The semi-oft posted Favorite Linux Distribution poll...
Displaying poll results.47146 total votes.
Hotels are tired of getting ripped off. I checked into a hotel and they had towels from my house. -- Mark Guido
Hotels are tired of getting ripped off. I checked into a hotel and they had towels from my house. -- Mark Guido
Mandrake Rocks (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Mandrake Rocks (Score:5, Funny)
Gozer: Then DIIIIIEEEEEE
electric sparks fly from Gozers hands
Spangler: When someone asks you if you're a God, YOU SAY YES!
But anyway, I think Mandrake is similar to a Macintosh, it's good for newbie users, yet all the tools are there to make it powerful for someone who knows where they are and how to use them.
Re:Mandrake Rocks (Score:5, Interesting)
I work on windoze systems all day, and when I get home I just want a system that works, and for me that is Mandrake.
I even tried an experement a while back, I had my old GF (A lUser if ever there was one.) install win98se, and Mandrake 7.2 on the same computer.
The results?
Mandrake:
She got a working system with network, sound, and a working video card.
Win98SE:
Se asked me more questions. I don't recall exactly but about double. Got a system with no sound, 640 X 480 16 color video, and no network.
It seems to me that Mandrake Linux is already easier to install than Windows... At least Win98 SE
Re:Mandrake Rocks (Score:5, Interesting)
I got started with Mandrake 7 as the free disk in Maximum Linux (anyone remember this?). At that time I was installing any Linux distro I could get my hands on. I was hunting for the distro that suited the way I work. I got to mandrake 7 and havn't looked back.
The install is super smooth. The only smoother install I've seen is Caldera (now SCO), however you don't get as in-depth an install procedure with Caldera. The whole system is configurable at install-time. The thing I like about the Caldera install is SOLITAIRE!!!
I do wish that mandrake would get apt-get though. I'm not saying do-away with rpm or urpmi(i like urpmi a lot!) but I just wish apt was there.
UNIX is 1337 (Score:5, Funny)
1337 Advanced Unix Programming
Maybe it's only funny to me.
Re:Mandrake Rocks (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong, I run Mandrake and win2k. I use win2k for everything BUT coding. When I'm coding I need linux because coding in windows kinda blows. Anyway I've installed Mandrake and windows numerous times. Mandrake's installer is easy, and awesome, and when it's done it leaves your system in perfect running condition. Win98 takes less effort to install than mandrake, but the amount of knowledge required is about the same, after you get past the manual fdisk phase. However installing windows, any windows, leaves your system in a low res, no sound, no network state. This is because windows expects you to change from generic drivers to drives of your choice later, in the device manager. And in windows that's easy to do. In Linux installing a hardware driver is a pain. I don't even know how to do it! At all! This is why mandrake, an easy distro, does it for you during installation. Because you would never ever figure out how to change it later.
And if you had her install win2k instead of 98se you probably would have found her asking less questions. Since 2k eliminates the manual fdisking with a better one and techincally only requires the user to press enter 3 times, F6 once, and enter a few more times to get a working install. Not counting typing in the CD-KEY.
So not that you're wrong, but your test is a little misleading. By the way I think that the #1 problem with linux is that it requires me to have a vast amount of knowledge to do things like upgrade the kernel, change drivers, install software, etc. All software should install like Mozilla and there should be some sort of device managerish thing. This is why I use mandrake. The control center, while buggy and slow, is better than what other distros give me, which is nothing.
Another note, I used to use redhat, but it didn't support all my hardware automatically. Mandrake does. And mandrake is sometimes called "the KDE distro" and KDE is my preference so, yeah.
Re:Mandrake Rocks (Score:3, Interesting)
I have to disagree completely with you on that one.
Most users that run linux today know how to install it and many of them know how to partition their drive according to their preferences, however, you seem to be forgetting that most modern distributions such as SuSe, Mandrake and RedHat have this button labeled "Let {RedHat/SuSe/Mandrake} partition my drive for me"
So that's one point you got wrong, and which makes it possible for a totally inexperienced user to install linux without the need for fdisk.
Then comes the drivers thing...
It's fairly simple, once again, most modern linux distributions include a software package called Kudzu that loads at boot time in most cases, in charge of detecting changes in your hardware configuration and install/uninstall those drivers automatically, so no need to install them manually in most cases.
In the possible case that the driver is provided with the device, 99% of the time, the driver disk will contain very detailed and moron-proof instructions on how to install it!
Then comes the system updates.
It's fairly simple, once again, modern distributions such as RedHat, SuSe, Debian, Mandrake, Gentoo, etc... all include some kind of system update management system...
Whether it is based on up2date (redhat), emerge (Gentoo), apt-get (Debian) and all the others, it's very easy to update all the software residing on your system and that includes software packages like Apache, Gimp or fluxbox, but also the kernel and other system packages.
