Ask Newsvine: The Distro Wars

For the desktop, I picked openSUSE with the Gnome Desktop.
Here are the highlights of my reasoning:

- It is by Novell (Known For Their Security In Their Windows Products)
- Based off of commercial software, so you can be assured of it's stability
- Though it is a bit bulky, it can be easily customized
- The Gnome desktop has a very slick interface
- Lots of Documentation & Support
- As with most linux distros, it is free!

Though I haven't had much experience with servers, I feel I would be most likely to choose the same linux distro (or perhaps the commercial version), as i have had prior experience with it.
Some of the positive things that I have noticed are as follows:

-Built in capabilities for network administrators/IT Professionals
-Security... As I mentioned before, Novell is known for their security

Debian is a great distro. It's not just apt-get (but I do loathe RPMs). Check out The Debian System. It's a book about the inner workings and technical administration of Debian.

I believe you are correct about Novell...
Though they are not perfect, what they do, they do well!
You are also correct about giving Novell credit where credit is due!
It is all to often that I see people give all the "praise & glory" to the wrong person (or in this case, company)

Where are all the Gentoo techies :(

Does nobody like to compile anymore?

I prefer openSuse. I have been a SuSe user for a few years and always find them to be the most stable and easy to install. There have been a few memory leaks along the way but they haven't been as bad as others I have tried.
I would love to have dyne:bolic with a kde desktop and apt.
Another I liked for a short while was VLOS, it was a Gentoo based OS with Gnome. The difference was a graphical installer. Since I am both impatient and have a wife who loves to shop online I can't spend forever trying to configure the whole thing by hand.
Which brings me back to suse. Yeah rpms can be a mess, but I can live with it.
Oh, Knoppix hard install with klick. very easy to install software. More like OS X in that everything needed to run an app is wrapped with all of its dependancies.
In any case I hate having to hack the OS to play DVD's I own! But that is another rant...

Free basing is pretty groovy. Build from instructions from places like linuxfromscratch.org, manually compiling every package will cram an intimate knowledge of your system so far down your throat that you will never navigate through a directory wondering what it's for or why it's there because you were the one that executed the mkdir command.

Rat poison is a great window manager. Gnome and KDE make me nauseous with their flair. Window maker can be okay I guess. I remember the summer I had the case off of my computer so that I could read the numbers on the chips to compile my kernel perfectly. Then I kind of grew out of it and just use a pirated copy of windows xp now. I think I'll go back some time in the near future though.

Other than that the only distribution I was ever able to tolerate was Slackware up to 9.1 but I was just learning.

I run Gentoo. It has nothing to do with "speed". It has everything to do with package selection ("non-free" software doesn't require tracking down an assload of random 3rd party repositories), USE flags (easy control of automatic package configuration), and the Gentoo kernel sources. It's also real easy to pick and choose "unstable" packages instead of having to wait for backports.

Also, on my laptop, compiling everything "-Os" and with the "pentium-m" GCC flag does make a lot of difference compared to the generic x86 packages in Ubuntu or Debian. Boot time's MUCH faster, apps have a smaller memory footprint, and runtime speed is (marginally) improved.

But again, speed is way down the list of what's nice about Gentoo.

I used to use Gentoo, then I Arch.

I *really* like Arch linux for desktops and servers. It's very flexible and light like gentoo and has a great package manager (pacman) that is reminiscent of emerge or apt-get. It's package manager uses binary packages by default but easily supports building from source. The binary packages are compiled for Pentium II pr greater CPUs (i686) so you get some compiler optimizations not normally seen on major binary package distros.

Ubuntu is also great, but I'll let the Ubuntu fanatics tackle it -- as there are many who would love to talk about it more than me.

I really used to enjoy KDE on the desktop -- but lately GNOME has been winning my heart... ever since I switched to Mac as my main platform.

It's really exciting to watch the linux world more at a distance than in the thick of it (using it as my primary platform like I did for two years) -- I love being able to see where Xorg and GNOME are taking us. Who knows -- I think Linux has the potential to rival OS X for desktop experience.

I've got openSuSE installed on my laptop, and I must say that I'm pretty satisfied with it for the time being.

Whilst I'd love to be able to use more advanced distributions like Gentoo, I don't really have the time just yet to figure out how to do so properly. I'm relatively new to Linux, hence I place more emphasis on ease of use and good hardware detection, as opposed to the ability to tinker with one's system for all eternity.

I use KDE, although I myself cannot explain why.

Overall, my foray into Linux has been an absolutely rewarding one. Who knows, it might even replace Windows on my laptop one fine day...

I love Slackware, I've been using it for over 4 years now, Also Vector is pretty nice too. Slackware + XFCE = Crazy Delicious.

I started many many years ago on Slackware (some pre-1.0 version - '93, or maybe '94?) that I bought from yggdrasil and infomagic.

