Beginner's Guide to Linux Distros 409
Martin writes "TipMonkies has a nice overview of various Linux distros for those of you with little time to research each distro yourself. The article also discusses some of the advantages/disadvantages of each distro." From the article: "SUSE- The 'U' is hard and the 'E' is soft. Almost like the word sue with an S on the end. SUSE is the other big commercial distro. It was when it was still it's own company in Germany, and now even bigger since being purchased by Novell."
Progressing (Score:2, Interesting)
eh... (Score:5, Interesting)
I dunno... while much of this dude's article seemed accurate, after reading the above, I've come to the conclusion that even after all his years of experience, he's still a newb... or he's just plain smoking crack.
Laptops... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been through Debian installs so many times, and I get so close, but there's always one thing or another I can't quite get (used to be sound, now I got that working but the darn thing won't sleep anymore)... I tried Kanotix, again the sleeping issue... downloading Ubuntu now. (Yes, in case you can't tell by the list I'm a big Debian fan... but Fedora is next on the torrent list, lousy 2.7GB download though)
Is there a reason laptops are so tricky for linux, and yes I know all about linuxforlaptops.com and the other websites which cater, but still, the installs are frustrating, the wireless has finally gotten to a point where it's ok, but still not great (enabling wep and connecting to a varity of networks etc)...
Does a "for laptops" distro exist?, I'd love it, hell I'd help with it if my skills could be used.
Sidenote: The old debian installer had much better support for laptops than the new one!
Re:Slackware (Score:2, Interesting)
How about "WindowsKey + F"? The first time in, turn off the stupid puppy, and set up the options the correct way, then a search is always just a WindowsKey+F away. No, I don't think the Windows search is all that great, but it's not that complicated or difficult to get to, either. You don't even have to switch to a terminal window. It's easier for people to learn a few keyboard shortcuts than to learn to understand a CLI. I'm not saying the GUI is better, but it's simpler for most people out there. For power users, there's CLI.
Re:SuSE Pronunciation (Score:3, Interesting)
What you're wishing for is for everyone to become more educated, and while it's certainly a noble wish, it's also not entirely realistic.
Also, I've never heard anyone saying a soft c to mean anything other than a c that sounds like an s, so I don't see what benefit there'd be to saying the latter. (I'm not sure what a soft t would be in contrast to a hard t, perhaps a th sound?)
I'm gonna miss slackware! =( (Score:1, Interesting)
I've used most of the distros available... Redhat, Fedora, Gentoo, Knoppix, Ubuntu, Debian, SuSE, and Yellow Dog, but I feel most comfortable w/ Slackware.
I don't really agree with the author from the article link, when he says...
"It is a bit more simple but less powerful to hack around the init scripts and change the real guts of the OS"
I feel that is the most in-accurate statement possible, as that is part of the main reason I enjoy slackware so much, compared to say SuSE's moronic boot-script 'logic', or distros that use inetd (by default) to launch most of the server applications.
Slackware is one of the easiest os's to customize and optimize to do specifically what you want with, whether it be a development/production environment on a single system, or even on a multi-node clustered environment, so I have to also disagree when he says...
"You don't build the system from the ground up like Gentoo"
Gentoo's installation is not builing the system from the ground-up, it's choosing which packages to install, which is also an option in the slackware installation process.
Re:Slackware (Score:2, Interesting)
Most of the really good Unix tools would likely be considered "inadequate" by someone who doesn't understand them, because they are designed and intended to work in conjunction with some other tool or tools.
So the answer to your question is, yes, by design.
That's the point. Unix tools are like Tinker Toys. Each piece has some nominal value in its own right, but are really pretty inadequate. Their real power comes in being able to combine them in novel ways to create your own structures.
You can't do that with GUI buttons, their whole raison d'etre being the delivery of a completely assembled "kit" at, well, the press of a button. A button designed to punch out cubes will do so much faster and easier than building the cubes out of all the Tinker Toy parts. .
