I'm looking for comments/suggestions regarding Debian on the desktop. I'm what you might call a "fairly experienced newbie". I currently have installs of FreeBSD, Mandrake and Gentoo, at home. I have been using FreeBSD on its own box as a server while my Linux partitions share HD space on another box with Windows. For a variety of reasons, I'm not quite happy with Mandrake or Gentoo. So, I'm searching for a new distro to serve as my primary desktop. Because of my experiences with FreeBSD's ports and packages and Debian's reputation as being a rock solid distro with a 1st class packaging system, I've been thinking about trying them out on the desktop. I've only used FreeBSD in console mode. So, using it on the desktop would be a new thing entirely. I realize that trying them both out will ultimately be the best way to choose. But, I'm trying to minimize the risks associated with doing dual boot installs.
Since, I will be using it almost exclusively as a desktop, I'm most concerned about access to current builds of my favorite packages like KDE3, OpenOffice 1.0 & Mozilla 1.0RC2. Of course, OO and Mozilla have pretty good installers that come with them. I'm happy with those and could use their install programs. So, I guess I'm mostly concerned about KDE3. Another concern is how difficult Debian might be to install as a dual boot. Does Debian use the traditional partition naming scheme? Frankly, even though I've had a considerable amount of experience switching Linux distros and setting them up to dual boot, setting up FreeBSD to dual boot would make me sweat. One of the drawbacks that I've heard that about Debian's (even from a Debian advocate) is that their packages are rather out of date. Is that true, even if I choose to install Woody? Just to get a feel for the packages, I browsed through the packages looking for KDE3. I found a long list of KDE3 files. Would I have to install all of those KDE3 apps individually? Or, is it as simple as something like apt-get KDE3? Any comments would be appreciated. Darren -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
