What's the best Linux distribution?

[distantvoices]

My ultra sparc 30 creator box runs gentoo. It's my internet gateway/router/firewall/nat machine. Way better than any out of the box small router - not only because of loooads of memory buildt in.

the gentoo setup 's been ... looooong. *rofl* But pretty ok. Once one finds out how startup scripts work in gentoo, it's easy to get the own scripts up and going. ADSL dial in at start up and adsl quit at shut down. That's nice. The documentation on the gentoo web helps very much.

Stay safe.

[Solar]

Once one finds out how startup scripts work in gentoo...

...which is the same as in *BSD or (K)Ubuntu, IIRC...

[JoeKayzA]

The startup scripts are one thing in gentoo that I don't like that much. The dependency-based system is cool, but they should have pushed it further. I mean, they give it's own name to every runlevel, but underneath they are just numbers again, because init was built that way. But I could also live with the traditional SystemV init scripts, so I don't care.

I can't believe I'd ever say such a thing, but considering flexibility and cleanness, I better like windows' service based startup.

cheers Joe

[KORVIN]

I like RedHat Distribution, i am using Fedora Core 4...

[Warrior]

Slackware!

[Solar]

Dudes, one thing you have yet to learn about "my distro is better than yours": Just shouting the name of your distro doesn't help anyone. Just saying "it works for me" doesn't help either. If that were any indicator, we would all be using Windows, because that's what most people are using.

So, why are you using RedHat or Slackware? Which other distros have you tried, and why did you chose the distro you are using today over the others? Just because they made most of your hardware work out-of-the-box, or because you liked the default desktop setup best?

[AGI1122]

Try this test:
http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/index.php

It will tell you the distro that's best for you. I just took the test and funnily enough it suggested Ubuntu which is what I am currently using. ;D

[Solar]

And don't take it too seriously. It claims that "Gentoo does not have one-click installable applications"... well, it's not one-click, but one-command which is exactly why I'm preferring it...

[JoeKayzA]

When I was promted to choose between apt-get, rpm and portage, and I chose portage, I already knew the result....

The point why I'm using Gentoo is simply because everything is optional, everything can be compiled from scratch and the system can easily be updated. The second point is that the commandline is, for me, still the preferred user interface to a linux system. Of course I run Xorg too because I'm using apps like openoffice or firefox every day, but for low level stuff - configuration, file management, simple tasks like pushing a file over bluetooth or setting up wlan and vpn - I always have some ETerm windows open.

cheers Joe

EDIT: @Solar: Which window manager/ desktop environment do you use (if any.... )

[Solar]

The point why I'm using Gentoo is simply because everything is optional, everything can be compiled from scratch and the system can easily be updated.

Especially the last point is something. I saw a friend of mine going through all seven hells trying to update his Fedora system from v{something} to v{something + 1} because of some incompatibilities in the C lib and GCC used, which weren't properly reflected in the packages - a problem that has never occured to me with Gentoo.

EDIT: @Solar: Which window manager/ desktop environment do you use (if any.... )

KDE. Emerge and forget. No, honestly - having everything under one hood is important to me, and Gnome felt too much like a collection of rather independant applications at the time. Plus, the make procedure of Gnome appears to be highly volatile, which means Gentoo KDE support is better - especially now with the individual packages, which speeds up patching and updating.

[Crazed123]

Gentoo was pretty good, but setting up boot-time support for my WLAN dongle with linux-wlan-ng was hell, and the machine has been compiling OO.o 2.0.0 for more than twelve hours now. MPlayer also seems to be taking a long time to emerge.

On the other hand, it saves me the dependency hell I had going with LFS...

[Solar]

Some packages are a real pain to compile unless you have a big-iron CPU to throw at it. Your OO.o should be finished by the time you read this, but next time you might want to look for a *-bin package if you're emerging something as big as that. USE-Flags and configurability is all well and fine, but I preferred openoffice-bin over having to compile the beast on a 500 MHz laptop.

[JoeKayzA]

The *-bin packages are a point where the portage system is already getting a bit out of hand. I mean, emerge offers a cmdline-option for merging from a binary package

Code: Select all

emerge -K openoffice

for example. These binary packages need to have a portage specific format (*.tbz2 archive, with specific metadata files). But then there are those *-bin ebuilds for most larger packages (openoffice, firefox, thunderbird, sun-j2sdk are the ones I use currently), where portage fetches the official binary and extracts and installs them during a fake 'build'-sequence.

I know that it works, but IMVHO this looks like a rather ugly workaround because the bin and source ebuilds are treated as if they were completely different packages...

They should have extended their own binary packing system (the .tbz2's), in a way that it can handle also different formats - the official package's format. Just a small rant ::)

Some packages are a real pain to compile unless you have a big-iron CPU to throw at it.

...or a farm of processors using distcc! ;D

cheers Joe

[iammisc]

The best Linux distro is Slackware!!!!!!
yeah it might be hard but just install KDE and then log-in(that should be easy enough) and then type startx and wallah! you have a complete Desktop!!!

OR you could use Fedora.

[Solar]

I know that it works, but IMVHO this looks like a rather ugly workaround because the bin and source ebuilds are treated as if they were completely different packages...

They are. The *-bin packages will never be re-emerged e.g. during a [tt]emerge --newuse[/tt], as they are set up not to be affected by USE-Flags. A binary package in $PKGDIR will still be checked for USE-Flags, and ignored / rebuild if necessary IIRC.

The -k / -K option are there as counterpart for the -b / -B options (--buildpkg / --buildpkgonly). You build the binary packages during the usual emerge, copy them elsewhere, and then you can use -k / -K for setting up several other machines (or reinstall your current one) quickly.