[NTLUG:Discuss] Linux destro recommandation

[Chris Cox]

m m wrote:
> Hi All:
> 
> First of all, I am no mean to rise a war. Just want get some ieads.
> 
> I have a very simple question for you guys:
> which destro Linux will be in the 'main stream' in the future? this may 
> not make sense. What I reing to say is does RH will be still be the most 
> popular Linux OS in the world? or it will be replace by other destro? A 
> brief histry, around 10 years ago, slackware was very popular, and many 
> years ago, RH became very popular. It was a kind of 'main stream' in 
> Linux word.

Commercially.. RH and SUSE are THE considerations (period).  There
is no other distributions to speak of at all.

So if "main stream" means Enterprise... RH or SUSE.

> 
> Bucause of RH make changes (policy, packages...ect), some of the group 
> members don't think newer version of RH will suite for them. (MadHat is 
> an example, on his post several months ago)
> (Madhat, please don't get upset, just use you for an example.)

Actually, Fedora is a very viable Linux... especially for RH users.

Gentoo has become quite popular with the techies.  General
rule with gentoo is compilation by source... but they now
do binary updates in certain cases.

Personally, I think slackware has gotten a bit long in tooth...
there's just too many features that slackware doesn't support
and they just don't seem to be interested.  But that could
all change overnight, you never know.

Debian is a good wild card choice... especially some of the
prepackaged variants (like Knoppix and the gazillion Knoppix
follow ons).  Hardware detection is excellent.  Nice to
see a fall back to using the frame buffer for X automatically
if nothing else works!!  Good job.

For the moment I'm still tied to SUSE... and SUSE 9.0 is
pretty nice... SUSE 9.1 will likely be the first 2.6 based
killer desktop dist (look for that sometime in May/June).
All I can say is that there is NO WAY I would deploy RHL
at a customer site unless the customer had a VERY, VERY
good understanding of Linux... wheras, I have deployed
SUSE 8.0,8.1,8.2,9.0 for customers that had very little
knowledge of Linux (talking about Linux running primarily
the back office, file sharing, print sharing, dynamic DNS,
database, accouting systems, etc.).  Redhat just requires
too much 'fixing'... a headache for my customer and it
even frustrates me.. I just don't have the time anymore.


....
> I am not to rise the war.

(too late) :-)

> I just want to know what is the 'main stream' 
> currently.

The "main stream" is best described as "Linux"... but probably
SUSE and RH/Fedora just because of the corporate/gov't interests.

> I am not an experts as you guys, I am worry about to pick a destro that 
> no one knows how to fix the problem when I got a problem.
> 
> I am still using old RH 6.0 (6.2?).
> I am going to install another Linux on another box uses as server (file, 
> database,web and mail sercers).
> 
> what are your suggestions?

If you are comfortable with RH, give Fedora a try.  Since there
never (ever) really was any support from RH corporate for their
own product... my opinion is that you'll find support VASTLY
superior with Fedora and the Fedora community.  If you're not
doing anything terribly sophisticated... everything should
work just fine.  The RH community is used to making manual
fixes and patches to the RH product line... so even if things
don't go as expected, there's usually plenty of support
out there (but you may to go through some "complicated" hoops).

Or if you want to try something different... give SUSE 9.0 a
try.  (just remember acpi=off, acpi being the most problematic
issue with mb's today).  SUSE's not perfect... but I think
they've got more things right than RH at the moment.  Fewer
hoops/fixes needed... but not as large a community as RH today
when there is an issue.