Which Linux?

[Kyuuketsuki]

OK,

This one is for you Linux aficionados

Which is the best version of Linux and why?

I admit to being interested in Linux, been experimenting with it for about 10 years buying (yes buying) my first copy (SuSE Linux 7 DVD) at a computer expo about 7 years ago. Maybe it was just my first one but that experience remained with me, I used that copy (as my main system) for about 6 months before going back to Windows and I always install the latest version of SuSE when a new version comes out, I think I loved it coz it had YaST which (amongst other things) allowed the easy install of software without descending into "dependency hell". I also loved KDE (which I know some Linux people frown on) ... KDE 4 is better still IMO.

Since then I have experimented with several versions, all the main distro's and many minor:

OpenSUSE: 9/10 Far & away the slickest version of Linux IMO , recent releases have been a bit buggy.
KNOPPIX: 8/10 The best Live CD
Parted Magic: 8/10 Excellent tool for expanding hard drive partitions.
Evil Entity: 8/10 Super slick gothic distro, unfortunately discontinued (8/10 for style alone)
Openfiler: 8/10 This is likely the distro I will use to create my NAS.
Yoper: 7/10 Interesting distro at least up to version 2.0
Damn Small: 7/10 Useful when giving low spec PC's away on FreeCycle.
FreeNAS: 7/10 Moving over to ESXi and may use this on my old server to create a TB (will probably use Openfiler though).
GParted: 7/10 Excellent tool for expanding hard drive partitions.
Morphix: 7/10 For a while my favourite distro outside of SuSE.
Vector: 6/10 Works, easy config but never really got fired up.
Kubuntu: 6/10 Works but hard to get enthusiastic about.
School: 6/10 Can't find reference to this anywhere but it was rather good.
Mandriva: 5/10 Competent but somehow never interested me.
Ubuntu: 5/10 Works fine but never really "got it"
Gentoo: 4/10 Never been able to get this to work outside of a Live CD.
Debian: 3/10 Never could get the bloody thing to work OK.
Slackware: 3/10 Complicated or what?
Fedora: 2/10 Dunno why but I always had an irrational hatred of this one.
Xandros: 2/10 Tried it, went, "Oh!" and then id something else.
Red Hat: 1/10 Yawn!!! Bored now!
Freespire: 0/10 Screwed the boot sector of my PC big time.

So which is the best version of Linux for you so far? Maybe we should expand this discussion and make it most stylish, most competent or whatever?

Kyu

[Tiberius]

If you want usability, you need Ubuntu. The fact that the company behind it are funded by a millionaire means they are dedicated to providing a great OS that is easy to use. It's perfect for beginners so maybe you'd like to expand on your 5/10 score? What did you find wrong with it / what confused you about it?

I also prefer the Gnome desktop over KDE, simply because KDE is such a resource hog, and I find it tries too hard. Gnome + Compiz makes any system shiny! Also, a lot of people have been complaining about KDE4 because the devs rewrote the core and it is full of bugs. My friend was once a hardcore KDE user who kept on pressuring me to try KDE 4.1, and a few days ago we met up and he's temporarily "downgraded" to the stable Gnome. Same goes for Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, who used to be a KDE fan and who spoke you against Gnome.

So I started out on Ubuntu, then I tried out Linux Mint (an Ubuntu based system), then Fedora. I have a love/hate relationship with Fedora. I installed version 7 and found it ok to use, but then all versions since then have just been so much more confusing. The package management system is by far the worst since you are bombarded with a ton of information in no sensible format. It also seems to lack pretty much any of the configuration options that has made Ubuntu so popular. After a year with Ubuntu, I decided I knew enough about the GNU/Linux OS that I would install Gentoo, and I wouldn't use anything else.

If you know what you are doing, Gentoo is worth the 24 hour install It's pretty much compiling the system from scratch to your specific needs. You choose the kernel options, which modules to build, which types of programs, etc. The Gentoo documentation install guide is very useful, and it goes through everything you need to do to get a good install. Since the install is text based, I prefer to boot into an Ubuntu live cd and install Gentoo through a terminal there.

I'd also like to add to the list:

GRUB: 10/10 - Awesome boot manager. No bugs that I've ever found, and very easy to configure.

[leo-rcc]

For me Ubuntu as well (for now at least). I tried Fedora before that, but it slowed my laptop down so much it wasn't even remotely funny anymore. Suse I also found to be quite good. I have started a new website (in Dutch, I might do a English one) where I do test reports on various Linux installations on average hardware. It is called http://www.linux-test.nl

[Kyuuketsuki]

If you want usability, you need Ubuntu. The fact that the company behind it are funded by a millionaire means they are dedicated to providing a great OS that is easy to use. It's perfect for beginners so maybe you'd like to expand on your 5/10 score? What did you find wrong with it / what confused you about it?

Off hand I don't know, can't remember ... I just didn't like it much (not saying for one moment this about a rational evaluation).

Not really confused, I just didn't get it ... how can I explain that? I get KDE because it appears to have been designed (at least superficially) to grab the attention of Windows users. I don't like Gnome much even though (ironically) I'll configure my Windows desktop to have many characteristics of the Gnome on. In the end it was just one of those distro's I looked at and went, "Meh!"

I also prefer the Gnome desktop over KDE, simply because KDE is such a resource hog, and I find it tries too hard. Gnome + Compiz makes any system shiny! Also, a lot of people have been complaining about KDE4 because the devs rewrote the core and it is full of bugs. My friend was once a hardcore KDE user who kept on pressuring me to try KDE 4.1, and a few days ago we met up and he's temporarily "downgraded" to the stable Gnome. Same goes for Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, who used to be a KDE fan and who spoke you against Gnome.

