[mythtv-users] Recomended distro???

[Stroller]

On 16 Jan 2007, at 02:18, A JM wrote:

> After my 6th re-install of Fedora Core 6 I'm giving up on Fedora. I
> need a Distro that's easier to work with and you don't need a crystal
> ball or to be a software engineer to figure out what's wrong with it
> when it breaks...

Mind if I ask why you've reinstalled the same version of Fedora so  
many times?

I mean, I gather from this that you're reinstalling your distro  
because it is "br0ken" on your PC. This really says to me that  
something more than your distro is br0ken - you might reinstall  
Windows when it's playing up, but this is because Windows doesn't do  
proper logging, and because its DLLs & registry are an opaque &  
undocumented alchemy.

If your Linux distro is playing up then fix the problems with it.  
Reinstalling Linux will not magically make any difference, the way it  
does with Windows - it will just get you back to the same situation,  
but without all the fixes you've already applied! With each problem  
try to understand exactly what is happening and why, and take each  
step patiently at a time.

Unix is not supposed to be easy - it can be frustrating and time- 
consuming, but the pay-off is that anything is possible. I spent  
several hours trying to work out how to set the clock on my first  
Irix system, but surely learned much else in the process - I would  
say, for instance, that `man` pages only make sense once you have  
achieved a certain appreciation of their special syntax.

To be fair, it may simply be that Fedora isn't for you. I don't know  
that any other distro out there is any "better" or "worse" than any  
other, but I think you would be extremely lucky to happen upon the  
one distro that does make perfect sense to you during your first  
Linux installation.

I think you would be best off downloading Mandriva, Suse, Gentoo,  
Ubuntu and maybe one or two others and installing each of them in  
turn until you find the one you're completely happy with. One might  
respond to this "that's no good - I want my MythTV up & running  
straightaway", but there is no-one here who can play match-maker and  
be sure they'll pick the right distro for you - just as with women,  
one may have to try many before settling on "the right one".

Stroller.