Which flavor of Linux?
 

What is your favorite distro of linux? I am partial to Mandrake but I am still a 'nix newbie.

I use Gentoo. It takes me about 2 days to install (around 24 hours total time - I've got to sleep and stuff you know!) but for me it's well worth it. I've learned more about how Linux works and I have use of the wonderful emerge command so when I want something I can just type "emerge (program name)" most of the time! Not to mention everything down to the kernel is compiled specifically for my system! :D

My favorite distro for a newer person is Mandrake. It's what I started out on so I'm a bit biased, but the alternative, Red Hat, has a crippled KDE, doesn't include mp3 playing support, and various other things I take issue with.

Mandrake. The company is having financial problems right now, but hopefully they will pull through. I've been using Mandrake since version 6.0. Presently on 9.1.

Tough question. I'm using Slackware right now, but that's only because I've been too lazy to bother changing it recently. Mandrake is definitely a good choice, though. Hope the company pulls through on that.

It doesn't matter how many distro's I try, I always go back to debian. It's been my distro of choice for around 3 years.

Troof, bro; Debian is the best; stable, reliable and apt/dpkg is the standard for package management/upgrading. I'll be interested to see the new GUI installer when Sarge becomes Stable; the installer has always been Debians biggest roadblock as far as newbies are concerned, but OOOOO the creamy goodness once you get Deb installed!

Free BSD is the best

It is not linux - It is BSD - But it uses the same ideas with a different kernel and license

It uses Ports (Gentoo users - ports - portage? - HAH) which is in my opinion the best way to install software

It just works better than linux - There are less distributions so there is less spread of ways to do things

If you are a new user then I would recomend it to you

You avoid the 'hardness' (who the hell needs to hand mount file systems and re-configure a kernel on their first go round) of Gentoo

And the cruft of debian (used and use it - apt-get installs a lot of things that you sometimes do not need - and sometimes does stuff wrong)

i've been checking out different distros recently, and i'm liking the look of Gentoo.

Just installed RH 9.0 on my laptop after to failed attemps with RH 8.0 and Mandrake 9.1
So far so great, gonna wipe out the Windows partitions later and do a full install :D

I have RH 8.0 on my desktop and I'll be upgrading that one.
I've used MDK since 6.2 but I dont like the restrictions they put on root. I guess they figure they cater to the newbie and they don't want them having security issues or something.
I like Knoppix too, nice distro to try out and play with.

I use RH 9.0 on my laptop, previously used Redhat 7.3, 8.0, and I tried a Mandrake version once, but I'm a noob and Redhat was my first so I'm kind of used to it. Oh yeah I use Gnome so I don't know anything about a crippled KDE and you can easily download a patch for mp3 support ;)

Mandrake user. I love it, but I'm still trying to fix it after fucking it up for the third time. :rolleyes:

Suse baby! An all around good package for your regular desktop user.

Im a Slackware man, Always have been, and probably always will be. It just gets so much better with every release, its hard to deny it!

The distros that I use are RedHat and Debian. I like Solaris quite a bit, but it doesn't count :/

I started out in 1994 with Slackware, moved to RedHat in 1996. Lately I have started to gravitate towards Debian.

I've dabbled with Gentoo, LFS (Linux from Scratch), Mandrake, and Corel.

I really love Suse and the new 8.2 looks great, but right now I don't have enough cash for it!

So I went with Gentoo :)

I like it a lot. It took me all day to install because of all the compiling, and then kde went overnight, but the end result is a pretty quick system. It only has what you put on it, and its all customized for you. Portage is really nice.

If I go back to SuSE, I won't miss the difficultly of setting up Gentoo (though it has taught me a lot), but I'll miss the ease of portage. I always get things all mixed up with RPMs.

I think I've mentioned somewhere else that you can install portage on other distros (I think). As for the portage/BSD connection it's no secret - it sys so right on Gentoo's website. Doesn't change the fact that it's the first Linux distribution to utilize it. :) I'll give BSD a try once I get a chance but, frankly, I LIKE that there are so many different ways to do things in Linux.

And there are so on BSD but without the cruft and the ugly bits

I use gentoo, and recommend it to anyone who asks. The install process does take a lot of work, but that does not mean it is hard. Print out the install doc, and follow it word for word, and there shouldn't be a problem. Remember, long and detailed does not mean hard if you have very good documentation. :D

My favorites are Debian & Red Hat.
Debian for my Server & Red Hat on my laptop :D

I <3 gentoo!

Slackware and NetBSD Live.

I've attempted to install Mandrake, but failed miserably... Never tried an installable distrobution again. However, I do play with Knoppix quite a bit. Rather fun to run an OS entirely off of a CD

gentoo++


emerge -Du world !!!!

