Thursday, January 5

Linux Distribution Chooser!

In the past few months, I have been asked by quite a few people what distro is best for them. I have done my best to ask good questions to give them a good answer, but the truth is that I have not used many distros.

In the dark ages, I played around with RH (3 and 4) and Corel Linux. I successfully installed RH 7 as my first production system. I am now pretty wedded to Mandriva, but did use PC Linux Online for a time last year. I really don't know anything about a non-rpm based distro; so I don't know if my answers are really relevant.

Anyway, here is an online tool that will help you pick a distro, matched to your requirements. It doesn't include RH, but does include Fedora Core. Shockingly enough, it recommended that I use Mandriva.

4 comments:

Treasure State Jew said...

Penguin; I would be interested to hear what advantages you find with Debian and knoppix. I have never used those distros, but have heard many good things about them.

Anonymous said...

I took the test and it informed me Gentoo would ber perfect. Funny, that's what I use on my desktop and webserver. I've also used Debian but I like Gentoo a lot better.

Treasure State Jew said...

Sam; I would also be interested in hearing the advantages of Gentoo.

Anonymous said...

The advantage I found with Gentoo over Debian was package management was easier and more up to date than Debian. I was always fighting the apt-get system looking for source lists and trying to deal with dependency issues. The Gentoo portage system is easier for me to deal with. I won't get into which community of people is easier to deal with if you do have issues but I will point out I am sticking with Gentoo.

Gentoo is making moves recently towards a GUI installation and making the whole installation process easier for newcomers so it's becoming a little more friendly on installation which is where most people shy away from it.

Having said all that I have heard good things about the Debian clone Ubuntu/Kubuntu if a person wanted to try Debian. It is a lot more up to date than Debian and easier to manage.

Hope I helped.