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Recommending Linux to a Friend

posted by Dopefish on Wednesday March 05 2014, @07:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the no-need-to-join-the-microsoft-collective dept.

resignator writes:

"'Arm yourself with the information needed before telling someone to install such and such distro because it's great,' warned blogger Ken Starks in his recent FOSS Force post. 'It might be great for you, but maybe not so much with my hardware choices.'

What considerations do SoylentNews readers have when recommending an OS? What OS do you recommend the most or least? How far would you go to 'tailor' a Linux distro to a potential adopter before recommending something that will work out of the box but lack non-essential features?"

 
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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Bill Dimm on Wednesday March 05 2014, @09:31PM

    by Bill Dimm (940) on Wednesday March 05 2014, @09:31PM (#11640)

    Having seen so many people gushing about Mint lately, I decided to give it a try after an OpenSUSE 13.1 install failed [novell.com] on my new laptop. Mint recognized my hardware fine (unlike OpenSUSE), but had problems during installation [linuxmint.com]. It felt much less polished than I was expecting from all of the positive news I've heard about it. I ended up installing OpenSUSE 12.3, which worked but required installing a different WiFi driver [novell.com] to get wireless working, and still has weird bugs [novell.com], and the laptop screen stays on when the laptop is in a docking station with the lid closed and the WiFi stays on even when the hardware switch is turned off (works fine in Windows, so it's not a hardware problem).

    Maybe I've just had really bad luck this time around, but things just seem to be less polished and robust compared to when I installed OpenSUSE 10.2 on a similar laptop (mainstream Dell business laptop - D620 vs. E5430) in 2006. I've been using Linux since 1995, and I remember the bad old days. I thought they were behind us in 2006. Maybe some of the teams building distros these days are just too small to provide something really polished.

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  • (Score: 1) by HiThere on Wednesday March 05 2014, @10:02PM

    by HiThere (866) on Wednesday March 05 2014, @10:02PM (#11651)

    From my experiences (limited) Mint is a decent distro, but one that takes a more powerful CPU (or perhaps more RAM) than does Debian. This might be because I was using Mate on Mint, but xfce on Debian, but at that time Mate wasn't in the Debian repository. Mint may have had xfce, but the target user wouldn't have been satisfied, so I didn't test it.

    OTOH, I've tried a different version of Mint on the machine I'm now using with Debian wheezy KDE, and found it slow. I don't have any idea as to what's going on to cause this, however. Again, no straight-up comparison, so no strong conclusions can be drawn...but the result is that I tend to think of Mint as a slow system.

    --
    Put not your faith in princes.