Tell us why your Linux distro is the best

slackware 10 :p

I am not a fan of rpm's.. although i do think precompiled binaries do have there place. Give slack a chance, if you can get through the install and use cfdisk, you will be ok :)

Gentoo is pretty sweet too, although portage gets big, and until there is a standardized why to empty portage, you install will get bigger and bigger the more you emerge >.<
 
You'd think if they had done a decent job copying FreeBSD ports they'd have added that, too.
 
Snugglebear said:
You'd think if they had done a decent job copying FreeBSD ports they'd have added that, too.
Click to expand...
No kidding...Can't they rip off something right? :)
 
DR_K13 said:
Suse 9.1 :D
Click to expand...

Yep. I'm starting with this also. Ive had it for about a day and I''m not really sure what to think yet. Its seems more feature rich than Windows, and simple enough to use. I can see though, what peope are saying about not teaching you too much about the workings of the OS itself. Nevertheless, for me, putting any flavor of Linux on my machine was terrifying enough, being Windoze brainwashed my whole life. So I guess its a great place to start before I delve deeper into the kernel and other distros. :cool:
 
kleptophobiac said:
What: Arch Linux
Why:
- very minimalist
- simple install (CD or FTP)
- excellent packaging system (pacman -Syu updates the whole system, pacman -S package gets you a new proggy)
- packages get updated extremely quickly
- cleanest rc system I have ever seen
- extremely easy configure (everything is in /etc)
- Good (not excellent) docs at http://wiki.archlinux.org
- Nice community at bbs.archlinux.org
Where: http://www.archlinux.org
Click to expand...

I installed Arch last week based on your suggestion. It's fitting my personality quite well so far. Arch seems to satisfy my geek need for a minimalist install, configurability, and somewhat intuitive directory system. The graphical installer was a nice touch, and it gave me the chance to study some proper boot configuration files (grub, fstab, etc) and actually learn and fix the mistakes I was making in previous manual installs.

So far so good. I'm not exactly a noobie to linux (i've successfully installed a functional Gentoo workstation from stage 1, and I've dabbled in Mandrake and Red-Hat), but I think even the most basic user will gain some great experience and develop necessary linux skills with the Arch distro. At the same time, it's sufficiently powerful such that I don't forsee moving away from Arch any time soon.
 
Yoper- fastest out of the box linux

0.) Performance patches from Con Kolivas, i686 2.6.7 kernel, reiserfs
1.) All original sources, minimal patches.
2.) Compiled with i686 against latest gcc
3.) Stripping
4.) Prelinking
5.) Latest gcc and glibc and other sources
6.) Keep everything only dependent to what it really needs not what the ./configure happens to find.
7.) Hdparm on install

All things you can do with other distros, but it requires knowledge and a lot of time. And if you reinstall them, the result is gone. Instead, if you do a quick Yoper install (minutes is all it takes), you can have a really fast and fully functional distribution running on your desktop in no time.
 
MEfreak said:
I installed Arch last week based on your suggestion. It's fitting my personality quite well so far. Arch seems to satisfy my geek need for a minimalist install, configurability, and somewhat intuitive directory system. The graphical installer was a nice touch, and it gave me the chance to study some proper boot configuration files (grub, fstab, etc) and actually learn and fix the mistakes I was making in previous manual installs.

So far so good. I'm not exactly a noobie to linux (i've successfully installed a functional Gentoo workstation from stage 1, and I've dabbled in Mandrake and Red-Hat), but I think even the most basic user will gain some great experience and develop necessary linux skills with the Arch distro. At the same time, it's sufficiently powerful such that I don't forsee moving away from Arch any time soon.
Click to expand...

Glad to have made another Archer! I love the distro too. I used to be a Slackware person, but Arch took everything I liked from Slack and improved. :)

Arkaine23 said:
Yoper- fastest out of the box linux

0.) Performance patches from Con Kolivas, i686 2.6.7 kernel, reiserfs
1.) All original sources, minimal patches.
2.) Compiled with i686 against latest gcc
3.) Stripping
4.) Prelinking
5.) Latest gcc and glibc and other sources
6.) Keep everything only dependent to what it really needs not what the ./configure happens to find.
7.) Hdparm on install

All things you can do with other distros, but it requires knowledge and a lot of time. And if you reinstall them, the result is gone. Instead, if you do a quick Yoper install (minutes is all it takes), you can have a really fast and fully functional distribution running on your desktop in no time.
Click to expand...

