John Magliacane wrote:
--- Charlie Schlieper n5td@vvm.com wrote:
I was still using FEDORA 7 (or Core 7) at the time. I think they took the "CORE" term out finally. I had taken a LINUX 101 course
from
HP, and was trying my best to learn LINUX. I started with Fedora Core 5.
One of the problems I've seen individuals trying to learn Linux from a feature-rich, point-and-click, distribution is that they tend to learn the details about that particular distribution, rather than the operation of the Linux OS itself.
Personally, I prefer distributions such as Slackware, that install the components necessary to build a complete Linux system, and then get out of the way! :-)
That's a really good point, I often see people get too caught up in a particular distribution rather than the stuff that makes Linux really fantastic.
All OSs (or any complex system for that matter) require a collection of arcane knowledge to get you through common problems. Most of us have a bunch of windows minutia stored in our heads or in someone nearby. I think this makes it difficult to make the switch to Linux.
Ubuntu strikes a good balance. It's pretty and friendly, but it's still a debian distribution, so problem solving is intuitive at many different levels. For example, the following sort of thing works really well:
% sudo apt-get install gpredict
jeff