today i realised that i'm a fraud

[Marvin™]

today i realised that i'm a fraud.
i started working on computers in early 1974, huge mainframes, a room full of massive air-conditioning units and another full of battery backup equipment. then in the mid-eighties something appeared on my desk on day - a "PC". nothing was loaded, no paperwork, nothing. it was switched on then just as quickly switched off.
a short while later someone asked if i had tried it, "had i switched it on?". i switched it on again. he had loaded a menu system, QDOS, and i could use it to load various app's.
over the years i have come to think of myself as quite an expert on windows. i fix lots of machines for loads of people. however, in reality, i'm not an expert, just a person who has had such a crappy experience with windows that he's been forced to learn how to get past all those problems - learning huge amounts in the process. maybe that's what's wrong with my linux experience. maybe what i need is a really crap version of linux, full of bugs so that i'm forced to learn how to get past those too. then i'll understand linux. does anyone know of a really shity, unstable, buggy, badly written, constantly crashing version of linux i could try please?

[rokytnji]

Here ya go Marvin, Don't be so hard on yerself.

Index of /unstable/linux-i586 these are unstable versions of open office org. You can also Try out something with like KDE 4 Desktop from what I've been reading on the forum on KDE 4.


Any Test Distro of Linux will fit your needs also, Like Ubuntu 9, or Lunar 1.5.1 i686 pre-release (rc1) announcement: msg#00144 linux.distributions.lunar.general

[elija]

You could try a debian or slackware install. It's not that they are bad or buggy but you can do a really minimal install and then build everything up from scratch(ish)

[GNU-Fan]

Use Gentoo.
There is nothing like compiling it for hours just to realize you set some USE flag wrongly.

[oz]

welcome to the forums!

i think it's probably very much like the "best distro" question that we often get from new users and in the end, you'll need to try some of the various distros yourself to find the worst one for you and your hardware.

best of luck with the search.

[smolloy]

Debian comes in several flavours -- stable, testing, unstable, and experimental. See if you can live with nightly builds of the experimental branch...

Or try Damn Vulnerable Linux if you want to spend your time keeping out crackers.

[Bemk]

A better learning experience might come from doing something like LinuxFromScratch.

It will teach you a lot about the Linux system and results in a system which you can set to how you want it. You can also do it while compiling the sources, and learn by trail and error.

[MikeTbob]

Use Gentoo.
There is nothing like compiling it for hours just to realize you set some USE flag wrongly.

Amen brother, and that was just the kernel build!

[Bemk]

And I was just looking for a nice entry into Gentoo. Well lets say this encourages me more, learning by trail and error.

[sarlacii]

LOL Gentoo is the way to go for a learning experience... been there, learnt a lot, but as a faithful desktop user I just didn't have the time to fiddle. However, their tutorials and install notes are excellent, plus their irc and forums are also very helpful... so you only "struggle" as much as you want to. Also, it's not totally unstable or crappy, so perhaps not suited for a journey into computing hell? Good luck. :o)