I'll have to give this one a shot, but it does sound quite a bit like Arch. Arch is also i686 compiled and is extremely zippy "out of the box"

If you haven't tried it, please do! Give us a report on how the two compare. I'll likely be doing the same when I find the time.
 
I'm a Linux lover, yeah!

For all of you who say that with Red Hat you can't learn, and that RPM is a hell, you are right... to some extent, and also wrong... Let me explain: You can learn as much or as less as you choose with any Linux distro, Gentoo, Red Hat, Slackware, Debian are no exceptions. In fact Gentoo and its portage makes you as lazy as Red Hat with its RPMs and yum or Debian with its DEBs and apt, why? because people (and I'm not excluding myself from this) tend to get contempted, you get used to it, and because of that you forget about other stuff you can also do. You don't like RPMs and are tied to an RPM distro? Install the old way, via source and ./configure! Sooner or later you'll forget most of what you learnt during your glorious Gentoo install, not all, but most. I've known people who just ask about how to install a program from a tarball in Gentoo, because they're used to find all in portage and portage does all for them.

Basically documentation is available virtually everywhere! You can even get a generic Linux book and you'll be able to get around virtually around all distros, the man pages are your friend, and also may look as your worst enemy (they may seem more like a computer science degree thesis than a simple help file or manual documentation for a program, true, but you'll be able to understand it). The point is, if it is knowledge you seek, you'll find it if (and only if) you really seek it. Some may say that you can't learn with a distro that does everything for you, but in reality if you really want to learn you'll find your way. I'd rather have a friendly environment to which I feel comfortable with than a totally hostile environmet that forces me to look for a way to get around.

I've come to the conclusion that no distro is better than another, they are just more convenient for a certain task. And all distros are as configurable as you want them to be. I've seen people complain about how much does a distro like Mandy or Red Hat or SuSE or Debian installs for them in order to satisfy deps, when you can just install what you need, a basic system and add all from source if you want later, just as Gentoo or LFS. Heck, if you don't like a certain package manager, just install the old fashioned way. Even tools like File-Rolller will allow you to extract and entire .deb or .rpm if you really dislike them, but have to use them. Don't get me wrong, but if something is clear is that package managment in Linux is far from perfrect. Each package format tries to tackle this in very different ways, and each has flaws. From ease of use to reliability to real usefulness, and nothing seems better than old tarlballs (maybe that's why the packages for Slack are TGZs :D )

I personally run Fedora Core2, I've tweaked it to my heart's content. I installed it after a careless error I made with Gentoo that trashed the whole installation which I could not recover from. I've come to find that FC2 fills all my needs with excellence. In the course of the years (I've used Linux since Nov1996, exclusively three years ago) I have also tried many distros and never found one which really satisfied me until I realized that a distro would fill only basic needs and that if I really wanted it to make it work the way I wnated, I had to get my hands dirty by digging in its insides. That's why Gentoo is an excellent distro, but not the panacea, because in the end you can do so with any distro as long as you have GCC or whatever compiler you choose.

So what distro is best? NONE. What do you want the distro for? Would be the right question to ask, the way I see it. In the end, amongst this chaotic freedom this GNU/Linux amalgam is, you get to choose whatever you want, and to me that's what's important. Alas it may be staggering and frustrating at times... But then again, that's what makes it fun (IMO). :D

Peace.


Gian Paolo Mureddu
AKA Thetargos.
 
Indeed. You can force any distro to do what you want, the question is how much work it is, and how easy it is to maintain.
 
kleptophobiac said:
Just out of curiousity, what was your careless error?
Click to expand...
:LOL: I trashed my Gentoo with an unemerge of sed, along with its deps (portage included) and trying to re-do my steps from the boot disk did not work. I'm still puzzled at what could I have done wrong, becuase even if I re-did a stage3 "re-install" I could not get the computer to wrok right any more, thus I was forced to re-install :D

EDIT: And since it took me more than 3 weeks to have computer just the way it was before I did my stupid move, I decided to install FC1, which I coiuld take to the same degree of customization in less than ONE week ;)
 
