[SWLUG] Which distribution?

[Dave Cridland [Home]]

On Wed, 2003-02-05 at 11:31, Gareth Bowker wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-02-05 at 09:55, Davage, Marcus wrote:
> > I've only ever tried Mandrake, and have been reasonably happy with it. I
> > don't know if it's my distribution, or Linux in general, but I get really
> > p'ed off when I find a nice little application, download it, and it fails to
> > install due to a dependency error - both the RPM and the source
> > ./configure;make routes. <Sigh>
> 
> This is one of the nice things about apt. I run debian exclusively at
> home and RedHat here at work. I've installed apt here as I find it
> invaluable. It sorts out all the dependency problems for you, pretty

I too use RedHat with apt, the apt from http://freshrpms.net/.
Invaluable tool for keeping all my systems up to date.

I find RedHat very good, and it's my distribution of choice, partly
because I've used it since it was called "RedHat Commercial Linux", and
versions were nearly always called Mother's Day. I even recently
switched to using RedHat's packaged kernels.

I've been tempted to switch to Debian, since the distribution carries
vastly more packages than "stock" RedHat, but I'm used to RedHat to a
degree that switching to something else would no doubt cause me a
considerable learning curve. One of these days I'll try it out in a UML
system.

Gareth also touches on an important point in favour of RedHat - it's
nearly always the distribution used commercially.

Whichever distribution you choose, just make sure you either use the
package manager (RPM for RedHat, dpkg et al for Debian), or else don't.
It's very tricky to mix installed-from-source stuff with packages, and
usually ends up in tears.

Of course, you're always able to make up your own packages from a source
tarball, so don't feel too restricted by going the package route.

Dave.