After a long hiatus from Linux, I realized that I miss it dearly and I want it back. So I downloaded Ubuntu Desktop, only to find that it really skimps on packages. (Yeah, I know, it’s supposed to be all trim n stuff, but there’s something about selecting packages from the installer that brings me great joy. A little weird, I know.)
I’m now downloading the Debian 4.0r2 netinst image, having had good experiences with Debian before and knowing that it certainly does not skimp on packages. (21+ CDs? Holy shit! If only I had a DVD burner…) But I still worry that I might be missing out on some really cool distro that would blow me away. So, basically, I’m calling on Linux and BSD Dopers to tell me why they love their favorite distro, and why I should use it.
I’m running Gentoo on my MythTV media server, and recently installed Xubuntu on my laptop. Gentoo was fun for getting to muck around with low level options and only install exactly the packages I needed, but now that I’ve run Ubuntu that’s my unqualified recommendation for pretty much anybody. It’s really about as easy as Linux gets while still just as powerful and customizable. You can add any software missing from the default installation with either the Synaptic package manager interface or from the command line with apt.
But you did notice that the application offered by the installer and the “add application…” thing are only a small part of the Ubuntu packages? Ubuntu also has a proper package manager: apt and the corresponding GUI synaptic.
I’m quite familiar with apt, having used Debian for a while back in the late 90s/early 2000s. It’s just that I really like installing the programs I want during the OS install process, and having them all there when I boot it up for the first time. And I like the process of choosing them from a long list of stuff with verbose descriptions. I know it sounds like a really minor thing to get particular about, but I like it. Not to mention that Ubuntu just gives me the feeling that they think of me as a lifelong Windows user who starts to panic when I see a command line, and the resulting tone in the Ubuntu documentation feels a little insulting to me. No offense to those who prefer X - I’m just a command-line kind of guy. As for synaptic, it seems I can use that on Debian if I want to.
ETA: I don’t mean to be snarky here, just going more in-depth about why I’m not giving Ubuntu a chance.
Being as we’re a commercial shop, we have a lot of Redhat around here.
If I can hijack the thread a bit, as you all reply, can you add, “Why not Redhat Fedora?” They’re pretty much the granddaddy of the major distros these days (is Slackware still around?)
On the other hand, Ubuntu is fantastic as a transition from Windows. I’m only just now making my first foray into the Linux world, and it’s been a major help. It certainly doesn’t keep you from the command line if you want to use it, so I’ve been slowly learning how to work outside the GUI. Still, I can see why someone who’s already familiar with Linux would be impatient with it.
And apt is maybe the coolest program I’ve ever come across, just for the record.
I use Ubuntu at home and it’s certainly the distro I would recommend for most purposes.
I’ve been playing with gOS too - which is a Ubuntu derivative, but with the Enlightenment GUI - which is really quite nice (it’s configured as a Mac-wannabe interface in this instance)
You really want to have gigs upon gigs of stuff in the default install? What’s the point?
Hell, when I’ve done netinst installs, I leave the dselect step until after I’m booting off of disk, especially on workstation installs where I could be downloading gigs of stuff. Installing a big slug of packages in one whack is a good way to hose up a system.
Anyway, I think OpenSuSE has a DVD installer. Maybe Ubuntu does too… I can’t remember, since I’ve never bothered with it.
I think Fedora is a great choice for a corporation without hardcore nixheads on board, especially if they’re transitioning from Windows Server. (Which is a great idea now that Server 2008 is getting ready to stink up the market.) In fact, I used Red Hat for a while back in the day. But I’ve always viewed it as a beginner’s distro, not to mention that I’ve had fewer problems with apt than rpm and Red Hat’s dedication to the open source (sorry, “Free Software” :rolleyes: ) movement is highly questionable.
I seem to recall rpm getting upset when I tried to install packages that I had hand-compiled the prerequisites for. I don’t feel like I should have to fight my OS if I want to compile a program locally every once in a while. Hell, I get enough of that from Windows.
Other than apt-get, you mean. Forgive me if you already know this, BTW, but apt was Debian’s brainchild, and was adopted later by Ubuntu and the other Debian forks.
Yeah, I’ve always liked Enlightenment (although my loyalty to WindowMaker was stronger). But, is that the only difference between Ubuntu and gOS? I don’t remember it being that difficult to have several different window managers installed on the same box and flip between them. This idea of completely different Ubuntu distributions for each window system strikes me as rather odd.
The various *[Uu]buntus just pick one install one by default - everything’s pulled from the same repos, just like Debian. It’s easy enough to download the alternate desktop environment metapackage if you want to, eg, if you’re running Gnome, and you want all of KDE, too, just install kubuntu-desktop. It should handle setting up GDM (the GTK successor to XDM) and everything for you. I don’t know the packages for the more esoteric WM’s take care of the display manager setup, though.
I much prefer this approach - multiple supported DE’s/WM’s - to the approach taken by other distros. Back before SuSE went to Novell, it was the KDE distro. Sure, you could install Gnome, but you could tell the distro treated it like an afterthought. Since they went Gnome, thanks to Ximian, the KDE stuff feels kind of lame. Or at least it did in SLED 10.1.
Pretty much - gOS sets itself up with a strong emphasis on web-based tools, Web 2.0 sites and social networks, but that’s really just a fancy way of presenting bookmarks.