Let's see, I loved SuSE for the longest time, but since I had 8.2 I think..., it was outdated pretty much, did all I needed and such, but then I tried Red Hat, which was nice because of the ease of use. Sometimes, when you are pissed, having to do things 50 different ways is annoying, but used Red Hat. But now, I got Libranet, which is a version of Debian, and I'm likin it a lot except for the whole no desktop crap.

Currently running Mandrake 9.0 on both home and work machines.

It's a shame MDK gets such a bad rap; it really is the best of both worlds. It's an easy-installing desktop potentially usable by Mom and Pop, plus all the good guts the more "geek-oriented" distros have.

Gentoo on my desktop, Red Hat on my servers

i like debian.

Started with Slackware before I even had a supported Graphics card, then later went to Redhat.

Didn't care much for Redhat (disliked Gnome and KDE, alot of bloat for nothing I use)...

so I have gone back to Slackware, and still love it..

and as far as the emerge and apt-get.. who needs those? I love my tarballs (one major reason I went back.. Damn rpms.. go fark off!)

so, slackware has and will always probably be my favorite.

oblar, emerge doesn't use RPMs by any means. All it really does is download the tarball for you plus the tarballs of any dependencies and compiles them according to pre-defined (or presently-defined) settings.

Secret, I think you missed the newsletter!

http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/20...newsletter.xml

:D

haha,, that one caused quite a stir in their forums :)

Gentoo!

LOL, yeah, I actually believed it at first too! I was sitting at my computer screen going "uhhhhhh" and then, after talking to a friend of mine about it (who played along and kept me tricked!) I finally noticed to commend on the bottom about it being a joke. As far as I understand drobbins made them add that - he didn't find it as funny as some of the other people on the Gentoo team ;)

Mandrake, cause it the only one that ever installed properly, usually on the first try on most of by puters.

My favorite flavor is orange. Thank you.

i've only used redhat. running 9.0 now which is an upgrade from 8.0 which was a clean install wiping out my 7.3. redhat has always met my needs so i've never taken the opportunity to checkout any of the other distros.

I've played around with loads of Linux distros in the past nad the one which keeps pulling me back in is Mandrake.

I like spending time using my OS, and not configuring it, and Mandrake allows me to get the configuration sorted out very quickly.

I liked Gentoo for Portage, Suse because everything is green instead of blue, and Debian for it's purist appeal, but Mandrake really does it for me. More time is spent working and less time tinkering.

Right now I'm using Slackware 9.0. In the past the only real distro I've used was Redhat 7.2. I say "real distro" because a long time ago when I was new I used Winlinux, a terrible distro that can be installed on a FAT32 partition. It got me started, though, and that's what counts :p

nods, i know it doesnt. The RPM comment was slightly unrelated. I just really, really hate RPMs and will not go back to them.

I have been thinking about using Gentoo on a server, for the main reason of emerge. Make it so it automatically updates itself and basically runs so I can leave it in a closet somewhere.. but for my day to day use of computers I prefer slackware.. I prefer to do the tarballs myself. Just preference.

Can anyone recommend a good flavor to learn with? I want to wean myself off windows but have absolutely no knowledge of any kind of linux...

Well I did wipe out Windows from my laptop and have RH 9.0 on it now. Couldn't be happier. Had some problems with the wireless pcima card not working after a powerloss. Reinstalled and seemed to fix it.

Spungfo: Try Mandrake but I would also give RH 9.0 a try.

Definitely recommend Mandrake Linux. But you must understand some things. I don't feel like typing them, so go here: http://tfproject.org/tfp/showthread....&threadid=4170

oblar, that's cool, I can understand wanting to do things yourself. One thing about Gentoo as a server though: yes, "emerge sync && emerge -U world" is cool, but I wouldn't set it to blindly run it every so often. Just like with anything, maybe you don't want the latest upgrade to that one program because it's known to cause problems, or break compatibility with some other program. I'd always recommend "emerge -Up world" (the p is for pretend) so you can see what will be done first, then you can decide if you want to do it.

I use FreeBSD on all my servers and on my desktop at work.

I was running it on my desktop at home, but switched to Gentoo linux because the NVidia driver doesn't work very will with -CURRENT (and is quite a bit out of date); and vmware doesn't work quite right under Linux emulation.

I picked Gentoo because it's the most BSD-ish out of all the distros I've tried. However, there are still some Linux-isms that annoy me. I'll definitely be switching back to FreeBSD when they iron a few things out, probably around 5.3 or 5.4.

Out of curiosity, what are these "Linux-isms" you don't like?

Most of them are just personal preference, really.

For example, I like that the each of the BSDs are a full tightly-integrated OS. Linux is simply a bunch of installed packages from many different sources. Now, a lot of the BSD "system" source is imported third-party code, gcc for example, but it's been tweaked by the maintainers to function as expected on a BSD system and fit in to a well-defined scheme of what goes where.

