Well another slashdot submissions rejected, it sat in the thingy for about 3 days I assume for a slashback before being rejected. At any rate extremetech ran a nice series of reviews of 8 linux distros. Check it out Here.

Also, based on these nice reviews I decided to try out RH 8.0 'pysche' - bonus points to the geek who can tell me what it's named after. Now, a little background here. It has been years since I have tried out a desktop linux distro. I pretty much just use debian exclusively for my server and IpCop for my router/firewall/cache. But everyone has been saying how nice these new ones are so.. what the heck - I figured I would give it a shot.

I formatted it off my hard drive in about 3 days. The Good/Bad/Ugly are listed below.

• Good: Nice, Quick install. Automatically detected and configured my soundcard (audigy), usb devices (Scanner + zip drive), and video card (Geforce4). Very nice and a nice change of pace from the typical 4+ hours required for debian.
• Good: Wow does the desktop look nice. I mean real nice using KDE. The fonts are the best I've seen in linux in quite some time.
• Good: Nice set of config tools Red Hat provides for just about everything, including the common server stuff like apache. Would be quite useful for a newbie.
• Bad: My fscking usb Microsoft intellimouse wouldn't work with the 'wheel' enabled. I mean flat-out refused to work. No reason I could figure out, not even after checking the bug-reports so I had to make do without the wheel which is a major Pain in the Ass
• Bad:WTF? Why are there 14 submenu's? I mean do we NEED 4 different control menus? Argh. I have always despised this about linux desktops.
• Bad: I don't want ssh enabled on my machine by default. That is stupid. Repeat: No Good Very Bad Thing.
• The Ugly: RPM Hell. I have been spoiled with apt-get. I tried to get Opera, my browser of choice, installed. Nope, needed a package. Tried to get some other app's installed. It was about 50% success ratio. This was when I first shut down RH and booted back into Win2k.
• The Ugliest: NTFS. I still get mad just thinking about this. Red Hat doesn't enable NTFS support by default. Most ditros, like SuSe will auto-mount your NTFS partitions for you. Not RH. Nothing I did could get the NTFS module to load. Nothing. I tried loading into the kernel and everything else it just *refused*. My more geeky linux friends tried it and gave up. I gave up after an hour and formatted the fscking drive. I'm sorry RH but I am not going to spend an hour trying to read my NTFS partitions when SuSe and many others will automatically detect/mount these partitions on install

For some god unknown reason I can Meta-Moderate but I have never been able to moderate. Go figure. Anyone have any clue why?