Compiz (esp. Fusion) looks shiny. Might install it on SuSE if I ever build one of those again (not easy as my cellar is such a mess and I'm migrating to virtual machines). I like KDE 4, I was stopped from investigating it in depth because my hardware would constantly lockup ... I assumed that was a Linux specific distro flaw (OpenSuSE).

So I started out on Ubuntu, then I tried out Linux Mint (an Ubuntu based system), then Fedora. I have a love/hate relationship with Fedora. I installed version 7 and found it ok to use, but then all versions since then have just been so much more confusing. The package management system is by far the worst since you are bombarded with a ton of information in no sensible format. It also seems to lack pretty much any of the configuration options that has made Ubuntu so popular. After a year with Ubuntu, I decided I knew enough about the GNU/Linux OS that I would install Gentoo, and I wouldn't use anything else.

Uggh! I hate Red Hat/Fedora, have done ever since they did that BlueCurve desktop thing. Don't like RPM based installs either ... what package management system do the Unbuntu series use?

If you know what you are doing, Gentoo is worth the 24 hour install It's pretty much compiling the system from scratch to your specific needs. You choose the kernel options, which modules to build, which types of programs, etc. The Gentoo documentation install guide is very useful, and it goes through everything you need to do to get a good install. Since the install is text based, I prefer to boot into an Ubuntu live cd and install Gentoo through a terminal there.

I know a lot of Linux bits, but none of it makes sense to me in a *whole* fashion ... this may be because Linux is "designed" by many different individuals or it may be I'm a brain-damaged Windows techy. Dunno.

GRUB:10/10 - Awesome boot manager. No bugs that I've ever found, and very easy to configure.

Never really screwed around with boot managers under Linux.

Kyu

[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.

[Tiberius]

Off hand I don't know, can't remember ... I just didn't like it much (not saying for one moment this about a rational evaluation).

Not really confused, I just didn't get it ... how can I explain that? I get KDE because it appears to have been designed (at least superficially) to grab the attention of Windows users. I don't like Gnome much even though (ironically) I'll configure my Windows desktop to have many characteristics of the Gnome on. In the end it was just one of those distro's I looked at and went, "Meh!"

I like Gnome because it is simple. You have all the applications in the "Applications" menu, all your places/bookmarks in the "Places" menu, and system settings in the "System" menu. You can add multiple panels and customize them easily with applets. What I like most about Gnome is that it will always try to keep a system stable, and it won't release new upgrades that it hasn't properly tested. The KDE devs released 4.0 as a full release when it wasn't even properly tested, and since then they have rewritten massive sections of the code from scratch, introducing new bugs. KDE will take time to get back on track, and when they do I hope they produce a good system, but for now it is a complete mess.

Compiz (esp. Fusion) looks shiny. Might install it on SuSE if I ever build one of those again (not easy as my cellar is such a mess and I'm migrating to virtual machines). I like KDE 4, I was stopped from investigating it in depth because my hardware would constantly lockup ... I assumed that was a Linux specific distro flaw (OpenSuSE).

I suspect the lockup was either due to KDE or compiz (if you have it installed). The Ubuntu devs have made a lot of adjustments to compiz to ensure it doesn't crash as often as it did, and on my Gentoo install it hardly crashes at all due to it being compiled for the system. Of course during a lockup you could simply press Ctrl + Alt + F1 and bring up the text based view, login, and then kill compiz .

Uggh! I hate Red Hat/Fedora, have done ever since they did that BlueCurve desktop thing. Don't like RPM based installs either ... what package management system do the Unbuntu series use?

Amen to that. Ubuntu is a Debian based distribution, so it uses the far superior "apt" package manager. The Gentoo default is portage but I prefer paludis .

I know a lot of Linux bits, but none of it makes sense to me in a *whole* fashion ... this may be because Linux is "designed" by many different individuals or it may be I'm a brain-damaged Windows techy. Dunno.

I used to be a Windows techy as well, and I probably had the same view of Linux as you did. I thought it was ok, had tried it a few times, but nothing had stuck. It was only when I started a CS degree and started using it on servers that I finally saw the value of the system, and the awesome amount of power it has. Having complete control over your system with such a powerful shell (I use zsh) is just too irresistible, as well as the other features like the ext file systems, which is the main reason why Linux doesn't need disk defragmentors. Quoth wikipedia:

Modern Linux filesystem(s) keep fragmentation at a minimum by keeping all blocks in a file close together, even if they can't be stored in consecutive sectors. Some filesystems, like ext3, effectively allocate the free block that is nearest to other blocks in a file. Therefore it is not necessary to worry about fragmentation in a Linux system.

[leo-rcc]

KDE 4 was a disaster when I tried it. KDE 3 was all right but I went to Gnome with the install of Ubuntu 7 and never looked back.

[Tiberius]

This is what I have found. KDE3 was great, although I still preferred the easy to use nature of Gnome. KDE4 was an attempt to rewrite massive sections of code, and then release it unfinished in order to get more people to work on it. The problem was that not many people did want to work on it because it was so bad. The KDE devs can only rely on fanboys for a certain amount, and they overstepped the mark. It would be like Microsoft releasing an edition of Windows that installed fine but left out key details like explorer.exe.

[Kyuuketsuki]

Bugger! My soon to be ESXi server (DELL 1600SC) has screwed up!

For some reason it won't go past the base memory check ... that AND I've spilt tea on my keyboard (only my spell checker got me my missing letters back)!!!!

Time to take it apart again!

Kyu

[Rob]

I use gentoo on anything that isnt a typical computer (netbook, playstation, toaster, ect.) and fedora on everything else. Honestly, I wouldn't recommend either of them.

I'd suggest Linux Mint. Its a spin off of ubuntu with various proprietary media binaries preinstalled. Though something tells me that you'll end up sticking to suse as you can never really escape your first love