[Cialug] Buying a new PC

[David Champion]

Nathan Stien wrote:
> On 10/8/07, Chris K. <lister at kulish.com> wrote:
>> Been out all weekend, so I am probably coming in late to the
>> conversation here.
>>
>> But there is always Debian as well.  apt is an excellent package manager.
> 
> I myself fall squarely into the apt camp.  But some people (especially
> Josh More) have lately been showing me some of the virtues of RPM.  It
> hasn't been enough to convert me quite yet, but I don't categorically
> dismiss it like I once did.  :-)
> 
> - Nathan

RPM by itself is a pain in the rear-end. Most RPM based systems now have
a front-end utility that makes it much easier to work with. I've been
using Mandriva for years, and the "urpmi" (user rpm interface) takes
care of 99% of the pain. There are some occasional issues, usually when
someone fat fingers a dependency name, or if your repository is broken.
Of course, there's also a graphical interface for this as well.

People complaining about "RPM dependency hell" are living in the dark
ages. It's like me complaining about Suse because it used to
occasionally spit out error dialogs in German at me even though I had
installed the English version - but it probably hasn't done that for 10
years. :)

I know some people really dig Gentoo, and that's fine for them, but can
you seriously in good conscience say that it's easy to use? For a
dedicated linux nerd maybe (and I'm not even giving you that) but for
the average computer user? Nope. Just the installation process alone is
enough of a deterrent for most people.

-dc