Favorite style of distribution

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Tue Feb 07, 2006 2:46 am

Somewhat of a twist on the age old "favorite distro" question.

thetza · Post by **thetza** » Tue Feb 07, 2006 3:34 am

arch is debian based, no?

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Tue Feb 07, 2006 3:43 am

thetza wrote:arch is debian based, no?

No, Arch uses it's own package system called Pacman.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Tue Feb 07, 2006 8:42 am

I'm for RPM, but with either yum, apt4rpm or urpmi as a wrapper.

Post by **Patrick** » Tue Feb 07, 2006 9:07 am

Apt-get is a fantastic package manager. Plus the sheer volume of packages in the Debian repositories is very impressive. For those of us who like to run the latest and greatest on the desktop Debian unstable has been an utter mess the last few months. Arch has been very good to me so far. No major issues. The installer could improve but once you get it going it's pretty sweet. Most of what I use is available in the pacman repositories and the AUR. Right now my blog is running Debian. It works very well. If I ever get a new server I might just install Arch. For now Debian stays. I'm curretnly running Arch on my workstation and laptop. It seems to combine the best aspects of Slackware, Gentoo and Debian. It's still a little rough around the edges in some spots but that will change with time. It's very promising.

For most noobs any of the following is fine:
Suse, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Kanotix, Fedora,

It seems Suse/Novell and Red Hat are the 'corporate' distros. I'd happily run either on my workstation at my job.

For those of us who really want to delve deeper we move to Slackware, Debian, Gentoo, Arch. It's a very different audience than the general masses.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Tue Feb 07, 2006 10:06 am

Patrick wrote:For those of us who like to run the latest and greatest on the desktop Debian unstable has been an utter mess the last few months.

You should give FreeBSD a go if you ever have an extra machine sitting around. It's packages are VERY recent, it had KDE 3.5.1 right after it's release (You need to use the STABLE branch of packages, not RELEASE), and you don't have to compile all the time like you do with Gentoo, also it has the "controversial" packages widely available like libdvdcss

The only reason I don't run FreeBSD is because it was so darn unstable on my machine the last time I tried it, but it works very well on some other machines I have, I'm gonna see if I can get it installed on my Xbox, if I can't get Slackware on there.

Patrick wrote:Right now my blog is running Debian.

I may not be hosting mine myself, but mine does as well, works great, my stack: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, WordPress: LAMPW

Patrick wrote:For most noobs any of the following is fine:
Suse, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Kanotix, Fedora,

Even for advanced users, a lot of the distro you mention are good, I consider myself an advanced user, and far from a newbie, and I enjoy SUSE Linux quite a lot, but Denmark is of course close to Germany, where SUSE was founded, might have something to do with it, I don't know

Patrick wrote:It seems Suse/Novell and Red Hat are the 'corporate' distros. I'd happily run either on my workstation at my job.

The SUSE Linux you can get at opensuse.org is developed pretty much the same way Fedora is, with some sponsorship from Novell that is, but aside from that., it's a community project.

CptnObvious999 · Post by **CptnObvious999** » Tue Feb 07, 2006 5:54 pm

gentooooooooooooooooooooooo! (as if you didn't already know

). Gentoo rarely breaks and the package manager (Portage) is amazing and powerfull since every package (or ebuild) is a python script it can do knifty things other tranditional package managers can't like install commercial games.

doublejoon · Post by **doublejoon** » Wed Feb 08, 2006 12:29 pm

I've been through most of the majors Suse,Fedora,RH, Gentoo, Debian and I finally landed on Arch... I think I will stop distro hopping for awhile and stick with this one.....

Vogateer · Post by **Vogateer** » Fri Feb 10, 2006 1:46 am

Another vote for Gentoo.

There has been less Gentoo bashing on the show lately, as someone pointed out earlier. It will take a lot of convincing to get me away from Gentoo, even though Arch sounds tempting, since it seems to resemble Gentoo, sans compiling of course. I can't imagine anything having more flexibility and customization options than portage, and Gentoo's forums and documentation pages are top notch.

Gentoo's also looking even sweeter since I bought this 19" LCD. I had two pathetic 15" CRT's before, and though it will be hard to live without two screens, this one ViewSonic is making up for it a bit.

jamathis · Post by **jamathis** » Sat Feb 11, 2006 11:04 am

I prefer Debian-based or Red Hat-based distros. I've played around with Slackware a little and like it, but I'm not sure if I would use it regularly or not.

thelinuxlink.net

Favorite style of distribution

Well?

Favorite style of distribution