Re: Overwhelmed newbie

[Andy Streich <andy@rushyglen.com>]

On Friday 16 September 2005 12:55 pm, Kjetil Kjernsmo wrote:
> > Most importantly, this is _debian_-user.  If you want to advocate
> > other distributions willy-nilly, it's not the place.
> 
> That kind of isolationism is something I think you will find very little 
> support for in the free software community. I think most people will 
> agree that we want to direct people to what is best for them.

I am also an overwhelmed newbie, one who could not have been using Debian for 
the last 9 months without the kind (and sometimes terse and abrupt) help from 
people on this list.  It takes a remarkable amount of dedication and time to 
become comfortable configuring a desktop Debian system on a machine with 
modest resources where you can't run KDE or GNOME without a significant 
performance problem.  

The choice of window managers for a desktop systems is, to really go out on a 
limb, fairly important.  The best advice I've gotten is that I should just 
start installing and trying out all the others.  That's not too appealing but 
I accept the reality.

I keep staring at my Ubuntu disks and wondering if I should switch horses.  
Yet I can't begin to estimate the costs involved -- in terms of my time and 
in the quality and maintainability of the resulting system.  Would a few 
months of using Ubuntu cause me to come running back to Debian?  I have no 
idea.

Any pointers to useful reading material would be appreciated.