Have you ever seen Microsoft Windows Update proposing you to update your Adobe Photoshop or your Norton Antivirus ? I didn't think so...
So I'm afraid none of your points prove to be informed, this is the kind of propaganda microsoft works on really hard to make linux look like something complicated/not-flexible/not-scalable/feature-les
Anyway I hope I helped in informing your opinion, no hostility.
Re:Mandrake Rocks (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Mandrake Rocks (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll just mention Kudzu again...
On any OS obviously, you shut down your computer in order to replace the peripheral (for any internal component, that is)
So the procedure on Windows would be as follow, once your device is installed physically:
- Boot your Operating System
- My Computer -> System Config Panel
-open device manager
-double click the piece of hardware I desire
-click update driver
-find the name of my piece of hardware and click on it
-click ok
Now, thanks to this wonderful piece of technology called Kudzu, here is the procedure for the same piece of hardware on the same machine running linux:
- Boot your operating system
Was that too complicated ?
Re:Mandrake Rocks (Score:4, Insightful)
Look, regardless of the whole kudzu/harddrake/devfsd issues involved here, your whole view point is based on some majorly incorrect assumptions - namely, that standard users know how to install drivers on windows.
I hate to break this to you, but based on the evidence of friends, coworkers and family, they do not. Hell, they wouldn't know what a "device manager" was if it jumped up and down in front of them wearing a "Linux Sux" T-shirt. (and the whole "right-click on "My Computer", choose properties, choose device manager, blah, blah is not what I'd call intuitive!) But what they do know is how to follow simple instructions in the manual that comes with the hardware. You know, the ones that say "Click on Start -> Run ... a:\setup.exe", etc? If they got a manual saying "Click on KDE menu -> Run ... modprobe /mnt/floppy/somedriver" they'd most likely be just as happy.
In fact, I'd say that provided they have instructions they're not going to care what they have to do provided it's less than a page of writing and has a graphic showing what any dialogue box should look like.
Having a GUI or not to install drivers just isn't an issue. Having a manual that tells you what to do is. And here's the rub: no windows user ever has to install hardware drivers without a manual - all newly purchased hardware will come with instructions, and all existing hardware alread y had the drivers installed when they bought their computer. The only situation where there might be difficulties is when - and if - they upgrade their OS. But with Linux, on the other hand, they're starting off without manuals. With the notable exception of my laser printer I've never seen any hardware that came with instrucitons for how to install linux drivers.
And I think you'll find that it's this complete lack of a nice, safe instruction manual for all their esoteric hardware that makes Linux so hard.
(But all this is really irrelevant anyway when you consider that with a resonably modern PC and a modern distro you'll never have to lift a finger to install the drivers for your hardware, as Linux does it all for you unless you've got some really bizare stuff inside your box. The only exception I can think of are NVidia's drivers for their graphics cards, and even then X is more than happy using the open-source ones that come with it by default, so it's not like you're without a functional graphics card if you don't install them. And even with these drivers, they come in nice, easy-to-swallow rpm or deb packages, so they're never going to be a problem.)
Re:Mandrake Rocks (Score:3, Insightful)
> -double click the piece of hardware I desire
> -click update driver
> -find the name of my piece of hardware and click on it
> -click ok
That's pretty optimistic. You left out the parts about looking up
FCC numbers or whatever else you can find printed on the card to see
who manufactured the thing, going to the website, trying to look up
the item only to discover you aren't sure which of several related
items it is, examining it more closely to try to find a model number,
giving up on that and downloading all posibilities, and trying them
one at a time. Oh, and each and every time Windows will _forget_
which drive the Windows CD-ROM is in, even though you never took it
out, and look for the Windows CAB files in the place where you put
the drivers you downloaded, then prompt you to fill in the correct
location _again_. After all that, the network card still may not
work. Can you tell I've had to reinstall Windows on old Deskpros
a number of times? Yeah. You end up going out and spending $10 on
a new network card (complete with drivers on a disk) just to save
your sanity. You then take the old Compaq network card and stick
it in a Mandrake box and Hard Drake will configure it for you.
Re:Mandrake Rocks (Score:5, Funny)
Someone else does it for you before you buy your computer. It's hard to compete with that....
Re:Mandrake Rocks (Score:4, Funny)
Someone else does it for you before you buy your computer. It's hard to compete with that....
Yes, but You have to know how to reinstall every 6 months or so...
Re:Mandrake Rocks (Score:5, Interesting)
65495 set it to "high speed", IIRC;
65494 set it back to the default, slower speed.
The CoCo 3, likewise, used the same convention, but used 65497 and 65496, respectively. Supposedly, there was something akin to backwards compatibility designed here--although the 95 and 94 addresses were reduced to no-ops.