HHunt said:
Indeed. You can force any distro to do what you want, the question is how much work it is, and how easy it is to maintain.
Click to expand...
When you know what you are doing, not much work, and depending how you do it, it can be VERY simple to keep it updated and mantained ;)
 
I like many of you; I have tried a ton of linux distro's from day 1 of "Newly Released" redhat 7 to running "Hackin9" I've as well had my share of fun with them. But one day while @ a local LUG [Linux User Group] Meeting I discovered FreeBSD. One of the graciously knowledged users was playing with FreeBSD and it looked challenging. Mostly cli @ the time and I wanted to give it a whirl. After 2 weeks had I formatted all 3 of my machines with it. It was clean, fast, and made great use of old hardware and even better use of the blazing fast p4 i had. Custom kernels were fun and can really be optimized. Tools like portupgrade and cvsup give you the latest fastest code out there and let you rebuild every program on the box so it's optimized to the max. After a few months I was very fluent with the BSD OS and had X running great and a great Fluxbox setup. After finally getting kde setup, it was over; this machine is comparable to no other in my opinion; fast, super-stable, and always presenting further indepth learning via the mailing lists.

If I had to suggest any piece of F.O.S.S. or O.S.S. it would be FreeBSD 5.2.1; it's great and it's easy to install like slackware. It utilized that C based gui/text mode installer.The FreeBSD handbook [the ultimate online FreeBSD reference manual] is super documented and the mailing lists have great support. I'd recommend everyone who hasn't to Check it out
http://www.freebsd.org/
 
has freebsd recovered from the royal piece of shit that was 4.7-4.8? If it has, I might have to give it another whirl on my router. :)
 
I've been using it since 3.4 and I've never noticed anything bad in the 4.x-RELEASE branches...Which is honestly what you should be running on machines you care about. If you didn't, well, that's your mistake and not FreeBSD's.
 
I can't say I remember any specific problems with 4.8, but I do suggest you try 5.2.1 . There has gone a lot of work into it since 4.8 .

Oh, I think I forgot my favourite FreeBSD thing: A devfs that just works.
 
I've been using unix since the mid 80s and have dealt with a
very wide range of unix flavours & clones. By preference, I run
OpenBSD. If that's not available, NetBSD or FreeBSD is fine.
Unfortunately most of my computers aren't supported by any
of those, so I find myself running Solaris on my Sparcserver-1000,
Irix on my Indigo 2, and AIX (UGH!) on my RS/6000s.
I recommend Linux to friends & family who are fed up with
Windows, but I don't really like to use it myself. It feels
pc-ish to me.
Also, I'm a ultra-minimalist about my environment. I don't
like complex, flashy desktops, and in fact, I sit in front of
a black & white monitor.
 
shieldforyoureyes said:
I recommend Linux to friends & family who are fed up with
Windows, but I don't really like to use it myself. It feels
pc-ish to me.
Click to expand...
Forgive my ignorance, but what exactly is "pc-ish?" How do you avoid a "pc-ish" feel when running a *nix or Windows platform on a PC? Does the descriptor not imply an innate characteristic of the platform rather than the OS?
 
Regarding FreeBSD, btw: CURRENT just hit 6.0, and seems to have gotten all the experimental things they were holding back while trying to make a 5-STABLE. It's ... interesting. And needs some time to mature.

5.2.1 is still fine, and I expect a 5-STABLE sometime soon.
 
Code freeze for RELENG_5 happened about a week ago and the schedule says a release should happen in October. I doubt they'll make it, but I'd rather them hold off and do it right than turn out something with problems.
 
[H]EMI_426 said:
Code freeze for RELENG_5 happened about a week ago and the schedule says a release should happen in October. I doubt they'll make it, but I'd rather them hold off and do it right than turn out something with problems.
Click to expand...

That would be the FreeBSD way, yes.
(Though 5.2.0 supposedly should have gotten a few more days).
 
MEfreak said:
Forgive my ignorance, but what exactly is "pc-ish?" How do you avoid a "pc-ish" feel when running a *nix or Windows platform on a PC? Does the descriptor not imply an innate characteristic of the platform rather than the OS?
Click to expand...