Gentoo actually does a pretty good job of doing this, modifying the installation of various software to follow the Gentoo layout. However, there are some exceptions that get dumped on /opt, or /usr/kde3.1 for example. Gentoo also has a very blurred distinction between "system" and "user-installed". In BSD, all base software is installed in /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, and /usr/sbin. User-installed stuff goes either in /usr/local or /usr/X11R6, depending on if it's X-related or not. Again, personal preferences.

Other things I have are minor gripes, such as the fact that Linux has no kernel sound mixer (the kernel developers are morally opposed to the idea or something). So without artsd or esd I can only play one sound at once. Even if I used ALSA, because my sound card is a cheap integrated AC97, there's no hardware mixing so it has the same problem. I run artsd for KDE, so must stuff works, but mplayer lags really bad when playing through artsd, vmware doesn't work at all (artsdsp doesn't work on setuid binaries), and the mozilla flash plugin skips and lags when running through artsd. In BSD it's no problem because I can run artsd for KDE and each of those programs can have its very own virtual /dev/dsp that gets run through a low-latency mixer in the kernel... The BSD audio abstraction is much more flexible so vchans work with any sound driver. With ALSA, every sound driver has to reinvent the wheel or copy a bunch of code verbatim from another driver.

One minor annoyance to me is the amount of junk that gets printed on bootup of Linux systems. Useless debugging information, advertisements (X driver development was sponsored by Y), and just in general very little consistency to how drivers print out information, or how much information they print. My FreeBSD box's dmesg, with only a couple of excepctions, looks like "device0: at 0xAAA irq 15 on pci0". Just the very basic information about what hardware is detected. If I'm debugging a problem, I can boot -v and see heaps of extra information about what's going on, but it doesn't give it to me unless I ask.

I also like the development model of BSD. In FreeBSD (and NetBSD, and OpenBSD), everything is in CVS. You can pull the current source code from CVS and build the entire OS with a couple commands. Changes to it are approved by a group of committers, a group to which anyone who contributes enough can become. The "core" team, who sets the vision and direction of development, is regularly elected from the committers. It's a very democratic system. I have occassinally contributed code and changes, and despite BSD's reputation having even more arrogant users/developers than Linux, have found that most of the developers are actually quite nice people. There's a few assholes here and there who hang out on the mailing lists, but for the most part that's no worse than in the Linux world.

Contrast with the Linux kernel, which is a dictatorship at which Linus is the head. It's his kernel. And while I respect him and think he's a cool guy, if there was ever a major architectural disagreement, the only solution would be for somebody to fork their own verison of the kernel.

For distributions, many are run by corporate interests. Some, such as Debian and Gentoo, are volunteer-based which is good. But there's a lot of them. It's harder to get a company to distribute what you want, so there's lot of fragmentation. It's hard to pick a distro because there's a lot of overlap as far as which one has which features. The three branches of BSD cooperate and swap code quite often. Each has its niche, but there's little to no overlap for the different purposes. Because the process is very democratic, forks are quite rare and only happen under extreme circumstances (Theo's disagreement with NetBSD for one).

EDIT: Added 5/1. One thing I meant to mention in this post but forgot is library version problems. On a FreeBSD system, version 4.5 of the system uses the C library libc.so.4. 3.x uses libc.so.3. And so on. Newer minor revisions of the system may add more functions, but they NEVER change how existing ones work. This guarantees binary compatibility for an entire major version of the OS. If I'm running 5.1, and I install the compat4x and compat3x packages, I can run any programs that were compiled for any version of FreeBSD between 3.0 and 5.x. In the past, glibc (the C library used by most Linux systems), has changed function semantics and broken binary compatibility across minor point releases, leading to what's known as glibc-hell. Things have been better recently, so hopefully if the glibc maintainers get yelled at enough when they break things it won't be as much of a problem in the future :D. But, on servers especially, I feel better that I know something will work rather than having to hope that it will work.

I don't really care about the whole BSD-vs-GPL license debate so much, so I won't get into it here.

Really, I don't dislike Linux; I just prefer FreeBSD because IMHO it's a better fit to how I want things to work. I'd much rather use a Linux machine than something like the awful Win9x line, and the fact that I like Gentoo enough to run it on my primary desktop should say something :)

I'll probably edit this post if I think of more later, but for now I'm pretty much tapped out :)

Okay, re-reading my post I bet I'm going to get jumped on for that statement, so let me qualify it a little :)

To me, Linux feels like just a bunch of installed packages. I know that each distro usually has something of its own besides just what packages are installed by default, like Gentoo has portage, Debian has apt, and Red Hat has automatic updating stuff, but in the end the difference between "System" and "User-installed" tends to blur and it can make maintainance more difficult.

Having built a couple of Linux-from-scratch systems, I can say that I really appreciate how much work it is to sort through all the dependency problems and create a cohesive distribution.