[Digikam-users] Re: Newb discovers the perils of "endorsed" PPAs!

[Michael Johnson]

On Wed, December 22, 2010 9:08:30 AM Mark Greenwood wrote:

> If you're interested in trying a different distro - one that keeps more up to 
> date without the need to use potentially dodgy PPAs - you could try Arch linux, 
>
> although I'm not reccomending it as I've never used it myself. Had this been a 

> year ago I'd have reccomended Mandriva, but that's a bit dead in the water 
>these 
>
> days.


Just chiming in here, as someone who's been using Arch Linux for a year and a 
half or so: it's a great distro if you want cutting-edge versions of software; 
the versions available in the repositories are updated almost in tandem with 
upstream, which I really enjoy.  Arch is also great if you like having a great 
deal of control over your system, because it leaves most configuration decisions 
up to you (rather than making them all automatically).

However, it is undeniably harder to get set up and get running than something 
like Ubuntu is; it makes fewer assumptions about what you want.  It won't even 
install a window manager by default; that's up to you.  But if you like that 
control, and don't mind tinkering on the command line, I highly recommend it. 
 The community is also quite helpful, even though it's smaller than for Ubuntu.

If that's not what you're looking for, but you would like a rolling release 
distro (no waiting for big version updates, like Ubuntu), you might watch 
openSUSE Tumbleweed, which was recently announced.  It's just starting, but once 
it's done it sounds interesting.

Michael