[Wylug-help] Which distro?

[John Hodrien]

On Fri, 22 Jul 2011, Roger wrote:

> His machine been staggering on for a long time now (with the occasional
> new HD), but XP has been perceived to be gradually slowing down (is it
> paranoia to suspect an M$ strategy to build this into the innumerable
> updates?)  That's why I'm recommending a clean new installation of Linux!
>
> I use CentOS (64) on my server, but the mouse support seems flaky on the
> odd occasion I use it as a workstation (it stops working until I reboot
> - something I don't normally expect from Linux) but I can't be bothered
> to fix that since I rarely do use it as a workstation and it performs
> flawlessly in its main role as a RAID file-server...

This isn't a normal feature of CentOS.  I've used it on numerous desktops with
varying hardware and never seen it, so I'd treat that as an outlier.

> Ubuntu has now been suggested by three people, so I'm tempted to go that
> way, however, you suggest "Ubuntu LTS", while Simon Greenwood suggests
> "Ubuntu 10.04"
>
> Please, what, if anything, is the difference?

As has been said, it's just the long term support version.  If you're
installing now for this guy, you don't want to force a disruptive upgrade in a
year.  With Ubuntu desktop I believe you get 3 years of support from the
moment of release, and 5 years with Ubuntu server.  With CentOS/SL 6 you'd get
7 years.

jh