[sllug-members]: Preferred Linux architecture?

[Nathan Lane [yho]]

Hi,
  I have been playing around with using Linux permanently for my personal computer operating system for about 2 years now.  I have "played" around with several distros, and I'm not to happy with parts of some and other parts of others.  I still have difficulty installing certain distros as well, which may be due to older hardware.  Anyway, I have tried Suse 9.3 and 10.0, Debian Sarge and Woody, Simply MEPIS, Gentoo, CentOS 4.0, 4.1 and 4.3, Fedora Core 3 and 4 (I have 5 also, but haven't ever installed it), Slackware, Kubuntu 5.10, Ubuntu 5.10 and 6.06, and Knoppix 3.4, 3.6, 3.8, and 5.  I'm searching for simplicity and completelness and I prefer the Debian deb package based architecture over both Suse's and Red Hat's RPM architecture, partly because dpkg seems to take care of dependencies and rpm/Yum/YaST do not (all the time), for example it was the biggest pain in the rear installing OpenOffice.org 2 on my CentOS system from RPMs, but they weren't available in the CentOS
 repositories, I don't even remember what I did, but somehow I sort of got it to work.  Basically I know I should probably use true Debian, but I have problems with installing a Desktop system on Debian (that's what might be due to old hardware). I want GNOME, and I've tried installing both GNOME and KDE on plain old Debian and have never had any good luck with that.  I have installed Ubuntu and I like the package managing system and all of the programs it comes with, but it is definitely not set up for any sort of developer - I need things like php, gcc, and all of the libraries installed for me - Ubuntu doesn't give me that option, except in Advanced package installer, and I don't have a clue what I'm missing or how to configure it I guess (it also limits the configurability via UI and I'm still a UI Linux person, don't know many config files or commands yet), so now I'm running CentOS 4.3 and it seems to be missing pieces like libcairo.so.2, and I don't really know what
 to do about that.  Without it I can't run my favorite vector drawing program Inkscape.  Is there an all-one-one that anyone has experienced using and had everything work?  Or is this just a problem that I'll have to muddle through when I first install my Linux OS?  It seems to take weeks sometimes to get everything the way I want it, and then it's missing something.  Does anyone have a suggestion?  Just to simplifiy things my wishlist is dev tools-GCC with extensions for C/C++, ADA, Pascal, etc., PHP, Apache, Samba, GNOME, Inkscape, GIMP, OpenOffice.org 2, Scribus, GAIM, CD/DVD recording software and Debian dpkg based if possible.  I'm certain that some of these things are included with GNOME or Linux anyway.  Any ideas?

thanks,

Nathan

 				
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