On the CoCo 3, the "high speed" mode was 1.77MHz.
Compared to today's machines, that's nothing, but back in the day, that rom-pack expansion bus was ahead of its time. Think about it: it was the ancestor of PCMCIA--except it wasn't hot-swappable!
BTW, some people still use their Color Computers, and there is/used to be a mailing list for getting parts. Last I heard from the list, there was talk of an electrical engineer who was building an ethernet device for the rompack port, and someone else was working on a small IP stack for OS9 Level II.
Rogue was the stuff--I wasted months of my life playing that game.
These days, many CoCo users have upgraded their boxes to SCSI drives, up to 8MB of RAM, and put them in PC cases. There was a kit made for the retrofit called the "NoCan3".
Re:Mandrake Rocks (Score:3, Insightful)
It was a fun time, in certain respects. It was a time when it was easy to do something new and exciting. There were all sorts of areas that needed exploration. In 1978, for example, writing a real-time moon lander in Level 1 basic was considered sellable. It takes way more work than that to do something considered interesting now.
It's very hard, these days, to do something interesting that doesn't require a reasonably large team. The landscspe has changed. While there are things that I can do now that would have been considered miraculous back then, much of the wilderness is now tamed and the excitement of the frontier is now gone.
Re:Mandrake Rocks (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Mandrake Rocks (Score:4, Interesting)
Surprise, the 'net connection was up, and my home-brewed network was up and running without help from me (and without any repeated reboots). If that isn't as easy, or easier, than a Windows install, I don't know what is. And security updates are a snap (if needed), and still no reboots required.
Re:Mandrake Rocks (Score:3, Interesting)
MDK was the first that I ever tried. Then I tried Debian, loved it but it seemed to break a lot.. but that was most likely my own stupidity. The whole apt-get dist-upgrade thing was a nightmare. I would use it too often (just couldn't help myself) and something would break. At the time I was a raw newbie and couldn't fix it so I would have to do a clean install. Then I tried FreeBSD... that was nice but not very stable on my desktop. I had problems with various things and ended up going back to Mandrake. The servers I manage all run RedHat but for desktop use, MDK is the way to go.
Oh, I did have 2 servers running FreeBSD for a long time but ended up switching those to RH so that all of my servers were running the same OS.
Re:Mandrake Rocks (Score:3, Interesting)
Since I don't use GNOME or KDE, my menus say exactly what I want them to say. Only not on RH8, of course, as they've chosen to remove fvwm2 from the distribution. Along with rxvt, ical, and half of the other tools I use on a daily basis. Sigh. At the moment, I'm undecided on whether to stick with Red Hat, and just manually add the things I need, or to just bite the bullet and go for a complete roll your own disto.
At Work (Score:3, Interesting)
Red Hat's commercial support is why it was chosen at work, so I use it at home. The choice was made before I worked here, but nobody here now feels strongly enough to try and change it.
My FIRST distro was Slackware, and I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for it. I wonder what percentage of people stay with the first distro they install, and what percentage of people migrate.
Re:At Work (Score:2)
Work pressure can push you to switch: I started by migrating from FreeBSD to RedHat, mainly because my projects at work were making a similar shift.
And then, there's religion: I switched from RedHat to Debian after a yellow-robed gnu appeared in my GNU Emacs scratch buffer and told me that apt would make me Free... and that I could still use twm.
- Tim
Actually it was the reverse in my case... (Score:4, Insightful)
I've tried Debian, Slackware and Mandrake but I keep coming back to Red Hat. A friend of mine is the same way with SUSE. I'm not opposed to any of the other distros and I'll happily work with any distro I'm given. But if I'm given a choice, I'll pick Red Hat.
I'll never understand why people get into holy wars over which distro is better because it's just Linux and the GNU tools underneath.
CoNectiva (Score:4, Funny)
Bummer!
Conectiva is written with a single N :oP Just like this:
Re:CoNectiva (Score:5, Funny)
Re:CoNectiva (Score:5, Funny)
Brendan
Use the 'Hat (Score:3, Funny)
Was given an early RedHat (3.0). Hated it. Config stuff in weird locations. but it ran X out of the box.
I've now installed all of the major distros (Debian, Suse, Mandrake, YelloDog, RedHat, Caldera). With few exceptions, RedHat goes on easiest and provides the largest list of stuff I want to use. Debian and Suse have a larger list of stuff, but installing Debian is more involved than it needs to be, and Yast was closed source the last time I checked.
I'll be taking the RHCE exam as soon as the funds are available.
Re:Use the 'Hat (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Use the 'Hat (Score:3, Informative)
Has anyone tried it recently? The installation and setup is quite easy for anyone who's used any other distro before. I only started to use Slack at 8.0 (was a Redhat user previously), and have never looked back since. I've tried the other distros such as Mandrake and SuSE, but Slack is still the best on my list.
