“I get asked, by more junior Linux users, and people just looking to try it out, which distribution of Linux I use or recommend. It occurred to me that I never actually published an answer to this question, even though it is, by far, the question I am asked most often. I think my stock answer is maybe slightly unusual only because, unlike most of the rest of the Linux-using world, I hate every distro I’ve ever tried. That’s right: every distribution of Linux sucks in its own special way. Some just suck less”, says Brian Jones on Linux.com.
Linux.com: “Which Distro Do You Recommend?” — They All Suck!
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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What docs are you getting from work? Outside of some spreadsheets with embedded scripts I have run into nothing that OpenOffice or Gnumeric (for .xls) could not handle and convert back well since like about a year or so ago.
Excel documents with macros, and .doc files with lots of images. However, as I said, I tried the OpenOffice 2 beta and it seems that practically all image layout issues have been fixed for Word docs, so I may give OOo another try soon (haven’t had a chance to check Excel macros with it yet).
@Johnathan Bailes
Excel documents with macros, and .doc files with lots of images. However, as I said, I tried the OpenOffice 2 beta and it seems that practically all image layout issues have been fixed for Word docs, so I may give OOo another try soon (haven’t had a chance to check Excel macros with it yet).
Weird even Abiword (which I use when I have to use XP) seems to handle embedding images just fine now. My After Action Report is one of those wrapped rtf files now that Abiword uses but the templace is a Word doc with tables and a company graphic on top. If Abiword can handle so can OpenOffice.
I doubt Macros are working but god I always hated that crap anyway.
Thank god I am a sysadmin and don’t deal with many of these.
its easy to act cool, but its hard to act wise and future-oriented. take the source code, make it better. its not against the law.
thats freedom guys. if you have troubles with hardware, force the manufacturer to provide drivers for linux and stop crying like babies.
respect to the GNU/linux developers – fadimat
for me at least.
i wont discuss people’s personal experiences.
what i liked about the article is that hopefully saying all distros sucks – would be a motivation for us to keep trying improving things more and more.
i can’t work with windows because of some extreme nightmare stories some of you, probably have experienced.
there is too much ground to cover, but unlike window users we can do something about it – and so we try our level best.
I spent four months working closely with SuSE 9.1 Professional, Fedora Core 3, and Debian, and found that I liked Fedora the best. It proved to be more stable than my install of Suse, and believe me, I probably installed 20x or more after going so far as to find out which platform would allow the best recompile from source of KDE, GTK 2.6 for Gnome Desktop and all the free apps I needed in X to make my system fun to use. After finding odd quirks on SuSE when trying to compile programs from source, I went with Fedora Core 3 and KDE. I’ve been familiar with Red Hat since ’96 and am sticking with it.