Repost: Arch linux anyone? Distro choices blah blah.

[dom at latter.org]

Huw wrote:
> Hi Dom

Hi Huw!

> I, too, have been having problems with Ubuntu 9.10 which seemingly nobody is able to help me with

What gives?

> Arch is one of the systems I've been looking at recently, along with Debian, Gentoo and FreeBSD (!).  

I've looked at FreeBSD again and come to the same conclusion again - it's a server OS.

Gentoo - that way madness lies.  Although if you have truly ancient hardware it's a good way
of getting something useful out of it - for a long while I had an ancient Pentium/MMX laptop
with IIRC 96 MB of RAM that did useful stuff as an X terminal and very occasionally as a standalone
word processor and PHP dev box.  But you end up fiddling with the OS rather than just using it.

Debian - good choice for a server... never run it as a desktop OS.

> However, going from what I recall, I think it was/is an excellent distro.

This is encouraging, but it's a bit scary to go to a new distro with no available Live incarnation
to try it out... part of the planned reinstall is to set up VirtualBox to allow me to try new
distros out.  Having said that, I could do that now and try Arch on a VM.

BTW your line lengths are (in my mail client, Thunderbird) excessively long, which makes replying
a matter of reformatting your text...

Thanks for the feedback,

Dom