I never use Windows. "PC-ish feel" basicly means a lot of Linux
utilities look like they were written by someone who grew up
on PCs & DOS, rather than Unix. Command line utilities that
have a status line that makes them hard to use in pipelines,
things like that. To anyone from a traditional Unix background
(VAX & Sun in the 80s, etc) Linux has subtle PCisms scattered
throughout.
 
kleptophobiac said:
...isn't that what verbosity and quiet levels are good for?
Click to expand...

It's not so much the problems (they are fixable) as the mindset it's a symptom of . :D
(Eliteist bastards? Oh yes. And we like it.)
 
kleptophobiac said:
...isn't that what verbosity and quiet levels are good for?
Click to expand...

When they exist. But it's PC-ish to default to verbose.
Look at ffmpeg - it "cleverly" lets you type "q" at any point
to halt it. Even though "^C" would work, and looking for that
"q" means it's waiting on stdin, so you can't run it in the
background from the shell. Oh, *thanks*. (Actually, I have
no idea where ffmpeg came from, but that's what I mean by
"PC-ism". It looks like a DOS utility. (Actually, ffmpeg has
mostly been generating corrupt files for me recently, so it
*really* looks like a DOS utility. Ha ha.))
 
Downloaded and burned Slack 10 and all I get is 'install failed' from CD and from bootdisk. The Redhat distro I have (downloaded it a year ago but never installed it) will install great but I want to try something new. My goal is a system to play an evil game (that I sent many days in the computer lab playing instead of going to class) called Moria (Well MUDDog killed my GPA too but that is a diffrent story) and as a general 'toy' to play with and maybe even take a stab at learning C (or Fortran ;) ) The whole 'window feel' is last on my list of wants.
 
Trooper4985 said:
Downloaded and burned Slack 10 and all I get is 'install failed' from CD and from bootdisk. The Redhat distro I have (downloaded it a year ago but never installed it) will install great but I want to try something new. My goal is a system to play an evil game (that I sent many days in the computer lab playing instead of going to class) called Moria (Well MUDDog killed my GPA too but that is a diffrent story) and as a general 'toy' to play with and maybe even take a stab at learning C (or Fortran ;) ) The whole 'window feel' is last on my list of wants.
Click to expand...


give Arch a shot. it's very basic, installs in 10 minutes, and pacman (package manager, not the game) is unbelievably awesome. great for 'toying' with.

of course, that is all just my opinion.
 
Excellent distro if you don't mind doing pretty much everything by yourslef with the aid of the excellent tool called portage. I really like Gentoo, though I couldn't get it as integrated as I found SuSE's or RH's and FC's desktops.
 
Dosent gentoo take days ( or a day ) to load?
Suse took me under an hour, Redhat took me 4 hours :mad:
 
DR_K13 said:
Dosent gentoo take days ( or a day ) to load?
Suse took me under an hour, Redhat took me 4 hours :mad:
Click to expand...

I just installed Gentoo on an old K6-2 500 that I had laying around. The only part that took awhile on the core install was my own ignorance. Now KDE is a whole other story, I am on 2 1/2 days of compiling that puppy :eek: . You don't have to compile from source if you don't want to, I was just curious as to how the old girl would take to it.
 
Uncle Toxie said:
I just installed Gentoo on an old K6-2 500 that I had laying around. The only part that took awhile on the core install was my own ignorance. Now KDE is a whole other story, I am on 2 1/2 days of compiling that puppy :eek: . You don't have to compile from source if you don't want to, I was just curious as to how the old girl would take to it.
Click to expand...

It's like someone said about FreeBSD: You don't have to compile anything, it just happens to be the easiest way.
 
Gentoo is the way to go if you really want to learn about Linux and have a smokin' hot distro. The learning curve is steep, but once you've got it down you won't want to go back. If you have brand new technology you should also give Gentoo a try as you will find the help forums full of people in the same boat you are.
 
I can tell you exactly why my Linux distribution is the best.

I made it.

Well, not without some help of the other Gentoo developers, but for the 2004.3 release (which comes out in about 3 hours and 40 minutes), I was the primary developer in working out new features and old bugs in catalyst, our LiveCD building tool.

I really have grown to love Gentoo. I was once a Gentoo basher, like many of the slashbots you see trolling slashdot, but then I decided to give it a real try. I found that my main distaste for Gentoo at the time was the management, not the actual technical details of the distribution. After being a good member of the community for a few months and submitting ebuilds for new packages and patches for bugs in existing packages, I was tapped to become a developer for the games team. Ever since, I have been working to make Gentoo better for everyone that uses it and I can say that our biggest asset is the community around the distribution.
 