I've yet to try Debian though...
Redhat (Score:5, Interesting)
YMPGMV
Re:Redhat (Score:5, Funny)
Is there any reason that pump AND dhcpcd are disabled, and that the new client is dhclient? And given the 4+ GB full install, they couldn't find any room for Xine, or any other MP3 player? And if they don't want me to get "political" about fsking Bluecurve/KDE, maybe THEY should be less "political" about their media players.
"You should switch to OGG... " No, thanks. I'll switch to Debian.
And Bluecurve! Yes, could you make my user experience as much like Windows XP as possible? Could you do it right down to having a link to your Active Update (or Red Hat Network, as you call it) flash right on my taskbar? Could you do that for me, please?
Wow. I had more pent-up rage than I'd thought - all that being said, I still love Red Hat 7.3.
BSD-mirabile (Score:3, Interesting)
(currently nearly 1 MiB diff to OpenBSD).
It has native IPv6 apache and other nice stuff.
Plus, it uses gcc-3.2 instead of gcc-2.95.3,
which makes for some nice athlon optimizations
(don't try that at home, gcc-2.95 optimizer
is broken and triggers kernel and gcc bugs)
gentoo (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:gentoo (Score:2, Funny)
Re:gentoo (Score:5, Interesting)
Leave it to the trolls to make Gentoo look like an elitists distro.
I work with one of the core developers... Gentoo is far from elitist.
Re:gentoo (Score:4, Funny)
Re:gentoo (Score:5, Insightful)
I like gentoo primarily because of the amount of software available and the fact that new releases become available far faster than on most other packaging systems. Additionally, emerge handles dependencies most effectively of any linux distribution I've tried.
Sure it takes a little extra time and effort to set up, but my system under gentoo has had fewer problems than I've ever had under RedHat or Mandrake. (Mandrake committed suicide on me, and took a Windows partition with it, so I gave that up permanently...)
Re:gentoo (Score:5, Insightful)
My solution? Gentoo! I only install what I want, it's compiled for my machine, and updates come fast. I am subscribed to the announce list so I'm always told of upgrades and security announcements. The USE variables make it so if I want ssl and crypto options, all of my programs automatically get this functionality compiled in without me having to do anything extra. The documentation is great. Portage is AWESOME! There are a few things I wish it did, but the user groups are really awesome and all of those things have been provided by fellow gentoo'ers as a python or awk script.
It is true that updates come very quickly, but in many cases, I can do the updated packages myself. Just update 'foo-3.2.8.ebuild' to 'foo-3.3.0.ebuild', emerge it and make a digest (be sure to find a trusted digest source if making your own). It automatically grabs the latest file from the mirrors and compiles it with my custom settings. No more waiting on maintainers in many situations. Also, the digests keep malicious things from happening. Big thanks to Gentoo for finding the latest tcpdump and libpcap trojans!
Overall I've loved my experience with Gentoo. It's fast, I have what I want installed and it's all compiled to my optimizations and options. I still get my dist-upgrades w/o reinstalling. Sure, if you have a slow internet connection and/or computer, then it makes it take longer, but I've managed to survive w/a 500mHz PIII on a 28.8K modem.
Re:gentoo (Score:5, Insightful)
Astroturfing? You may want to look up the meaning of that word in the jargon file before you try using it again.
Anyway, I'm pretty suprised Gentoo didn't make the poll this time. Are the editors losing touch with the Linux community? Gentoo has really taken off over the last couple months, and with good reason.
I know this has been explained over and over, but I'll explain it again. Gentoo is best suited for people that fit the following criteria:
1) Have a fast computer
2) Have a fast connection
3) Have a decent working knowledge of Linux
None of these things are requirements, but your experience installing gentoo is going to be greatly affected by your lack of any of the above.
Yes I know I'm responding to flamebait, but if I just sat here doing nothing my computer really would just be wasting clock cycles.
Re:gentoo (Score:3, Insightful)
I must say that I like the emerge system where I can just tell it to grab things from the web, compile and install without a fuss (well, besides waiting for it to compile). I've got a 1 GHz Pentium 3 so things aren't ungodly slow in the compile department. The thing that impressed me though was the speeds I was getting downloading, 130+KB/s easy. It makes it feel a lot less painful then downloading x number of CDs for a full distro when in 200 megs I had a full install and could choose whatever I wanted to install without downloading extra junk. However I wouldn't mind seeing binaries for things like, oh I don't know, X and Gnome/KDE available for download in a package. I don't know why such big items need to be compiled by everybody.
Also, the forums are exceedingly helpful, and anything that goes wrong seems to be covered in there. I had an issue with GRUB being stupid and it was in the first three pages of installation forum. Not bad I say. They appear to be well run and maintained.
