After spending quite a bit of time with Fedora Core 3 & 4 and reading lotsa interesting things about Debian and Ubuntu I decided to try Ubuntu today. I had tried Debian two years ago and was dissapointed by how difficult I found it (installation was very confusing to me). I think Debian may be one of the "purest" open source distros around and I hope to use it more someday. In any case, I thought Ubuntu would be easier (and it was) but I still couldn't figure out how to:

mount an external drive (I figured this out in FC)
login as root (could only do this as a terminal)
upgrade/select packages with apt (gcc, perl and a few others were missing)

There were other minor things but overall I really missed my FC4 and decided to ditch Ubuntu and get FC4 going again. Surely given enough time I could have gotten around better in Ubuntu, but I just lost patience. For now, FC4 is plenty powerful for me.

I didn't post this here to start a flame war, but to share my experience and to hopefully get suggestions should I try Ubuntu/Debian again in the future.


Thanks,
linuxted

Most of what you need to know can be had by googling or checking this forum or ubuntuforums.org or ubuntuguide.org . I think you gave up too soon. Ubuntu is a great distro, well I'm partial to KDE so for me it is Kubuntu.

Give it a second shot.

i had the opposite experience, came from FC3 (first real linux distro I've ever used) and went to FC4. I think Fedora is easy to use and all but the speed I think sucks. I disabled unnecessary services and tried it on several recent P4 platforms and still the same experience. I tried CentOS and that distro flies for some reason. I then went to Ubuntu and I love the speed and the simlistic nature of it. I too hate the sudo stuff as I've been accustomed to the whole admin on XP experience. After I finally configured everything I needed after the initial setup I calmed down about the sudo commands because they are less frequent. My goal someday is to phase out Windows for good other than my role at work. I'm still trying to figure out how to use a distro at work that I can join to the domain and get good results with citrix support etc... I looked into Xandros as they seem to have a simple business setup for newbies. Anyway enough ranting

I very well may give it another try and don't dispute your opinion that I gave up too soon. However, what made me immediately go back to FC4 was the (my?) innability to mount an external harddrive and my lack of knowledge on how to add packages (I'm familiar with "yum install package" but couldn't figure out what Debian/Ubuntu uses).

Thanks for your input

For me, Fedora Core has the feel of trying to hide linux from the user a bit. What's more, it's based on RPMs, and do I ever hate RPMs. apt makes retrieving packages so much easier, and if you don't like using text based tools, there's always kynaptic, etc.

That's just a personal view of course.

Ubuntu's Ubuntu Guide has the answers to everything a newbie could want. It's not that difficult to copy and paste some commands into the terminal. If you want total GUI for a Debian-based distro, Mepis is your pal:

1. All hard drives and partitions automatically appear on the desktop
2. You can log in as root immediately if necessary. In fact, there's an icon for browsing files as root within the user login.
3. Enabling extra repositories in Synaptic can be down with three clicks (settings > repositories, check some boxes).

Don't give up on Debian-based distros so soon. I happen to like Ubuntu more than Mepis now that I've embraced the command-line, but for GUI simple configuration, Mepis can't be beat.

I copied the ubuntuguide - very helpful! I will give it a second chance after reading through it.


Thanks for the help! I do like the "philosophy" of the debian-based distros so I think it deserves some more research on my part.

The repository list as viewed from Synaptic is great. You do not need to go all over the net looking for RPM's, what you need has been gathered for you already. "I want this" <click> <install> <use>

I've gotten much further after the suggestion to look at the user's guide!

I have now successfully accessed an external drive, gotten my old data and added/updated packages... I'm liking the distro much more this time.


I'm having a problem setting the screen refresh rate to 75Hz though (any suggestions?)


Thanks,
linuxted

There are tons of threads on this very forum. You edit the Xorgconfig file. (I'm on Mepis right now so I don't know the exact name in Ubuntu)

I also came from FC3 and was blown away by Ubuntu. The speed was a big factor for me too. Having never used a Debian based distro before, I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread - I won't ever look back. Now it's hard to get me to shutup about it. I try to advocate Ubuntu (or just linux in general) and Firefox wherever and whenever possible.

-Anderson

Same here. My starting distro was Blag, which is great in its own way, but it's Fedora-based, and I advocate for Mepis and Ubuntu whenever possible. Mepis I recommend to those initially afraid of the command-line. Ubuntu I advise for people who aren't intimidated by copying and pasting some text and hitting Enter.