usability [was Re: [ILUG] To ubuntu or not to ubuntu]

[Brendan Kehoe]

> As I get older, I'm coming to the conclusion that Bill Gates
> has got a lot of things right.
> Many things are set up and set out much better in Windows.
> Eg the Control Panel is so much better organised.

I spent all day yesterday doing an incredible amount of manual labor
with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 to make it do some pretty basic stuff. 
If at all possible I'm suggesting the folks I'm contracting with (on
stuff totally unrelated to this) to avoid the parent-company-induced
RHEL requirement and do everything under Ubuntu or SuSE until it proves
to actually be necessary.  I had to go digging in their release notes
and elsewhere to have the steps to be able to have the kernel source in
order to build something else with a kernel module as part of its kit
(and had only Fedora rpms).  No longer should I have to be typing 'rpm
-ivh /var/spool/up2date/kernel*.src.rpm', dammit.  Way back when I used
to have fun building everything I use from scratch, but I too am finding
an awful lot of this as being suitable for full automation.  If every
single user's effectively going to have to type the same sequence of
commands, why force them to?  I use Fedora (Core 3) at home for our
MythTV box, and find even that much better than the interface (or lack
of same) for RHEL's maintenance.

I enjoy Ubuntu, but find myself using SuSE more for the other part of
usability---updating SuSE doesn't make it unusable, in comparison to
some recent experience with Ubuntu.  Growing pains on the part of
distributions?

B