Andy Streich wrote:
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.
KDE and Gnome will hog resources on any distribution. I have heard that xfce is something of a compromise between bloatware and friendliness, so you may wish to try that.
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.
The best window manager is the one that gets in your way the least.
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.
You could try Martin's book, The Debian System, which is highly rated, although I haven't seen it. http://debiansystem.info. Apart from that, there's always the Debian Reference http://www.debian.org/doc, which isn't perfect, but is probably the closest online thing that Debian has to a manual.
You could also be a little more specific in terms of actual problems that you are facing.