J.A. Watson writes "I have been quiet about Linux this week because I have been busy trying several new versions. In the process, I have learned quite a bit more, and started to think about the philosophy behind Linux, operating system choices, and Free / Open Source software in general."
The first thing that became clear to me this week, although I already knew it on a more superficial level, was that Linux distributions run across a sort of a scale from easy to install and use to complex to install and requiring a lot of manual setup and configuration. What I have tried, and written about, so far were at the "easy" end of the scale - Ubuntu, openSuSE and Mandriva. What I have been trying this week are at the other end of the scale - Fedora, Slackware and Debian Linux. In very general terms, what they all have in common is that the "easy" ones are usually based on one of the "complex" distributions, and then the authors of the distribution have done a lot of the hard work of setup and configuration, put a lot of effort into simplifying and automating the installation procedure, and added some/many/most of the most common packages. The goal of it all being that an "ordinary" user can install one of the "easy" distributions, and end up with a computer that is ready to use when the installation is done.
