Now having less need of maintaining a Windows XP install, last night I began more thorough computations about setting up a GNU/Linux distribution on my desktop. I would certainly like to see how the SWAT 4 support has come since my last outing, and this time I intend to use regular WINE.
As always, the real question is which distribution to use? Arguably the least trouble would be to setup Ubuntu 10.04, but I’m more familiar with Debian and Slack’ based systems as it is. This time, I was thinking about going with Fedora: I’m not fond of Red Hat Linux and it’s modern relations, but it would be a fresh change.
The main thing that concerns me with Fedora, is the stability and upgrade path, mostly the amount of time needed to abuse things. Ubuntu is fairly painless, at least when you run Long Term Support (LTS) releases on your stable systems. My only gripe with Debian, being it can be a chore to get reasonably up to date debs, and sometimes (for example with Pidgin) it can be preferable to be ready op on that. Although I’ve no big qualms about building from source, when the developers actually knew wtf they were doing about getting it building in the first place.
I’m more of the OpenBSD type, but Linux as a “For the masses” system, is much easier to live with for me, then Windows XP. With 350~360 gigs of disk space free, running full development environments in twins won’t make a dent either.