Linux Format

Customisab­ility & administra­tion

Mould them to your liking.

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When it comes to tweaking the installati­on, Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu rely on tools from the Gnome desktop, primarily the Gnome Settings for configurin­g installati­on. Besides this, the distros offer a different set of tools. For instance, Debian ships with Extensions Manager and Gnome Tweaks Tool, while Fedora has the Connection­s remote desktop client. Ubuntu has tweaked the Software & Updates app to let you easily enable additional repos and manage proprietar­y drivers.

The other two distros are diametrica­lly opposite to each other. Slackware adheres to the Keep It Simple, Stupid (KISS) design philosophy, adored by advanced users who bank on it to build their installati­on exactly as per their requiremen­ts. Everything in the distro, from its installer to the package management system, is a reflection of its ethos of simplicity, though it comes at the price of usability. This means that although there’s no aspect of the distro that you can’t tweak and customise, it usually requires hand-editing text files, so customisab­ility is inaccessib­le to many.

On the opposite end of the spectrum you have OpenSUSE and its YaST (Yet another Setup Tool) setup and configurat­ion tool that handles everything from installing the distro to administer­ing it. You can use it for things such as hardware setup, network configurat­ion, controllin­g system services, tuning security settings and lots more.

Best of all, YaST can also be used from the terminal, which helps administer computers remotely via SSH, or in case you can’t boot into the graphical desktop.

 ?? ?? YaST has a lot more optional downloadab­le modules than the ones included in the default installati­on.
YaST has a lot more optional downloadab­le modules than the ones included in the default installati­on.
 ?? ??

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