On Jan 23, 2008, at 8:25 AM, Jeff Schroeder wrote:
Jeff asked:
Has anyone else had any struggles with choosing (or un-choosing) a
distro?
I was a Red Hat user for many years back in the 90's, and one day I
woke
up and felt like they'd become too corporate. They were all
about "enterprise this" and "support contract that" and the easygoing
leading-edge stuff was gone. Even today, I work with some companies
who use RHEL and tell me they can't upgrade to, say, PHP 5 because
it's "too bleeding edge" and the repositories don't support that kind
of craziness and whatever. (I realize this isn't entirely true, but
that's the perception these guys get and I think RHEL pushes
that "stability and security" thing enough that people feel like they
can't run recent packages as a result.)
I've experimented with several distros, including Gentoo and even a
roll-your-own that I built myself based on Linux from Scratch, but for
the last few years I've been a happy Kubuntu user. They're bleeding
edge and have an element of fun about them.
$0.02,
Jeff
I've been around several linux distros as well - I cut my teeth on
RedHat 5.x back in the day on my parent's 486. Later, I bought my
first mac (back in the OS 8.6 days) and slapped yellowdog, then
mandrake on it. Both had positive aspects - but then I was
particularly interested in hardware support for my particular
machine. Then one day the sun shined down on me and I was introduced
to Debian. Hands down, the reason I loved Debian was the package
management. apt saved my bacon more times than I care to remember,
and I was a hardcore debian user for several years. Then OS X came
along and got to where it did not suck much (round about 10.2) and I
switched back to it full time on my personal machine, but kept debian
on all the servers I admin.
Then Ubuntu came along, and I again felt like the heavens parted and
angels sang, etc. See, my biggest beef with Debian has always been a
perception that the packages in it are old, outdated, and way too
conservative. Now, I realize that it is that way on purpose, but
sometimes I wanted or needed bleeding edge, and am not much of a fan
of compiling my own junk outside of apt. Ubuntu brought the awesome
package management of Debian plus the bleeding edge I crave.
Additionally the support that is available on their site is awesome -
I frequently learn new and interesting ways to do things from their
user contributed docs.
Ubuntu is all I use on any of the Linux boxen I admin these days, and
I've been VERY happy with it.
In short, items I look for are:
Recent builds of the items I need
Package Management That Doesn't Suck™
Hardware compatibility
Ubuntu does that for me.
-- Kimball
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