But you're hosed if you want a tetrahedron and you don't have a button for one of those.
When you realize how easy it is to make your own, custom Tinker Toy parts, commands, in a Unix shell, fully combinable with all the others, GUIs simply get left in the dust in terms of functionality. There are times when it can be faster to write a new command in C to get a job done than use a prexisting GUI, because it only takes a few mintues to write the needed command, and a few more to combine it with the standard commands, against countless, repetitive button presses to do the same thing.
I'm not anti GUI. I spend a lot of time in them. For easily predefined, repetitive tasks they have the value of being able to perform those tasks at the press of a button. But not being anti GUI doesn't mean I have to pretend it's always the best way.
KFG
Hardly (Score:4, Interesting)
He's already corrected the first one (SUSE, being from Germany, is not pronounced with a silent 'E') but more remain. For instance, he confuses Debian testing and unstable, reversing them.
Re:Slackware (Score:2, Interesting)
It took me a long time to warm up to Linux because I didn't understand how things worked underneath the pretty GUI. Coming from the DOS/Windows world I just didn't feel comfortable having the command line there and not knowing how to use it.
On one hand you have Linux distributions that largly allow you to run the system without ever needing to use the command line. This is good for helping people get on the Linux boat, and I know it helped me in the beginning.
On the other hand you have people who enjoy the command line. I can truely understand this now because I've been playing with a headless Linux box for the past few months and my only interface to it is a textmode terminal over SSH. Learning to do everything through the command line has really helped me appreciate *nix systems more and I've learned more about how Linux works than I ever did playing with the GUI (or even building Gentoo.)
Is it the best way to learn? No. Worth learning? Absolutely. Infact, I think it lends an understanding of the system that goes beyond what you can get from the GUI alone.
Every interface is a layer of abstraction between the system and the user. The GUI is a much friendler abstraction and more intuitive, while the command line is a much more intimate abstraction of the system. Each one has it's place.
Re:SUSE (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Slackware (Score:3, Interesting)
Heh... I must be an old fart at heart, then. Sometimes I certainly feel like one (at 26). I was attracted to Linux mostly because it looked difficult. Now please bear with me, I'll get to my points soon. First a tiny bit of background.
I first tried some version (1.x.y) in '94 but it threw a kernel panic almost instantly (I reasoned it was due to my 540MB Conner harddrive using some kind of "EasyBIOS") and didn't know how to fix it (didn't have the 'net to look to for help either). I put it away, and installed Win95 (alpha :). Years passed.
I've now used Slackware since 7.1, currently running 10.0 on my servers; I'll probably never use anything else on them. However, for my desktop I wanted something pretty with windows and graphics, looking to kill Windows completely. I still haven't :)
I've tried the "graphical" Linuxen since the first Corel. Since then I've been through Mandrake [8-10], SuSe [5-9.2], RedHat [5-7] and Fedora Core [2,3].
My experience is that they're all easy to install (even for a non-techie) and by default boots into a pretty-looking graphical system. But if that was everything that was offered, users with the need for little more than a web browser and word processor would be at a loss. A GUI way of configuring a complete Linux system, and all other apps being a GUI, would be so slow to use (click, click, click, type, click, type, click click) you'd develop RSI in a week. With a casual, non-techie user, fine; but the pros would commit suicude in droves. Or code a GUI app with nothing but a large text window to interface the system using self-invented textual command aliases for the GUI apps ("an atrocity, I tell you! You can't even use the mouse!" -Tilly) :)
Imagine doing a simple search/replace on text in a bunch of files with nothing but a GUI having radio buttons and checkboxen for all possible options... Of course, there would be no regular expression text input available; that would be a too difficult syntax for the user to understand. And to process those results further, you'd have to save the results and start another app to do it.
Unless an app was created specifically to do that chain of tasks. But then we'd end up with a uncomprehensible number of apps tailored to one weird, specific task. The command line just can't go away.
