Re: Geeze, I might try Linux after all... (not too off-tpic I hope)

["Charles P. Schaum" <verbo.solo@sbcglobal.net>]

I had a poor experience with "commercial" design software on Windows (by
Serif, a company based out of the UK.) That pushed me to Linux.

I started with Debian "woody" and right away I had to fetch and compile
kernel modules from an Intel code base. I actually got Debian working
well under the 2.4 kernel and KDE (cause Gnome 2 was only just
starting). Then I went with Fedora, Mandrake, and SuSE. Each had strong
and weak points, except Mandrake (now Mandriva) that only had weak
points. I then toured through the BSD's and found that I like the X
implementation there the best, but the desktop experience was not the
best. I even tried Plan 9 and Solaris, which is slow. And I use a Mac
for work. I now run FreeBSD on a server and Ubuntu on desktop.

If you know Windows, then Mac, PC-BSD, and Ubuntu/Kubuntu are the likely
candidates. Increasingly I grow irritated with Gnome, but KDE is also
quite bloated. The Push Button Installer technology of PC-BSD, similar
to Mac and Windows, will feel very "normal."

TeX and friends work out of the box as TeX Live 2007 on Ubuntu and
Kubuntu. There is no "port" for FreeBSD apart from TeTeX AFAIK but there
are binaries that one can install under /usr/local. The BSD's have
better docs than Linux. Period. And their kernel and userland come
together in a full-features OS while Linux is a kernel and GNU, etc.,
userland. Kile for KDE and auctex with emacs are probably what you will
be interested in. TeXmaker forked from Kile and it can be slow. TeXmacs
and LyX are not strictly TeX/LaTeX, but close.

I'm torn between a TeX packaged "distro" and independent construction
either via TeX Live itself or DIY'ing it from CTAN. OTOH it's nice not
to have to build your own texmf tree; but it can be done and I've done
it by following the specs. Then again, if you are not LaTeXing things,
you might not need it. It gives one, however, a certain air of
self-gratification to master mktexlsr and have kpsewhich find stuff.

Also anything Linux-based is likely to have someone's ideology about
"freedom" of some sort butting into otherwise perfectly good software
packages and delimiting the "non-free" stuff, resulting in, for example,
the hyperlinked ConTeXt manuals not finding their links. With the BSD's
you don't have this politicking down on the commune. But TeTeX is a bit
outdated for my tastes.

Charles

On Fri, 2008-06-13 at 12:42 +0200, Alan Stone wrote:
> ( Oops, pushed inadvertedly some key on my keyboard and the
> message was away while in GMail - here's the sequel... )
> 
> Having heard Linux is, amongst other things, far more stable
> I might be tempted to play with it and progressively build some
> experience with it, master the beast and then switch some
> applications, amongst which ConTeXt, to it.
> 
> As I presently don't know a thing about Linux, which distribution
> do you recommend ?
> 
> Many thanks,
> Alan
> 
> At Friday 13/06/2008 12:28, you wrote:
> >Hi,
> >
> >Yesterday WXP crashed and it took me a whole day to
> >repair the thing and get it up and running again.
> >
> >Ha
> 
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