Now, I use Fedora (FC4) for most of my machines, although I am leaning towards openSuse as of late. The only thing that has really kept me on Fedora has been 'yum', which improves the use of rpm a bit. OpenSuse should be even better at package management. The other reason I use FC is, I admit, that from an administration perspective familiarity will often trump superiority. I don't think I would consider FC the superior desktop Linux, but as I am the most familiar with it, the path of least resistance sometimes wins :)

I can't help myself, but I like KDE as well - especially 3.5.1. I am a sucker for eye candy, as well - to a point. I am writing this from my Powerbook, which in my mind has a less useable UI than KDE. Expose is neat, but somewhat gimmicky - and there are a lot of little nit-picky things that drive me crazy even more so because I cannot change them. But that is all fodder for a different thread :)

im currently using Kubuntu on my Linux box (i prefer the ease of use which comes with KDE)

Fedora Core IV with Gnome is my current OS of choice. I just like the interface and install the most out of all the distros. I run open SuSE at work (We're a novell shop so I like to stay knowlegeable on all their technologies) and it's not bad, loads really fast and comes pre-installed with Beagle which is just fantastic.

To me the distribution isn't as big a deal as the window manager is. I can make Gnome or KDE look and do the same things on what ever distro I'm using. Package management via yum or apt-get can pretty much cover any install (the good stuff you still get to compile).

The only distro I had any problems with was Ubuntu, I found it too difficult to get things done in the way I was familiar with, compiling programs was kind of hard as it seemed that they stripped down the libraries and packages to make it as simple as possible.

Yeah I'm a mac/FreeBSD kind of guy but if Linux, I always liked Debian and Gentoo. Despite the "ricer" image of Gentoo it has always been solid, and really fun/interesting to maintain, I ran it as my desktop for a long time. Can't stand Ubuntu as a desktop, just comes with too much unnecessary packages, and I found to just not be as fun.

I find it interesting that you chose the title "The Distro Wars" To me it implies infighting. I love linux based OSs and one of the aspects I love is the wide choice in distros. This is something that many of my Windows colleges do not understand.

With linux based operating systems I can choose from a wide variety of flavors, each tailored and suited to a different need or application. I can even roll my own if I am so inclined.

Personally I use Debian Stable x86 for my home servers, RHEL3/4 ES x86 for my work servers, Gentoo x86 for my home desktop and the latest Kubuntu PPC for my work desktop. Isn't choice delicious?

I started out years ago on Red Hat, followed it through the first couple Fedora Core releases, then switched to Ubuntu, mostly because of ease of package management. And by that I don't mean apt -- it's great, and I love it, but there's apt for RPM, too, and I used it religiously. I mean the repositories; perhaps FC has improved since I last used it, but the Debian-based distros have much larger, and much higher-quality, package repositories available, which makes a huge difference.

And as for why I use Ubuntu and not "pure" Debian, well, I'm primarily a desktop user, and Ubuntu goes out of their way to provide a nice desktop experience. Also, these days I tend to view Ubuntu and Debian sort of like Firefox and the Mozilla application suite; Mozilla exists primariy as a foundation on which to build interesting browsers, and Debian has been drifting in the direction of becoming a foundation on which to build interesting Linux distributions, so I'd rather use one of those specifically targeted at my use case than customize the "general" version of the distro.

why doesn't any one like red hat?? It's packet management is the same system that lots of the distros use. you have your choice of lots of programs including KDE and GNOME desktops. it's still maintained but isn't so new that the creators could be seen as "working the kinks out" I just don't understand why this seemingly very good distro doesn't get the editors choice?!

To me a good ftp install is a must. I like to burn as few CD's as possible. I've been running Debian for some time, but I started out with SuSE. I think it must of been an easier install, I got tired of green and the YUM package management. I'll eventually dump Debian too maybe for a smallerdistro . I think with all the cool new Web 2.0 apps, the OS will become less important. I was frustrated with the Debian Openoffice combo I was using because I wanted to see OOo 2.0. All I could find were about 30 RPM's. It is rare that alien fails me but with the core10 RPM it can't read the script, produces a file that fails when run. OOo is trying to compete with MSoffice and for what that is OOo blows them awayespecally when cost is factored in. I would rather have my disc space and wordperfict. Anyway, check out http://www.writely.com/ now I think I'll just uninstall all the text editors except nano.

I have been using KDE. It's very customizable, I like slide shows for backgrounds. I delete the K menu and have 20 desktops. I like to multitask, not to say it couldn't be better. The number one advantage windows has over Linux is the device configuration. How long a desktop user can spend trying to take advantage of a new video card. The great thing about Linux everyone who comes over don't know how to use it.

I use Mandriva LE2006 and GNome desktop..I'm still a linux newbie but am starting to get the hang of it. Although I'm typing this on my Windows XP laptop as we speak..(doh!)

Ubuntu Baby

Vector Linux SOHO + KDE for desktops.

Vector is Slackware-based, lightning-fast, and uses slapt-get for package management. KDE has been the most intuitive for me since switching from Windows.

The non-SOHO edition is even faster, using IceWM / Fluxbox as defaults I believe.