Re:The Gentoo conundrum (Score:5, Interesting)
No, I didn't want mysql when I installed postfix, no, I didn't really need libjpeg/libtiff/libpng to install samba, no, this box is a server and I don't want X, why is php dependant on X! (and other weird package dependencies I've noticed in various distribs)
The flipside of the coin is that perhaps I want php or something compiled against postgresql or some other combination of modules which, for instance, fedora or debian won't allow me to have? Gentoo gets around this rather well as everything is compiled and you can link packages against the libs that you want. Also since you're compiling it yourself for your system you know it'll work whereas you can't be sure with rpms these days as they can be made for any number of distribs.
Gentoo is for advanced users who don't mind compile times and like having things customized the way they want it. It's not a bad distrib, don't knock it because of some of the users.
Re:But people don't want to learn. (Score:3, Interesting)
See, for me linux looks like a very good desktop OS. On my old HP laptop Ubuntu works faster and more reliably than Windows 2000 that it replaced (it was also easier to install). Most of my computer use fits in to the categories you mentioned -- the fact that setting up a ssh daemon is possible is nice too, but that's just a bonus.
Now, how exactly would Windows or OS X do those three things you mentioned better than my (pretty much out-of-the-box) Ubuntu installation? I'm trying not to label you a troll, but you just gave no explanation to your opinions...
Uh.. it's German (Score:3, Interesting)
And the 'E' on the end of a word in German has the English short 'A' sound, or 'uh' sound. So it's somewhat pronounced like 'su-suh.'
Slightly OT: but Knoppix is also German, and is pronounced with a beginning hard 'K' sound at the beginning: 'Kuh-noppix.' Though if you say it that way in the US everyone will look at you strangely.
Re:Ubuntu and Slackware (Score:3, Interesting)
Ubuntu arrived on the scene at almost the exact same time that Dropline was starting to stagnate a bit - Todd had pretty much burned out on the project and started a transition from a one-man metadistro to the project being community maintained. So while Dropline had always had the latest Gnome packages inside of the week in the past, they were very, very late getting Gnome's October 2.8 release, and when HAL was added in, it was more than a bit flakey.
At this same time, Ubuntu 4.10 Warty was released, which was a stable, easy to install distro with the same type of focus on usability that Dropline had always had. For many, it was their first taste of apt on a system that was easy to get running, and seemed to be headed in the right direction.
Personally, I made the move in late October/early November, and haven't looked back. While I still love Slackware, its underlying system wasn't the friendliest in the world for a usability-oriented desktop system. It's a distribution that's really fleshed out much of the potential I saw in Dropline, and Canonical is moving everything in the right direction to keep this happening.
Although I also have to say that it's not just Slackware users pulled in by this - it's no coincidence that it's been the top distro on Distrowatch for quite some time now. I think the most compelling case I've seen personally is a good friend of mine that's a total Mac fanatic. He's a geek, and enjoys computers, but in the past, he's hated anything Linux simply because it was too much hassle for him. That said, he's fallen absolutely in love with Ubuntu, and has been installing it on almost any piece of x86 hardware he touches lately. That's quite an endorsement to me.
Re:The Gentoo conundrum (Score:3, Interesting)
Originally, I had kicked Gentoo around because it had 'bleeding edge' support for new hardware. Wanted to run AMD64, wireless, or some ATI video chipset on a laptop - I could usually get it up and running a few months before the major distros started including it. All good and fine, but not enough to hold me to a distro when the others got the support sorted.
What did it for me was having a couple commercial applications (a zSeries mainframe emulator was the worst culprit) that were tied to specific distributions. Great, except for two months after buying the commercial cut of RH 8 for one and RH9 for the other, RH dropped the distro support for anything other than the enterprise versions. I then got the joy of trying to keep these boxes patched on my own. (eventually switched to the red carpet service) I was very much at the mercy of folks who packaged the RPM's or what ever the software used to distribute binary updates. Did I mention bitter? I found myself circling back to Gentoo not because it was faster or l33t, but because a n00b like myself could actually keep a system up to date with the source based approach.