Sounds ambitious, doesn't it? But after yesterday's experience, I feel that I have to give some of the other distros a shot, just for the sake of fairness. What are some of the other up and coming Linux distributions?
I don't know that there are many out there that I haven't tried, but I still going to do my best to fill in the knowledge gaps; when it comes to Mr. Average or Joe Sixpack, then there seem to be few more suited to do it than myself.
Really, think about it--longtime Mac user, and we all know full well that Macs are a ton easier to run and setup than Windows boxes; there can't be any bigger Apple fanbois than myself; so out of the box will be everything, and this is being done with the less onerous conditions of not trying to get wireless working, just a plain install that has all the bells and whistles for everyday computer use.
Major media playback--mp3s, movies, and the various file types associated with web surfing such as flash, realplayer files and the like. And as I'll be using a machine with an ATI card (old Radeon 350M), the difficulty of getting graphics cards going will be covered in spades.
Just a couple more thoughts on Fedora 7 before I move on to today's distro; Don't use Beryl when web-surfing, particularly when you are going to be loading a ton of pages/tabs; it slows down the experience considerably, to the point of being a hindrance. Never use Beryl when you are live-blogging or on a particularly hot rec list story, as the reloading of pages will nearly kill your surfing experience. Play with Beryl, then shut if off before you need to get some real work done.
The set up of all the major media needs is really quite simple, on a par to that of Automatix, by following the author's clear explanation you can be up and at 'em in a very short time indeed.
If you have a really slow machine, then it would be wise to set up Fedora 7 with the XFCE desktop environment, as this will drain a lot less ram and make things quite a bit speedier. Very simple to do in the graphical add/remove software menu--at the top is the listing Desktop Environment, and there are only three listed: KDE, GNOME, and XFCE. I got the GNOME desktop environment (a considerably larger download than XFCE) up and running in around twenty minutes.
Finally, Fedora 7 is a very cutting edge distro; if you want a stable Red Hat install then you're probably better off with CentOS or some earlier version of FC. Things will break or not work as you like, so if this is your only machine, then best to stay away for a little while at least.
And (really awful segue) speaking of cutting edge, that brings us to today's distro, Sidux 2007-2. This is a Debian based distro and they don't come any fresher than this. Sidux is from the unstable branch of Debian (Etch being the stable) and includes the latest of the latest of the latest of everything.
Though this iteration of Sidux , Tartaros, includes the KDE desktop as its default, it's a rather dark boot screen and liveCD desktop environment; when you first get desktop access, the Sidux manual launches in a web browser, with all of the various points of interest clearly laid out. How to burn ISO files, installation instructions, setting up wifi, partitioning your disk, and so on. Those interested can read it online and get more info if so desired. Very comprehensive and clearly organized and written.
The liveCD is fully functional and quite speedy, even more so than Fedora 7; this should be no surprise as Sidux was built by some of the former developers of Kanotix, a well-known liveCD distro in the style of Knoppix.
The disk partitioner is GParted, the same as provided for in Fedora 7, and the standard when it comes to such; if you are leery of doing this yourself, then Sidux will do it for you, though it does add a bit of time to the install process.
Once you have decided where to install the bootloader (grub) and given your personal details (username, etc.) then you are allowed to start the install process; additionally you are offered the choice of installing extra packages, even those from the non-free repositories, special metapackages for slower/older computers. Very handy, though requires an internet connection at the time of install.
Once installed, it runs very fast, similar to a Damn Small Linux or Puppy Linux install--hard to believe this is KDE. The installation took only seven minutes total; it probably could have been a bit shorter, but I was writing this is as I installed. This is very well suited to older/slower machines, more so than Fedora 7. Don't tell me you went old skool! (boom-boom-boom right about now...).
Since I installed this over my install of Fedora 7, of course I will be comparing the two; While Sidux is a very nice Debian-based liveCD, it somehow doesn't feel as ground-breaking as Fedora 7 did. Very nice, easy to install, 100% open source with 'dirty' (proprietary) packages installed very simply by adding a repository, and a very dark KDE--probably my favorite KDE look to date.
That being said, I'll still be going back to Fedora 7 on my 'test' machine; I call it a 'test' machine, because after scanning the list at Distrowatch, there really are very few distros to try out in the top twenty; apart from Xandros and CentOS, I've tried just about every one, with the exception of Gentoo and Slackware.
I'm open to suggestions as to what to write about next; kind of flailing about for ideas at the present moment--not really sure what there is that I haven't covered in these diaries as relates to a new user's experiences and what to expect.