing them.
For example, on a Debian system it is no problem upgrading your version of
libc.  Try that manually and it's very hard.  I doubt Debian is alone in
that feature, I'm sure RH has something very similar these days.

> I would like to take more control over my system...which is my initial
> desire for slackware. Using mandrakes tools make me lazy, and I find myself
> trying to use their gui for config stuff. (bad habits are hard to break)

If control is your thing then you will find either Debian or slackware to
be quite rewarding.  Slackware in my experience is very good on older
machines that don't have the bells and whistles.

Good luck.
Jason