|  kolme | Feb 10, 2006 3:16am | Which is your favourite distro, and why? I think all of them are nice, and have their own pros and cons.
Personally, I like Slackware best. It's simple and very flexible, and really fast. I also like ubuntu and gentoo, though. |
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Sponsor |  MrPopo | Feb 10, 2006 9:48am | | Hmmm... Its a hard choice, but I'd have to say its a toss up between Ubuntu and Kubuntu. Ubuntu is usually a bit more polished than Kubuntu in terms of applications and package installs. Not really surprising since Kubuntu is based on ubuntu. Kubuntu gets a nod however for being KDE based instead of Gnome based.(Personal preference there). |
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|  ra1 | Feb 10, 2006 7:19pm | I would go with Debian on servers because it is very stable and has
superior package management. As my workstation i like to use Gentoo,
because it has bleeding edge packages and it's good for learning
purpose. Every distro has its pros and cons as kolme said. For example
Fedora is very enterprise-like, it's stable, it's easy to configure RAID
and LVM on it, it has support from commercial software vendors (like
VMware), but the package management even with YUM kind of sucks. |
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| | r4v3n | Feb 25, 2006 12:23am | | As a matter of fact I'll go with debian on the desktop as well, the package management is a godsend, and since my HD crashed last month I've moved from Mepis to debian, on a bigger drive. I've noticed that now I'm doing more things on my own, to speed up debian, I've compiled my own Kernel and there are several packages that I do compile for my machine, and altough I'm doing everything "the Debian way" I guess it's not really debian what I'm running... |
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|  TheCheat8988 | Mar 2, 2006 8:54pm | Well each one has their pros and cons. Right now I'm pretty happy with ZenWalk.
ral said Fedora was stable... That's not really true. In my experience with all sorts of distros, Fedora was the slowest, and the least stable.
I'm actually now trying to go for those more "advanced" distros like Slackware and Gentoo. I actually have tried to install Gentoo three times. However, each time I've encountered some sort of problem where it didn't install correctly. The most recent installation has been the most successful. Not gonna get the 2006.0 disc. Just gonna install 2005.1, and then upgrade. 2006.0 comes with a graphical installer... Well.... I guess if I mess up a fourth time I'll resort to the graphical installer...
Ubuntu's got to be one of the worst distros I've ever tried. I had all sorts of dependencie conflicts with the last two releases.
Debian is very fast, but it's really behind. |
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|  |  501303 | Mar 2, 2006 11:15pm | | I've been using Ubuntu for four months now, with no conflicts whatsoever. I must say its my favourite distro. I've used Mandrake and Red Hat at other times. I prefer Ubuntu over them. My roommate swears by Gentoo though. He reinstalled it last month. |
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Sponsor | | IanHayhurst | Mar 3, 2006 1:01am | I've been using SuSe as a desktop distro for years (started with 6.2 or 6.4 in about 98/99) and using their Enterprise offering on some servers SLES 8 and SLES9, Though I do love Gentoo for servers It has such a good level of control and just feels so right on a server (if I get the time and bandwidth I will convert my amd64 box at home from Suse to gentoo... alas gentoo would be best with an always on internet connection and at home I'm still on dialup), I have some DEC/Compaq/HP Alpha machines running Gentoo and they're sweet, though on the blade farm (42 nodes) we run CentOs4 as some of the IBM tools for running / setting it up are RedHat specific (and CentOs is cheaper on that scale) other servers (intel) run RH ES AS 3/4 and that's largely for Oracle certification/ support.
summary: SuSE on the desktop (Gentoo if I get the time)
CentOS or Gentoo on servers (RH if they need commercial support oracle etc)
Familiar on a hand held
and Knoppix on a cd in my bag.
Linux is Linux (and UNIX in spirit) whatever distro... they all have their quirks and strengths. and there's strength in diversity (try telling that to the corporate drones that want uniformity and Redmonds offering across the board) |
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| | apecat | Mar 7, 2006 6:24am | I'm not definitely not a l33t linux user, and will probably not be one for a veery long time since i'm too freaking lazy to get everything i need on my main desktop working under linux; surround sound, something as good as ffdshow & ac3filter & bsplayer, desktop search (yes, i know of beagle). But i set up Ubuntu desktop for not demanding basic desktop use now and then, and my personal secondary desktop/server runs Debian, it's so extremely easy to maintain. And it's Debian Testing, of course.
Alright, Debian based distros are a bit messy if you actually need to configure them on your own outside the package management system, but Slackware, which is extremely nice and clean structure-wise doesn't have package management/repositories comparaple to those of debian (and yes, i've tried Linuxpackages.net & slackpkg/slapt-get).
I'm lazy and i want want a distro that wipes its own ass, which Slackware unfortunately doesn't. Slackware is very enjoyable to study, but i just want a shell/samba/ftp/http-box that is easily maintained. |
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|  slybloty | Mar 15, 2006 5:39pm | | I'm using Fedora and I like it a lot. I also like Ubuntu but I couldn't get the wireless to work on it and also couldn't install mozilla mail for I don't know what reason so I came back to Fedora. It's very stable and I do like yum a lot. |
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| | topyli | Mar 16, 2006 1:35pm | | I used Red Hat, then Mandrake, then suddenly became more sane and switched to Debian when Woody came out. Currently I use Ubuntu. My experience is to just pick one, learn to live with it, and stick to it. Switching is too much trouble. :) |
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