Yeah, I think it’s fairly simple. Not something I’ve played with a lot recently
These are Linux distributions aimed at non-geeks - they’re packaged for consumers - the home and small office market. they want an installable, self-configuring OS - they just don’t all want the same one.
I have Debian (etch) on my desktop and Ubuntu on my laptop. I know what you mean about that Ubuntu (sort of) holds your hand. But, then again, I just did an apt-get install dselect on the laptop, which is what I use on the desktop, so it’s there if you want it. Since my desktop is my main computer, I’m generally satisfied with just apt-get on the laptop, as I know beforehand what packages I want to install. But I still prefer dselect to synaptic (or even aptitude).
I have to admit, it’s not clear to me why you’d want to install all your packages prior to first boot. I used to do that; one too many times, the install was borked and I had wasted hours. No, I now do a basic install, make sure it’s kosher, then spend hours going through the packages. And, as you know, Ubuntu is a Debian derivative; IIRC – and this may have changed, with all the work going on in Fedora – Debian still has the greatest number of packages, followed by Ubuntu.
And Fedora has pissed me off too many times by overwriting my custom (system) config files whenever packages were updated. (That was between RH9 and FC2; perhaps it’s changed. Debian prompts for confirmation when it finds a modified file, which is the correct way to do it.) If that matters to you (for most people, it doesn’t), I’d argue against Fedora.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to install any Red Hat product any time soon, but I appreciate the info–I didn’t know (or had forgotten) that about overwriting your config files. That would piss me right off, too.
So many, many hours wasted. The worst was the permissions, particularly in the udev rules. In our robotics research lab, our advisor had a RedHat hard-on and would only allow it to be on the “primary” robot. Because we had many users that worked on and with the robot, we not only had to rely on group permissions for many things (e.g., /dev/dsp, various shared directories, etc.), but also had to grant access to users that were not necessarily logged in via the console.
The speech recognition/production was a constant headache (especially when we were feeding the audio to different programs simultaneously); the various software settings were brittle enough that we always had to go through a battery of checks to find the problem. There was always much cursing when it eventually ended up being an overwritten config file (maybe 10% of the time) that we hadn’t changed in the first place.
Funny, we didn’t have those issues with the robot that ran Debian.
ETA: another irritation was upgrading; we never had a Fedora upgrade go smoothly (i.e., not having to reinstall from scratch anyway). Never had a Debian upgrade go wrong. Debian stable…it just works.
“It Just Works” is huge, even for a glutton for pain like me. It’s no coincidence that Ubuntu is based on Debian.
ETA: I’ve also downloaded OpenBSD and may install that as well, and I picked up the latest daily build of Haiku (the slowly-developing, not-quite-ready open-source BeOS remake built from scratch) and I’m thinking of running that for shits and giggles.
I’m not sure if you’re aware of the site, but even if you are, I’ll mention it for the benefit of others who might be interested: in choosing a distro, a good resource is DistroWatch (in particular, the DistroWatch Top 10 provides brief, yet worthwhile overviews).
I’ve been running Fedora since Core 1. I’m now on Fedora 8. I’ve thought about running other distro’s, but I’m perfectly happy with Fedora. I run Linux about 99% of the time and only switch over to Windows on very rare occasions .
The equivilent to apt-get for Fedora is Yum. Yum is command line, but also has a GUI. Just click on ‘update/ install software’ and you can search for packages. Install is usually as easy as clicking the box next to the package you want and click install. It’ll resolve the dependancies for you and install whatever the package needs.
I use my computer for everything. MythTV, DVD watching, music, even Windows games with Wine.
Digital Stimulus, thanks for linking me to that top-10 list. I was familiar with DistroWatch but hadn’t found any decent reviews like that on the site. DistroWatch is a great resource for finding the technical differences between distros, but does anyone know of a site with reviews on more than 10? Given the current climate of Linux usage, it seems like a significant portion of the top 10 are geared toward beginners; it’d be nice to see some reviews of some other slightly less mainstream distributions that aren’t.
You’re welcome; I’m not aware of any comprehensive distro reviews/comparisons…there’s just too damn many of them. Best I’ve seen are single reviews…but it would be horrible to have to sift through them one by one.
Yep, and it’s harder than one would think to find up-to-date reviews of most distros, it seems. But from what I have seen, I’m feeling more confident in my decision to run Debian (and OpenBSD, maybe). I considered Gentoo (love the concept of scripted compile-time customization in my package manager) and FreeBSD (OpenBSD seems a little intimidating for a guy like me who’s never even run Slackware), among others, but Gentoo’s core philosophy seems to have some serious flaws* and FreeBSD sounds like a bitch to get working correctly.
To wit: the “optimized” kernel build ends up being Module Hell, and updating it takes forever; building X and OpenOffice can take anywhere from six hours to a couple of days, with marginal performance increases at best; and there’s no QA process to speak of in the package system.
Ouch.
Well, I do miss Debian, after all. And running an OpenBSD will be an object lesson in computer security, which isn’t a bad thing since I’m studying for certification exams right now anyway.
On the plus side, I found some cool Live CD distributions: SystemRescueCd (which is pretty much what it sounds like), AnonymOS (tweaked for almost total anonymity for networking purposes), and FreeSBIE (FreeBSD-in-a-can, I guess).
Forgive me if you already know this, BTW, but apt was Debian’s brainchild, and was adopted later by Ubuntu and the other Debian forks.