By far though I think that this emerge thing is the best part about Gentoo. Of course, it's going to come and bite me when I take my laptop on the road and realize I didn't install one app that I need that's usually a trivial part of a default install in the big distros...
Re:gentoo (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, I've tried RedHat and Madrake many times and have always found them to be buggy.
I like "Debian: the idea", but not "Debian: the experience".
Gentoo and Slackware are the 2 distros, from my experience, that actually work. Read the manual, follow instructions and everything goes as planned.
The ONLY reason I don't use Slackware anymore, is I like to update my system often, and I'm too lazy to manage the packages myself. But before Gentoo, that's what I did.
Re:gentoo -- The real reasons (Score:3, Insightful)
I still feel, though, that Gentoo has it's shortcomings, but so do all distros. With Gentoo, I don't like waiting for the installs or the builds, but hey, if I'm going to build something big, I'll script it together real quick, and I'll go to bed. It may be a pain sometimes over a 56k modem, but, for me, I definitely feel that it's worth it. Until I get a bit more motivated and feel that I have enough time to run LFS (which will, unfortunately, probably be never) I will run Gentoo. At least until something else comes along and works with me better than Gentoo does now...
Jeremy
Conectiva Gentoo??!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Conectiva Gentoo??!! (Score:2)
Oh well, maybe next time.
Re:Conectiva Gentoo??!! (Score:3, Informative)
Where is gentoo?!? (Score:2, Redundant)
It's a conspiracy (Score:5, Funny)
But I will not be silenced. I'm in the middle of building two different Gentoo compq2gvv kl;
+++ NO CARRIER
SuSE to Debian (Score:2, Interesting)
Debian (Score:2, Redundant)
Nothing better than:
apt-get install xmms
or some such thing. I know that it's rare that in a Windows world you would need something else to run a program but in Linux it happens, a lot. Apt-get takes care of all that.
Apt-RPM is nice also, they both worked a heck of a lot better for me than Up2Date et. al.
Re:Debian apt-we-get-it (Score:5, Funny)
If you can't think of anything else to say just mention how great apt-get is. If I had a dollar for...
Debian (Score:5, Informative)
Debian: Worlds Best Post-Install Distro (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Debian: Worlds Best Post-Install Distro (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Debian (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Debian (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Debian (Score:5, Insightful)
I use Debian on a number of machines here -- what other current Linux distribution still ships for sun4m* -- but I always skip dselect entirely and use apt-get directly after the base install because dselect is an utter pig that will waste my afternoon every time even though I know exactly which packages I want installed. I'd hate to sit a newbie down in front of dselect, I'm sure they'd run screaming.
(* Gentoo now apparently supports sun4m, but who wants to compile an entire source distribution on an LX or an IPX?)
Re:Debian (Score:5, Informative)
That being said, I like Debian's apt package management tool. I like being able to type:
apt-get install foo
and have the application foo and all its dependencies download and install automagically. In my RedHat days, I did not like having to find and download the RPMs myself. (Perhaps things have improved since I stopped using RedHat?)
I also like being able to type:
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
and have my entire system upgraded automagically. I like being able to automate this process as a weekly cron job. I like how this works even across major revisions of Debian (2.2 to 3.0).
I like Debian. But I'm sure the other distributions have their good points, too.
- Tim
Re:Installation with Mandrake (Score:3, Informative)
Mandrake dropped the percentage install method a while ago. I haven't done a standard install in a long time, but ISTR that it now does a task selection and determines how many packages to install based on how much disk space you have.
Yellow Dog (Score:3, Insightful)
Teeny distros (Score:5, Funny)
After all, it's not the size of your distro, it's how you use it.
Re:Teeny distros (Score:5, Funny)
I use a different teeny distribution, you insensitve clod!
After all, it's not the size of your distro, it's how you use it.
That's what all the people with teeny distros say
The one I use or the one I like? (Score:2)
That said, I use RedHat on my laptop, and before the dotbomb, at work. Why? Because everything's distributed with RedHat in mind, so everything runs on it.
Looking for a RedHat Replacement (Score:4, Interesting)
Which teeny distribution? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's Yellow Dog, in my case, but I'm guessing Gentoo is probably the most popular one not on the list. Plus Gentoo users all seem to _love_ it, so it should get a got showing.
Got to to laugh when every Debian story is filled with Gentoo users insisting that they have the one true way. After years of Debian zealots dropping into every distribution-related story wondering why everyone doesn't just switch to Debian, they've got it coming....
