Well, our first (real) computer at home was the Amiga 1000 in 1986. I really liked that platform very much, but some Amigas later in 1996 I had to give it up and buy a Wintel-platform (Pentium Pro). But since I began working on that platform I was never happy with it. I never know what's so cool about Amiga's socalled "Multitasking" until I had to do something with Dos/Win3.
What I missed most was the cool "workbench" and the powerful shell. If you wanted to do some sophisticated stuff, you could just open a shell (or two or more!) and hack there cool things in, where DOS was very limited (oh and that thing with the 640k limit!). But in 1996 I discovered the world of Linux and I startet with Suse 4.x. And there I had again a cool desktop (hmm.. fvwm2 so I had the same desktop and tools like in the University on those Suns (bash, gcc, awk, .....). And yes, you can again hack around in some consoles. And oh, yes, there are so very powerful tools! It's amazing! Later I had a rather good running SuSE 5.3. But when I wanted to upgrade to V6.0, that was horrible! I just didn't find out why fetchmail didn't run anymore! And leafnode too refused to work (among some other Progs). But weeks later, you had to download all those patches and updates! So the distro was broken! How could I pay for that? So I was looking for something "better". After reading a lot "which distro is better than the other" threads, I checked out Debian (slink). And that was what I was looking for! Very good stability! And what I wanted is to learn more about Linux. With Suse, it's easy to set things up, but if you need other settings than possible to enter "the suse way" (with yast), it's hard. You can't just edit the original configuration-files, you have to set some vars in yast, sometimes somewhere else. With Debian, you can read the original documentation of the software and make your setting in the original locations (directly in /etc). That is true Linux! And: it's relative easy to install original tar.gz packages (which aren't yet available as *.deb). Nowdays I'm happy I don't have to buy the server-edition of suse (I think Redhat has now also two different distributions). And I think these server editions are rather expensive. I could live with a full distro for about $50, but when I have to pay now 2 or 3 times more, thats to much (then I also could by Windoze). That's it, I hope my english is not too bad, Greetings, Tibor
