Chances are if you have looked at this blog you are interested in Linux or you know me personally. One of the major hurdles when someone wants to try out Linux is which one. I am hoping to give a slight overview of the features and benefits of each, so you can make the choice that fits you best.
Out of the popular distros the least user friendly are Slackware, Gentoo, Arch, Linux from Scratch (it's not really a distro, but a howto on putting a Linux system together from scratch) and probably a few others I can throw in the list. These three will guide you through what to do, but it is a lot of work to do it. It can be overwhelming for a beginner or even an advanced user like myself. I have never used Slackware, but I have tried. Gentoo I got running, and recently I tried to install it in a virtual machine, and the list of instructions was way to long and involved for someone with the amount of time I have. Arch was probably the easiest of the bunch, but it involves using the command line quite a bit. If you are up for a challenge, these would be the distributions to use. By the end you will know quite a bit about how Linux works.
We then have our server category. Normally for a server you do not want the latest, greatest, and fastest update cycle in the world. This means you will want to use something a little older with a little more trial than the average distro. Some distributions you would want to look at are Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle Enterprise Linux, Debian, CentOS, and OpenSuSe. There are a few others I could mention, but these are probably the most stable as in few bugs. Red Hat, Oracle, and CentOS are all related to each other because Oracle and CentOS are derived from Red Hat. Debian stands on its own. OpenSuSe I know less about, and that is for a reason. I am not a fan of OpenSuSe because its package manager is slow and buggy, and the operating system reflects this fact in other areas. Red Hat you will have to pay a contract for updates and support, Oracle you will have to pay a contract for support, and CentOS you are your support. Debian is pretty respectable too, but Red Hat is the creme of the crop as far I am concerned. If you are on a limited budget, CentOS is the best way to go.
For a desktop system some of our other choices would be OpenSuSe, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Mandrivia, and countless others. I am of the same opinion still on OpenSuse. Fedora is the latest, greatest, and fastest update cycle you can get. It is so fast, they call it the bleeding edge, and bleeding for a reason. There have been a few times where the bugs have been too much, and they get worked out within about a month of Fedora having a release most of the time. Sometimes it takes two or three months to get some of the bugs that bother you out. Otherwise it is a great desktop and it has been my primary distribution for the majority of my Linux experience with the exception of a semester. Ubuntu is based on Debian with a bit of a faster release cycle, but it is slower on updates than Fedora. Ubuntu makes heavy use of sudo which I think is fundamentally unsecure, but I will write more on that later. Ubuntu has a richer collection of software thanks to the fact it is based on Debian. Debian has a large software repository. Most open source projects will have a package somewhere in the Debian repository. I would vote using the Debian testing branch over Ubuntu, but that is me. As for Mandrivia, I know little about it.
My personal recommendations out of all the ones I have mentioned would be for the average user either Debian or Fedora. Debian for greater stability, but Fedora for better usability and possibly better support for new hardware. You can do more research at www.distrowatch.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment