[Gllug] Recommended distro

[Jan Kokoska]

On Sun, 2004-12-12 at 15:25 +0000, Nelson Menezes wrote:
> OK, given the subject line, I hope this won't be too
> controversial (ah-ah).
> 
> I've been running Linux for over a year now on a home
> desktop. Mandrake 9.2 and Red Hat 9 were my first
> toes-in-the-water experiences, and I think they were very
> good to learn how things work, etc. I couldn't go back to
> Windows now. I've progressed through Mandrake 10 and 10.1
> and, being tech-savvy, I think I want something more
> in-depth and configurable now.

OK, looks like you're ready for something Debian-ish now.

> So, to sum it up, I was thinking maybe Debian or Gentoo.
> I've never tried either and the respective websites both
> say "this is the best distro on all universes", so I
> thought I'd get your opinions. Do both distros usually
> build from source? 

Gentoo does. In Debian you install binary packages which can be rebuilt
if you fetch sources by "apt-get source package" and follow the build
instructions (if absent then your common sense, or one of the canonical
developer/maintainer references, which will turn you into Free Software
zealot as a bonus).

Gentoo wins in configurability, but its original author chose his family
to tuning the dependencies and doesn't lead the project anymore, so
there you see...

Debian wins in maintainability (and to be fair, its original author
left, too, but that's long time ago), ability to reproduce and fix
problems (as it is compiled once, installed many times) and no doubt in
userbase. Second strongest after RH (not counting Cobalt routers):

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/01/28/debian_fastest_growing_linux_distribution.html

Despite that I would recommend you Ubuntu:
http://ubuntulinux.org/ 

This really makes much more sense for primarily a desktop user like
yourself, without massive datacenter to support (and there you go on
customizing Debian anyway).

And yes, it is based on Debian and yes, they actually have something
such as release schedule and the first release was 2 months ago. And it
is good, try it out!

That is what I recommended to a number of my friends and co-workers and
what I teach my Linux workshops on and everybody seems to be happy.
Myself, I am still running Debian on my laptop, but that's another
story..

> (I'd like that). Or does some other
> distro have the same level of popularity? (I don't want to
> be in a too-small niche.)
> 
> Sorry if this has been asked a zillion times before.

Well yea. But whatever, it's Sunday ;)

Jan

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