Open Source and Free Software

I just put Slackware on a little netbook that I'd upgraded. I'm really impressed with the distro, in part because it seems solid and well documented, and in part because there's an active community that likes it. Good info is easy to get and easy to apply. Changed the run-level -- bam! I've suddenly got access to a bunch of desktop environments. Wireless for my own network was really pretty easy to configure

I just put Fedora on another netbook. Here, I'm much less impressed. Good info is harder to get: packages don't always work like they're supposed to. And it seems slow and clunky to me. Another pizzer: Fedora is starting to merge all the bins into /usr/bin with some symlinks in the old standard places. I think that means Fedora is planning to wander off the ranch in terms of file organization. I can't see how that will help me learn linux. I'll keep Fedora on the machine a while, but I had Debian on that machine, and I think I'm likely to go back to Debian

I have Knoppix on one super-cheap machine. It works great.

I have Arch on another machine. It's a really good learning experience