Re:Which teeny distribution? (Score:4, Insightful)
I have a strong suspicion that all of those oh-so-happy Gentoo users are in some way deluding themselves, just as I did while using Source Mage. Coming from a Mandrake/RPM-hell background, Source Mage always seemed so great - I never had to worry about dependency problems, my computer was always using the most recent version of every program, and I could just do a "sorcery update" to automatically download and install all the latest programs. I never really noticed the supposed speed benefits of compiling everything from scratch, but I didn't care - I just kind of assumed that it was a little faster and loved that I was through with RPM-hell. I knew a little about Debian, but had never gotten up to the point of maintaining it on my own system - only had experience with that oh-so-ugly installation and maybe a little of the post-installation, which isn't so nice itself (yes, I admit it, dselect is ugly, though functional).
Yeah, so everything seemed great. Except then a new version of KDE came out, so I had to leave my computer to compile for hours and hours to get that working. And then once it finished compiling, there came another version of KDE...back to compiling. Oh wait, XF86 4.2.1 was released, better recompile that. Oh shit, the compile didn't work, gotta fix something and compile it. Oh and now there's a new Mozilla beta; let me compile that. Oh and now there's a new version of GCC, let me recompile *EVERYTHING*.
So it started to get a little annoying doing all this recompiling. Of course, you could say "just don't update it as frequently", but that would defeat the primary thing I loved about Source Mage - the up-to-datedness. I considered a switch to Debian, but I thought I'd be stuck using KDE 2.x and X 4.1 or 3.x or something. I kind of reverted into denial mode - just kept telling myself that "compiling is the best way to go" without really coming up with any rational reasons explaining this.
Finally my hard drive broke and I decided that rather than recompiling my entire system for the new drive, I'd give Debian another, far more fair shot. I realized that I could easily get KDE 3.x just by adding a line to one of my config files, and the same was true for X 4.2 (and now that's been integrated into unstable, so you don't even need to add the line). Aside from those two programs, Debian-unstable is practically as up-to-date as any source based distro. (For evidence, compare this [distrowatch.com] to the Debian-unstable column of this [distrowatch.com].) It might not be *quite* as up-to-date (though actually, at a glance, it looks like it might even be a little *more* up-to-date then Gentoo!), but the trade-off is that you get far more competent package managers that actually test their packages well. Yes, even Debian-"unstable" is far more well-tested than a comparably bleeding edge version of Source Mage (I can't really speak for Gentoo but I strongly suspect that their testing/package submission process is fairly similar to SM). Source Mage's "stable" set of packages was basically just all the packages that had been in testing/devel for a certain amount of time - a package could sit in devel for a week, not be used a single time, and still go to testing the next week and stable the week after - yes, without even being guaranteed that it would compile!
Debian unstable has its share of bugs, of course. But reporting them is just a matter of typing "reportbug" (or, more accurately, "repo[tab]", and you can quickly find out if your bug has already been reported, or report it yourself and quickly get a response from the package maintainer, presumably with plans for a fix. Debian stabe, meanwhile, is truly stable - it is well-tested and works across all platforms. Perhaps the point that exemplifies what I'm trying to describe is that if a program has a bug, then Debian considers it a bug in the distro. It doesn't matter if the bug is with the packaging or with the program itself, the package maintainer will work to get a fix. I highly doubt that Gentoo or Source Mage can do this, if only because of the limited number of users there are to report bugs and limited number of people volunteering as maintainers.
So yes, Debian's installation is ugly, and dselect isn't exactly the prettiest package management program. But who cares. After the first month, you will never have to deal with the installation/post-install again. I challenge all of these Gentoo fans to actually try Debian-unstable for an extended amount of time, and realize that you get all the benefits you've loved about Gentoo, except without having to wait for stuff to compile. Updates go from taking hours and hours to a couple minutes (assuming you have a reasonably fast internet connection, which Gentoo basically assumes too). Oh, and if for some reason you want to compile something, Debian includes apt-src to do just that. How many of Gentoo's huge fans have actually used Debian for more than a month?
Re:Which teeny distribution? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's certainly true that compiling big packages such as X on Gentoo can take ages. Personally I've just installed Gentoo on my PIII-550 and it's agonisingly slow to compile.
But that's what sleep is for! Downtime between interesting things happening on your computer. I just set "emerge xfree && emerge kde" running before I went to sleep, and hey presto, it's all done when I wake up.
Of course the same is true for any lengthy operation on any distro - just do it while you sleep. So I don't really regard compile time as a disadvantage of Gentoo, and when I eventually get around to buying that newer, faster CPU I'll have even less to worry about.
So then we're back to competing on other features. For me, package management is the most important feature of a distro, and Gentoo's is as good as any I've seen. (Note I said "as good as", not "better than"! Debian's package management is also excellent, for example.)
I have another computer which had Slackware 8 installed on it over a year ago, and although I've upgraded some things it's starting to creak. If I wanted to upgrade to, say, GCC 3.2, then I would hardly know where to begin. But with Gentoo I can just type two or three simple commands and it does all the hard work for me.
