> > advice is to avoid a distro that does everything for you. These are the > > most difficult to configure and tweak if something doesn't work > > plug-and-play, and less adherent to standards. And you'll learn nothing. > > I really doubt that. i tend to agree with mr "> >". i absolutely couldnt get a second screen going in SuSE since it wasnt autodetected/configured, yet in gentoo it was just a matter of 'emerge nvidia-kernel'. same with sound - all i had to do was echo ALSA_CARDS=mia >> /etc/make.conf && emerge alsa-driver && /etc/init.d/alsasound restart, but since the card wasnt autodetected and i couldnt even find a package containing alsa driver modules for debian, it required falling back to something even more primitive and timeconsuming (google for tarball location, grab tarball, configure, mess with make-kpkg, install crap, reboot, etc) > The distributions that have automatic hardware > detection and setup etc still use the same config files as more > barebones distributions, and editing a config file on Mandrake is no > harder than doing it on Slackware. if only it were that simple.. take things like the builtin GUI utilities being incredibly dumb and overwriting settings you changed behind the scenes. compared with the etc-update util in gentoo (or the similar thing in debian) these 'autoconfiguring' distrii often have no inkling that a user might want to override only certain things so my vote should be apparent..
