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> I think it's a bit of a shame that Ubuntu is the "no headaches" distro Is it though? I mean, it is advertised by magazines and shills as such, but it really
by zilti 3y ago
> I think it's a bit of a shame that Ubuntu is the "no headaches" distro
Is it though? I mean, it is advertised by magazines and shills as such, but it really is not in practice, never has been. Back in the days, Mandriva was the "no headaches" distro, since then many distros have caught up - my go-to for many years that I also successfully got non-nerds to use has been OpenSUSE.
- jlpcsl 3y agoThe one I usually install to normal users who do not know computers well is KDE Neon. But yeah with recent very positive experiences with openSUSE Tumbleweed, I am also thinking about using oST instead.
- indigodaddy 3y agoSo if I install Tumbleweed I should get this latest KDE version very soon?
- toyg 3y ago> Mandriva was the "no headaches" distro The original name was Mandrake, precisely because it would magically autoconfigure all your hardware and software - well before Ubuntu existed. The issue Mandrake/Mandriva always had, was that they would go a bit overboard with the approach, ending up with a system that could feel a bit sluggish - because it had all sorts of stuff preinstalled "just in case". It was also a bit of a separate kingdom - used RPM but wasn't really compatible with the wider array of RedHat packages. The Ubuntu innovation was that they hit a better middle ground: they were fundamentally Debian-compatible, and their autoconfiguration worked well (particularly with 3d cards, at the start) but also gave you a fairly fast desktop. These days it's all much of a muchness really.
- mark_undoio 3y agoIn the early days of my Linux use I was on Mandrake 7.2 and loved it. All the "just in case" random packages were very entertaining and educational to me, although they were probably a distraction from whatever I was meant to be doing! Still, the experience seems to have served me well in the end. I do miss that feeling of discovering all the weird themes and window managers they packaged by default, I don't get the same vibes of "any UI is possible" these days (even though the UX is probably much better by conventional criteria).
- qup 3y agoMandrake! I'm the other guy who used it! In 1999 I paid about $30 for a copy so I didn't have to spend weeks downloading it over 56k.
- kergonath 3y agoSame! So I guess there are at least 3 of us :) Memories…
- jtorrents 3y agoAs the sibling comment says, was relatively popular here in Europe. It was my first GNU/Linux disto. I had problems installing Debian in a laptop with a nasty Wifi PCMCIA card, Mandrake was able to make it work.
- qup 3y agoSame, broadcom wifi issues and 3dfx driver issues for my voodoo card but mandrake mostly just worked. I eventually learned enough to install debian-netinst and get everything working, probably within about a year.
- jtorrents 3y agoExactly the same here ;) I also ended using Debian when I learned enough.
- kergonath 3y agoOpenSuse is fantastic. It’s very easy to set up and nice to use out of the box. It’s also fairly close to the bleeding edge and at the same time very stable. I am quite happy with it.
- SomeoneFromCA 3y agoIMHO the best update strategy I've seen is the FreeBSD/NetBSD quarterly update, with "base" part of the system not updating. OpenSUSE is too frequent to my taste.