It's not quite there yet. I follow the instructions 100% accurate for my ATI driver installation, but it doesn't work.

Things need to be standardised in the Linux world. Things like installation, uninstallation, package management, administration, authorisation prompts and control panels.

I'm disappointed with my distribution of Debian.

I have been using Mandriva Linux now, for the past week or so. It has not been troublesome at all, though I have noticed problems with Firefox.

I thought that upgrading Firefox would be an easy procedure, but it involves using the console. I'll tell you now that this is the main reason why Linux will never be suitable for desktop use -- it is too dependant on the console/shell/terminal interface, in order to get the most out of the OS. This is a crying shame because many computer users would love to make the transition to Linux because of its heightened security, performance and far superior memory management (far superior to Windows, that is).

So I download Firefox 1.5.0.4 i686 for Linux, and I extract the files to my home directory located at /home/aaron/ in a folder called firefox. Then you need to open the console in order to start the program, but it gives you the message along the lines of: ./firefox cannot, glibc++5 is not a valid file or folder. This means I need the glibc++5 file.. and where do I find that? Well, it isn't on the Mandriva update site/application... and it isn't included with Firefox...

In fact, the Linux Firefox installation notes are a pile of crap. All it does is tell you how to extract it. Great. So, how about opening it?

I've been around in circles a few times and got nowhere, so when I get home tomorrow I think I'll just try and download the file I need from somewhere on the Interweb.

So I'm using Debian right now, and I don't understand how I ever got in to the problems that I did before... the installation was super-quick (for a net based installation, it took about 40 minutes), all the packages I need were pre-installed, things like Firefox (Iceweasel) and OpenOffice work out of the box, and it picked up the Gigabit network adapter in this Optiplex SX280 no problem. Fonts look great, Java installation was a breeze (I just followed the instructions on the java.com website) and Flash installation in Firefox (Iceweasel) is as simple as it is on Windows based systems.

The APT package management tool is simply the best package manager out there, and there are almost 20,000 official, tested, 100% stable packages to be installed on the current version of Debian (Etch, version 4.0). Although the software is noticeably behind the competition (Gnome 2.16, Fedora 8 will use 2.22), OpenOffice 2.0.4 (Fedora 8 will use 2.4) and it has Gaim instead of Pidgin. There is no option in the stable release to get a newer version simply down to it not being branded as 100% stable, and this is where Debian really excels.

For the person that just wants to use a computer for email, Internet, a bit of YouTube and to talk with friends online, I would recommend they use Linux to save themselves a bit of money and start working with the computer, and not around it.

Yea, the past couple of years have really seen Linux excel as a whole with compatibility and ease of use. I think in a few years Microsoft may have some real issues on their hands...

After a bit of fun on backports.org and debian-multimedia.org, I've got a pretty sweet desktop in my opinion, and it's very stable too!

Look how easy package management is in Debian...

I did a search for VLC and installed it all in less than 30 seconds.

Selecting to install VLC worked out all the dependencies in a split-second...


I then confirmed the changes I wanted to make to the system...


It downloading the necessary packages...


It installed and configured them...


And it had finished!


And finally...


I'll vouch for that!

That to me seems just like Fedoras one, but either way repo management is awesome now!

I think that apt-get and yum are in different leagues. apt-get is many, many times faster than yum. I can see why so many people say that apt-get rocks! yum seems to take a very long time to work out dependencies, but apt-get does it in a split-second.