Which Linux?

[Mark]

OK,

This one is for you Linux aficionados

Which is the best version of Linux and why?

It's interesting to know that you guys are into Linux. I wonder if this goes with the same independence of thought that makes people atheists.

There is no "best" distribution, of course, it's just a question of what you like and what meets your needs. A few years ago I bought an OS-less machine from Walmart and put Lunar (http://www.lunar-linux.org) on it, which like Gentoo is a distro compiled entirely from source, but which unlike Gentoo is fairly easy to install. The theoretical advantage of these compile-from-source distros is that you can optimize everything for your own machine. Also you don't get a machine loaded up with crap software that you have no intention of using. However twice I've had problems with Lunar kernel updates f--king up my system. Somehow the grub boot menu is not written correctly and it's a b--ch to fix because the line commands in the automatically updated grub.menu (which I can peek at with Knoppix) are not the right ones to get the system to boot. However except for this I've been fairly happy with Lunar. You do have to spend a lot of time compiling whenever you update, of course.

I just ordered a very fine new machine for my home (two quad core Xeon chips @3.0Ghz; 16GB ram, nice video card; Raid controller on motherboard; 500W power supply; big, quiet fans; main system on two internal 250 GB hard drives configured with Raid 0 (striping); bootable backup system on one internal 500 GB hard drive), and I decided to go with Debian Stable. I've had it with instability! (What I really mean is software incompatibility; Linux is not usually unstable the way Windows is, of course). Also Debian offers a very wide range of free software. I'm sure Ubuntu is good but it looks a little dumbed down to me.

This new machine will not be for gaming but for serious numerical analysis and perhaps a little chess-related database development. The vendor is Los Alamos Computers (http://www.laclinux.com). They tell me that I can expect delivery around March 16. I deal with them because they specialize in Linux pre-installs.

Personally I think KDE and Gnome both suck and that XFCE or something even simpler is the way to go. So if I wanted to go with Ubuntu, I would go with Xubuntu.

So far as I am concerned, Microsoft sucks big weenies, so there will be no Windows boot on this machine. I will however be running Windows XP Pro in a virtual machine because I have some chess software that runs only on Windows. I've done this before using Win4Lin. It's quite amusing to see Windows running in an X window, especially when it says, "It is now safe to turn off your computer." Yeah, right, how about if I just click on this little "close window" thingie? There will be a dual boot, of course, because the backup system will be bootable.

I share Adrian's strong preference for the grub bootloader. One big advantage of grub is that you can put it on a CD or floppy and boot your system with line commands (assuming you know the magic words) in case your MBR ever gets corrupted -- a not entirely unexpected occurence.