Ok, so I’ve had it installed for less than a day, and I’ve got very little actually installed on it, but I’ve noticed a few things:
Grub is very cool. Not something the average consumer would want to mess with, but a great geek tool for controlling startup. I may not have noticed this if not for Grub, but the brand new stable release of Debian, named sarge, uses a Linux kernel that’s a year old instead of a newer stable kernel. I’m sure they’ve got their reasons; I know that just because the 2.6 kernel is considered stable doesn’t mean it won’t cause problems in the Debian distribution. Or it could be just fine; true stability takes time to discover. I was just surprised… Knoppix seemed much better at identifying hardware and installing appropriate drivers. I never had to tell it what type of video card I had or when I was attaching my external firewire drive. When I booted, it just recognized them and got them running. (I haven’t tried the firewire drive yet, but on my first installation I was asked what video chipset I had. I took a guess but based on the fact that XWindow support couldn’t start, I guess I got it wrong).