Replace Slackware with Debian (I've never tried Slackware, a couple of my friends recommended Debian), Red Hat with Mandrake (that's what I got on a magazine cover DVD), and "to print things" with "to play Deus Ex" and you have my situation.
(I would run Deus Ex under WINE, but it doesn't seem to emulate well; its OpenGL support is apparently quite dodgy even on Windows, and the translucency goes all weird under Linux with the Nvidia drivers).
I was a clueless newbie when I used Mandrake, which didn't help, and I got hopelessly stuck whenever I went beyond the friendly GUI tools. Debian does throw you in at the deep end a bit more (I was a bit less clueless by this point), but it also provides plenty of documentation, so you get used to reading docs with a text console, man, zless and lynx :-) - it also has lots of almost-as-friendly ncurses tools, which have some of the advantages of the GUI ones, plus you can use them before you have a working X install!
Not wonderful for newbies, but it's great if you're treating installing Linux as a learning experience and you want to be forced to learn something. |
