[lug] Best Distro for Newbies with New Equipment (was DHCP Question)

[Bill Thoen]

On Thu, Aug 24, 2006 at 06:03:05PM -0600, Collins Richey wrote:
> It's not really Windows fault. The driver (reverse engineered, I
> presume) just didn't cover all the edge cases. Hopefully,this will be
> fixed, and you'llsee it quickly in the FCn series. Unfortunately I'm
> on Kubuntu 6.06, and I doubt that the developers will considerthisfor
> their "stable" release, maybe not even in Debian Etch.

This brings up another point we've been debating in my office. One of the
things "they say" about RedHat is that you get all the newest and 
experimental stuff you can stand and in fact, you may get buggy stuff as a
result. Since we have some fairly specific needs at work, we really don't
need the latest TOIP (Teleportation Over IP) and so maybe we should
reconsider the reasons we use RedHat software.

In opposition is a friend of mine who keeps telling me to go with
Slackware because they don't support all the new-fangled stuff out there in
favor of (he claims) doing the basics exceedingly well. But if I was using
something like Slack (or Kubuntu) would I be sort of screwed buying the
latest low-cost Windows box from Newegg.com only to find out that I need
new drivers (that I can't write) to keep up with the technology?
 
Or do Linux users who are "experienced" start with something forgiving like
RedHat Fedora Core and eventually migrate to a more esoteric distro once 
they know "The Lore"?

-Bill Thoen