Good package management means it is ludicrously simple to keep a system updated for years and years, even fundamental changes like GCC aren't impossible.
I like to tinker with my Linux installs, but I also like to have that safety net there which means that people of greater ability than I have written dependency management systems that make sure everything works, regardless of what I do.
So where's Gentoo behind Debian? As you say, Debian releases are probably more exhaustively tested. But that's mainly because Debian has more users, therefore more eyeballs. As Gentoo grows in popularity then I can see this becoming far less of an issue.
Previous Linux Distribution Polls (Score:5, Interesting)
9 February 1999 [slashdot.org]
24 March 1998 [slashdot.org]
Strange, it seems that the comments on the polls were lost.
Re:Previous Linux Distribution Polls (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Previous Linux Distribution Polls (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Previous Linux Distribution Polls (Score:3, Insightful)
The Linux people that need the features SUSE offers might not care so much.
Re:Previous Linux Distribution Polls (Score:3, Funny)
Don't worry. The comments from this poll will be indistinguishable.
Include OSX in this poll next time! (Score:2, Insightful)
No offense (and I'm not trying to be flamebait), but it would be more interesting than another lame Cowboy Neal option--these haven't been funny in a long time.
Poll Complaint (Score:2)
Everyone says that software choice should be 'the right tool for the job', shouldn't that extend to distro choice? For things that have to work, the company willingly pays for a little RH support. Because I like screwball packages, I use Debian on my desktops. And just because I wanted to see how quickly a PIV 2.4 could dispense with a Gentoo install, that's what wound up there.
Bitching about poll options (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Bitching about poll options (Score:3, Insightful)
Gentoo!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Where's my gentoo? I suppose no poll can ever be truly complete, but it seems like gentoo's numbers are growing daily. I love the portage system and hands-on slack-like installation. Truly the best distribution I've ever used. The ultimate in usability.
I keep checking the page for the anticipated release of 1.4 Final.. no joy so far.
Aha (Score:3, Insightful)
Love that SLACKWARE (Score:5, Interesting)
Nick's (GNU) Linux Distro Sucks/Rules meter (Score:4, Funny)
Nick's (GNU) Linux Distributions Sucks-Rules-O-Meter [zork.net] .
- Tim
Knoppix - Live Linux File System on CD (Score:3, Informative)
Linux Kernel 2.4.x
KDE 3.0
xmms +ogg
OpenOffice
etc.
Min. Requirements
i486
16MB RAM
Knoppix Homepage [knopper.net]
Great fun, and pretty dang fast for what it does.
~MrGrey
Re:Knoppix - Live Linux File System on CD (Score:3, Informative)
try it out, you've got nothing to lose...it won't screw with your current setup since it runs completely in the ram off the CD-rom.
Gentoo (Score:5, Insightful)
With RPM and APT, it's quite easy to break packages, and not all projects supply RPM or APT packages. RPM packages often have unlisted dependencies which can lead to much frustration.
Gentoo just works. There is a humungous selection of packages (but a very minimal base install), it's hard to accidentally break packages, and has a large number of packages available.
It combines the best of RPM and APT.
Linux Free Here (Score:5, Insightful)
Reposted reposted... (Score:3, Funny)
The Messiah of Distros (Score:5, Funny)
And I thought you were kidding! (Score:3, Informative)
LFS, anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, I use LFS and love it. By using LFS, you have total (and I really mean total) control over EVERYTHING that happens (everything down to the boot scripts!). I think it screams, but it can be a real headache to DIY (which is synonymous with LFS).
I love LFS, and use it both for my desktop AND my server. Personally, I do partially believe in security-through-obscurity... there may be script kiddes with scripts to hack standard RedHat and Mandrake distributions/installations, but every LFS configuration is different (on a per-user basis), so it's rather immune to script kiddies, per se.
Anybody else use it for these reasons? Any reasons? Just wondering...
Just my thoughts... If this seems like a flame, it's really not, and I apologize if it does.
Gotta love the condesending idiots (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Gotta love the condesending idiots (Score:3, Insightful)
I say BULLSHIT! What you need is strong stiff dose of strict PACKAGING POLICY!
You ain't a real Debian zealot until you swear your soul to upload the Debian Policy Manual [debian.org] and the Debian Free Software Guideline [debian.org]. Spending days on end squishing the endless hoards of bugs that no one else will touch on our wonderful bug tracking system, trying to figure out why your package builds on all but 1 out of the 10 $ARCHs we HAVE to support or hitting yourself for missing the final freeze deadline by a few hours. Once you join Debian, there's no way out but to quit Linux altogether. You become a zealot for life. I'll be damned if the Gentoo community become more bigotted than members of the Debian cabal. They wouldn't know what a policy or rock solid stable release is if it bit them up the arse.
