A waif astray
I feel a bit like a waif... I'm not sure I am going to like the next SuSE all that much. Yes, I'm a hobbyist. No, I'm a professional who uses his Linux laptop seven days a week, more hours a day than the ophthalmologist recommends to earn his daily bread, keep in touch with friends all over the world and to play an occasional harmless game of install-the-cool-app-from-source. So... Given that I'm a holistic person who does work-related stuff in his free time, and vice-versa, who regards his work as his hobby and his hobby as his work, am I among the target audience of SuSE?
Should I be? Do I want to be? It's a lifestyle thing, I guess. Maybe I shouldn't care. Brand loyalty is a thing of the past, after all.
I started using SuSE in 199-something, with 5.1 because at that time SuSE had a kernel that provided support for the soundblaster card in my spiffy new desktop. I had been a Slackware user up to then, occasionally making a foray into Redhat land or Linux FT, but liking neither very much. I remember that I tried Linux for the first time in 1994 or thereabouts -- maybe a bit earlier, maybe a bit later. Around the time my first daughter was born. At that time, distributions were a bit thin on the ground, and Internet access for non-students (I got my M.A in Comparative Linguistics in 1993 and when I was student only maths, physics and CS students were allowed to have net access at Leyden University) was really new. We took out a hacktic account and I tried downloading SLS linux distribution but stumbled on modem caused CRC errors.
Anyway, I used Slackware for years, using it for more and more of my computing needs, even installing it on a Compaq Contura Aero 486SX with 4MB of memory -- almost as cool as the bash shell on my Psion Series 3. I liked Slackware, liked its simplicity, and since I did not have enough memory to run X much (although calculating the modelines by hand was a milestone I fondly remember) and didn't have much other hardware, I did fine. Things like configuring Taylor UUCP were a challenge, and not too hard a challenge after having done the MS-Dos Waffle UUCP thing.
Besides, I was young. (Is it me, or have all the adults migrated to OS X or somewhere else -- it seems as if the Dot is filled to the brim with teenage parrots chirruping their whines in a sheep-like chorus.) I had all the time in the world to get XEarth to move in its mysterious ways in the root window of fvwm.
And then that blasted soundblaster came along. I wanted a distribution that supported that soundcard and I was getting a bit tired of recompiling the kernel myself. And I needed that soundcard because I wanted to create realaudio files for my invented language. So I shopped around a bit, and I decided on SuSE.
SuSE was easy to install, pleasant to use, Yast was a pleasant change from Slackware, too, and I grew fat (gained about fifteen centimeters of waistline since 1993, I'm afraid, and went from 55 kilos to 79), lazy and indolent, and decided I didn't care for all the configuring malarkey anymore. I was reasonably happy, only I needed to reinstall the entire computer (all two of them, at that time) whenever a new version commended itself into my attention.
However, while I still like the easy configurability of SuSE and the large selection of packages, I'm getting fed up with reinstalling each new version. We've got seven computers in the house now, eight if you count the Pismo powerbook that's dual booting OS X and Debian, and I don't want to reinstall Linux on seven computers, of which five are laptops. Especially not since some of them don't have working cd or dvd-players anymore.
Thus Debian thrusts itself into my attention... But Debian is a throwback beyond the stone age of Slackware into the primaeval void age of not just having to configure every frigging thing by hand -- and there are many more things nowadays than in my Slackware days -- but every little bit of configuration is complicated beyond the complications I had to handle in 1995. I don't want that kind of complexity anymore!
So, I guess I want a Debian-based distribution that allows me to easily install and configure apache, mailman, nfs, wireless, pptp, adsl, sendmail, imap, pop3, ssh, X, scanner, audio, dvd-playing, wacom tablets, acpi, apm, trackpad, multiple mice on one computer, ntp, spamassasin... And, of course, it needs to consider KDE a first class citizen. I may be fat, lazy and indolent, but I'm not that much of a retarded infant that I want the condescension of Gnome's no-such-applet feature that tells a user that the applet they had used until now is no longer available because it was deemed too complicated for them. Oh, and I no longer want to put my weary head to rest in the lap of a venal and vicious corporate entity. And it needs to support Sun's Java really well, I'm afraid. And be eternally upgradable without reinstalling.
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