On Wed, 2005-06-29 at 22:19 -0600, Jarom Jackson wrote: > I have fedora right now, and I like it,but its the only one I have > tried. What are some other good ones (esp if good for newbies like > me), and what are their main differences (pros and cons, etc)? Also, > what do most of you use?
I'm currently using Ubuntu. Debian and I have a long history. Debian has repeatedly demonstrated that it didn't like me. I orginally tried Ubuntu to force myself to give Debian(-based systems) another chance. Somewhere along the way, I fell in love. I like the fact that Ubuntu releases every six months. I love the fact that Ubuntu only release updates for critical bugs or security issues. While we're on the topic of Debian, I wouldn't recommend it for one simple reason: a release just happened, but there's no guarantee that another one will happen in less than the three years it took for this one. Plenty of people will tell you to run Debian unstable. They'll say they've never had a problem with unstable. I did. It ate my system. I don't trust Debian unstable and I don't want to wait three years between stable releases. Debian sarge is brand new, but when it shipped it was already obsolete. Every other major distro has switched from XFree86 to Xorg, but Debian hasn't. And it isn't like they didn't have enough time. The writing was on the wall for the last year. Sarge ships with Gnome 2.8, but 2.10 was current when Sarge shipped. Those are just a couple of examples. IIRC, OpenLDAP is another example of shipping obsolete software. Ubuntu give me Gnome 2.10, Xorg, and other relatively up-to-date software. Debian doesn't and won't until they get their house in order. If you want to join the Debian project and help them get their act together, more power to you. If you're not prepared to yet, I'd choose something other than Debian. Fedora is a great distro. It is one of the major contributors pushing the Linux desktop forward for everyone, not just themselves. However, you have want to be on the bleeding edge because you're going to do some bleeding. Within a week of shipping FC4, there were on the order of 400+ Megs of updates already. That's insane. Fedora is cool, but sometimes I think of Ubuntu as being what Fedora should have been. SUSE is a good distro. It has some quirks that annoy me, but you probably won't notice them. My biggest complaint is SuSEconfig. I don't like the way it fights my manual config edits. Gentoo is a great distro--for the right newbie. If you have plenty of free time, Gentoo will get you closer to the "engine" and make it easier for you to see what's happening "under the hood". Short of building your own Linux From Scrach (http://linuxfromscratch.org), there's no better way to learn. Many people, however, don't have the time or are interested in learning something different. I haven't looked at Mandriva (nee' Mandrake) for years. I don't let that stop me from teasing Mandrake users. ;-) When I last looked at it years ago, it was nothing special and more annoying than SUSE. That said, with all of the recent changes going I'm tempted to look at Mandriva again in a few months. The major difference between distros is 1) what packaging system they use to manage software 2) how custom their configuration system is 3) which desktop they focus Q&A testing on distro | packaging system | configuration system ================================================ Ubuntu .deb Debianized configs + some graphical tools Debian .deb Debianized configs + some graphical tools Fedora .rpm mostly normal configs + some graphical tools SUSE .rpm kinda abnormal configs + SuSEconfig + yast Mandriva .rpm (for now?) ? Gentoo .ebuild closes to stock configs LFS n/a stock configs distro | preferred desktop ========================== Ubuntu Gnome Debian both Fedora Gnome SUSE KDE Mandrive KDE Gentoo both LFS heh, have fun > I have a friend who uses Linspire, any opinions about that(Linspire)? I appreciate what they're trying to do for the community, but I would personally never use Linspire. PS: Bryan, you have barely begun to become opinionated. ;-) -- Stuart Jansen e-mail/jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED] "XML is like violence: if it doesn't solve your problem, you aren't using enough of it." - Chris Maden
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