The break down of distro usage from Linux Journal (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Mandrake 29.3%
2) SuSE 14%
3) Red Hat 12%
4) Debian 10.2 %
5) Elx 9.1%
6) Lycoris 6.8%
7) Gentoo 6.4%
8) Slackware 4.1%
9) Lindows 1.8%
10) Libranet 1.7%
Ok, so what in Gods name is Elx?
Re:The break down of distro usage from Linux Journ (Score:4, Informative)
looks like stock redhat w/ bluecurve from the sceenshots with some custom tools to make it look more like windows
and the prominent display of their dolphin logo on those
The big two (Score:3, Interesting)
Debian comes with moronic/paranoid defaults for "dektop" programs that either make them not work or not work they way they were intended to. I have to hunt for hours through man pages and config files to figure out just how the hell they broke it. This same attitude makes the server software wonderful. I don't worry a whole lot about my box getting rooted. I may have to reconfigure a few peculiar defaults, but they're things that I'd have been reconfiguring anyway. Since everyone expects to reconfigure these, the HOWTOs are plentiful.
On the other hand, I don't trust any port other than SSH going into the Redhat box. The installation installs all sorts of stuff I really don't want, whether I ask for it or not, and with a 2+ gig install once I put in the things I need, sorting through all the packages to remove everything gets tedious. On the other hand, the desktop programs ACTUALLY WORK. It's almost like they want normal people, but not power users, to use this OS.
Unfortunately, I fall somewhere between the power user Debian seems to be targeted at, and the "normal person" that RedHat is targeted at. I've been looking at other distributions, and I might actually install one of them, if I can ever figure out how to get my freaking burner working. On the plus side, RedHat's installer easily mounted my fat32 partition, so maybe I'll just get windows to burn it for me, as that's how I got redhat in the first place. Now doesn't that seem just a little bit backwards?
I'm very pleased with Cartmania! (Score:5, Funny)
All of the manual page entries have been altered to give credit where credit is due - not to RMS, not to Linus, not to the poor bastard who actually maintains gawk, but to Eric Cartman (from southpark). It also has a wildly illegal clickthrough agreement that prevents you from reporting any of the many GPL violations you encounter while using it. Finally, it costs money every minute that it is actually running, making my boss feel it has real value. Oh, also, it spies on you.
By default, you act as an open relay - but only if the mail is destined for an e-mail address specified in your
If you are a spammer, and I certainly know I am, it comes with built in, preconfigured tools to make address spoofing easier - I haven't tried any of the other spam enabled features, but I bet they're good.
If you're on any kind of shared network, it is set up to make sure bandwidth is always reserved for you by filling the pipe with whitenoise when you're not using it. There are various rules associated with playing nice under TCP/IP - it ignores them.
It's the best $1.11/hour/workstation, or $4/hour/server + $0.25/hour/remote terminal my company has ever spent.
VMandrakeWare... (Score:3, Informative)
VMWare should be on every geek's want list, and it's only about a month of eating ramen.
Tomsrtbt (Score:5, Informative)
Compares well with linux counter (Score:3, Interesting)
- RedHat, 30%
- Mandrake, 19%
- Debian, 14%
- Slackware & SuSE, 12%
If we consider that according to a recentThe one with the coolest T shirt. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:"I use a different teeny distribution" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:SLACKWARE! (Score:4, Insightful)
I love Debian for the ease of upgrade; it just works. But for the laptop, it was Slackware all the way. I had no ethernet card for it, or CDROM drive, or adapter for the hard drive, so I needed some other way to install it. Slackware gave me two choices: PLIP (which didn't work, because [I think] the parallel port on the laptop is gibbled) or floppy disks. I have a hard time coming up with another distro where you can still do that.
ObSlackwareWarStory: Back in 1997, when I decided I wanted to install Linux on my (then pretty current) 486 so I wouldn't have to worry about Windows viruses, I downloaded probably half the Slackware distro over a 33.6 modem, one floppy at a time, using this god-awful all-in-one internet suite for DOS. The suite worked, but god it was terrible -- the email interface was lifted straight out of a spreadsheet program (and I mean *straight* out -- you viewed diff. messages by changing to cell B-3). Eventually I gave up, invested in a CDROM drive, and bought "Slackware Unleashed" which came w/the CD version of Slackware 95, as they called it. So much simpler.
So there's a vote of confidence: Slackware, the distro for obsolete hardware. :-) But hey, isn't one of the great things about Linux that you don't need latest-and-greatest to do good work?
Re:Best part of Mandrake ... (Score:5, Funny)
The annoying part is still having to su. If I could just auto-logon as root, it'd be just as easy to work with as WinNT.
Re:slackware (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyways, if you're like me, your system doesn't much resemble the original distro after a few days