LFS 5.1 ... I did it months, ago, and haven't looked back, as that's looking back at (shudder) WinXP. My LFS box has to compile everything manually, I have no idea about the versions of software it's using or the versions currently available, heck I don't even really know what software is loaded on it. The kernel only has modules for the bits of hardware that are currently attached. When I want to change something, it always involves tweaking a text file somewhere. I've grown to know and love the nVidia driver installation screen. I willingly run release kernels, and even try to compile software for them (yes, I do fix my own source code problems :D ) So in the end, what am I saying? The distro that's the best it the one that gives you the best return on time. The functionality of my LFS box grows with leaps and bounds when I put time into it; Fedora just looks purdier when I put time into it. Nothing like the feeling of accomplishment to make you love your distro, no matter how badly you've broken it.
 
I started out with Slackware 10. I thought it was great, but was still curious about other distros. I tried Fedora Core 2, hated it because it was too polished and too much like Windows. I wanted total control over the OS internals. Then I found LFS. It has been a learning experience, and it has caused me quite a few headaches over the last month or so, but I love this distro. I just finished building from the LFS 6.0 book and I'm working through parts of BLFS now. It is great. I have leard a lot more in a day of working on this OS than I did in all my time with the others.
 
All this talk about BSD and no one said they like MacOSX? ;) I have used linux in the past a good amount on servers. On destops I have to say redhat and suse are good but really any of the big ones have good docs to back them up so it isn't that big of a deal. Gentoo is showing signs of being somthing great too. I personaly like running freebsd on my servers now as I have found it faster in a lot of cases and overall more secure then most linux distros. OpenBSD also is real good at this aspect. And as far as netbsd goes when am I going to see a toaster running it :D
 
swatbat said:
All this talk about BSD and no one said they like MacOSX? ;) I have used linux in the past a good amount on servers. On destops I have to say redhat and suse are good but really any of the big ones have good docs to back them up so it isn't that big of a deal. Gentoo is showing signs of being somthing great too. I personaly like running freebsd on my servers now as I have found it faster in a lot of cases and overall more secure then most linux distros. OpenBSD also is real good at this aspect. And as far as netbsd goes when am I going to see a toaster running it :D
Click to expand...

I would almost bet that someone has found a toaster with a CPU and ported NetBSD to it, just for the hell of it. :)
(I remember seeing a toaster that toasted the symbol for todays weather onto the bread, so it's not completely unrealistic.)

Besides, FreeBSD does work fine as a desktop as well, in my experience. (I'm just not a linux man. :D )
 
Hi:

Being somewhat new to Linux I have found SuSE 9.1 to be a very good starting point. I use the Command line prompt more than anything and I feel that I am learning about the OS. Though, I suppose I am not in comparsion to what other people are saying. However, you must realize from a new persons perspective to Linux, diving right into compiling kernels and madly learning command prompts can be a bit overwhelming. I have found that SuSE 9.1 offers the best mix of GUI and Command Line Interface for a new person like myself. Where the Command Line fails, the GUI can be helpful (YaST for RPMs) and the where the GUI fails (Installing programs i.e. Make/Make Install) the command line takes the day.

However, I also do not see myself diving into the OS any further than SuSE offers. For, at this point, I see no need to learn about the OS in detail nor do I have any reason to. Being a Native Windows user, making this change has been easy to do with SuSE.

All in SuSE for me, offers the best mix of an easy transition from a Windows based user to a on-and-off Linux user. If there is one thing that I 'love' about SuSE was the extremely easy install. Though windows has certainly come a long way from Windows 95 installing it always seems scary at first. You never know what might go wrong. Though I had no clue what to expect from SuSE, I was pleased when it simply recognized, installed all my Hardware and booted up nicely.

If there is one thing I 'Hate' about Linux/SuSE is upgrading hardware. For instance, according to Nvidia the new Linux Drivers add support for 6800 series, yet when YaST/YOU found them/installed them it added no support for my 6800. And currently I am very very annoyed with the Wireless drivers/installation of drivers. For the Love of god I can't get my LinkSys Wireless internet to work on SuSE.

And there you have it. My 2 Cents on SuSE 9.1 and why its working for me.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top