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Old 3rd April 2011
shep shep is offline
Real Name: Scott
Arp Constable
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: Dry and Dusty
Posts: 1,503
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I am sorry you took my post as a criticism/complaint for it was not intended as such.

I view the forums as a place where several things occur. Experienced advice is given to newcomers and some of the best threads involved accomplishment. I recently received help here on setting up my printer using lpr and apsfilter in OpenBSD. The thead showed how my typo prevented the lpd daemon from starting, and the syntax for using an hpdirect port on a stand alone print server

Another thing that occurs are discussions, Certainly there is no best windowmanager but I can review a thread and get a sense of the strengths and weaknesses of fluxbox, openbox, blackbox, pkwm etc rather than trying each myself.

I felt your post was a good start for choosing a BSD but was trying to suggest that your statement was too broad. Certainly, picking the defaults on Debian or Fedora leads to the installation of software that may never be needed or used. I recently migrated from Arch Linux (Rolling Release), where I had very fine grain control of the install packages because of a rocky period where radeon video driver transitioned to KMS. I felt it more prudent to use something more stable for my work station My first Debian install was taking the defaults for an Xfce4 installation and I ended up with evolution for an email client, gdm and cups. I wanted the claws-mail, xdm and my newly learned lpd/apsfilter printer setup so I went back and did a minimal install and basically mimicked how I would accomplish the same thing in FreeBSD. I almost went with OpenBSD current but did not feel that it offered the stability I was looking for and liked the ease of security updates that Debian provides. An example is the recent certificate vulnerability in mozilla browsers will not be addressed in OpenBSD 4.8. I almost went with Slackware for the same reasons.

I tried to support my suggestion with a link but felt it would be up to you to assess the validity of what I was saying and to either refute or accept the suggestion and adjust/respond as you saw fit. Your original post was a good start and I only felt your statement on the lack of flexibility in Debian was too broad. I have not tried Fedora so I can't speak to that but do know that the Scientific Linux group provided Icewm as some of their older hardware would not run well with the default install.
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