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Old 31st March 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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Future Proofing is a fine goal but in practice hard to accomplish. I'm saying that as I look at a box of Socket A CPU's, AGP video cards and pc133 memory.
The manufacturers of desktop hardware keep changing it. I just helped a neighbor who bought a new HP/Compaq system put a wireless card in it. It only had a PCI-e and a PCi -e16 slot. My old pci wireless cards are looking at future extinction.

Video drivers are also a current issue as most of the mainline cards (intel, amd/radeon)
are implementing KMS which at this time is only available in Linux. The BSD's
run older video drivers or heavily patched video drivers. I read someplace that
to get the new intel video driver to work in OpenBSD it took 4000 lines of additional code.

Another suggestion is that best future proofing is to pick a main line operating system and learn it. If you learn it you will be able to make it what you want. Judge the OS by the documentation, the forums and how security is handled

Mint and PC-PSC basically choose applications for you and the Mint version I saw
looked like a mish-mash of Gnome and KDE applications. PC-BSD is largely KDE although you can add gnome or xfce. I personally don't like the idea of having a
lot of bloat on a system (more to go wrong, more places for security holes, more
overhead maintaining daemons that you may not even use).

There are also 2 Slackware derivatives that have a philosophy of one task, one application. Zenwalk and Salix are extremely simple installs and are available
with various desktops (KDE, Gnome, Xfce4, openbox, fluxbox).
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