On Sunday, May 27, 2012 15:10:13, Adam wrote: > Hi again, fellow Linux users! > > I've been using Mandrake/Mandriva since I was a newbie in 2005. Now, > with the company's future uncertain, this seems like a reasonable time > for me to consider other distros.
Although the future of the Mandriva company seems uncertain, it looks like steps are being taken to insure that the Mandriva distro outlives those uncertainties. http://blog.mandriva.com/en/2012/05/17/mandriva-linux-will-return-to-the- community/ http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/277627/mandriva-sa-cedes-control- mandriva-community > Besides that, I now have a few years > of experience that I didn't have back then. Would any of you be willing > to share your expertise on the subject? > > What distros do you use, and why did you choose them? What are their > biggest advantages and disadvantages? Are there any distros you've > tried but chosen not to use? What made them a "bad fit" for you? I'd > be very grateful if any of you would share your experiences with various > distros. > > Just to clarify, I'm open to considering any distro (even if it's > totally different from Mandriva), and am comfortable with the command > line. Thanks VERY much in advance! I started with Slackware around 1995 from some Walnut Creek cdroms I got at a computer show. (I still have some of these BTW -- Slackware from the Nov 1995 set is not installable today, even in a VM. I have another set from Jun 1998 which is installable, but the ethernet drivers are so old that none of them seem to be supported by VirtualBox. :-P) Mainly I started with Slackware because a) the pamphlet in the Walnut Creek disc set came with instructions for installing Slackware, b) one of my better friends was using it so I had someone I personally knew who I could get help from. The main problem I enventually had with Slackware was that the recommended upgrade method was to reformat and reinstall the entire system. I could live with this until around 1998 when I started using Slackware on a home server for 'net connectivity, so reinstallation meant hours of downtime. [There are tricks to do this, but I didn't know them at the time.] When I decided things ahd to change, I took about a year and tried several other systems -- Red Hat (neither Fedora or RHEL existed prior to 2003), Mandrake, SuSE (was commercial only), and Debian. Mandrake was by far the easiest to install, but I ran into several issues with it (some hardware support issues for starters). SuSE was not something I wanted because of issues with YaST and because major OS upgrades meant another purchase. Debian was quite a pain to install at the time (no hardware detection, which meant manually choosing kernel modules at install time), but it was the most popular distribution for LILUG and it was what seemed to be most known for allowing "upgrade-in-place". Since lack of upgrade-in-place was the problem I was having at the time, picking the distribution that was best known for allowing it seemed to be the next logical choice. Plus I wanted something that was going to remain both free-as-in-freedom as well as free-as-in-no-cost for major upgrades. At prior jobs I ran several distributions including Red Hat, SuSE, Gentoo, and Debian. [I like Red Hat the least, but this was prior to Fedora.] Somehow Debian has fit my needs since I made the switch, which is why I'm still using it. I still occasionally I try other distributions in VMs, for many reasons. The best advice I can give you in terms of choosing a distribution is to think about what your needs are, and to try several of them and to compare them for yourself. Each distribution has its own unique qualities, and it's best to find out what these are firsthand. -- Chris -- Chris Knadle [email protected] _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) Vassar College Jun 6 - Why the Web Needs HTML5 Jul 11 - Mad Science Fair - Open Hardware Expo Aug 1 - Pimp My Network
