On Saturday 06 January 2007 02:21, Bradley Hook wrote:
What distros have you tried in the last year or two? In 10 words or less describe why you did or did not like them.
I've run RedHat, mostly in console mode, from 2.1 through FC4. Lots of good points, but due to them dropping support for their legacy releases for the second time I'm probably not going back. I have two servers I still support remotely, migrated one off to Mandriva last month.
I've also run Mandriva, mostly for my desktop, since a fairly early version. Actually, since I corrupted my RedHat system by trying to install the more current Madrake packages on it. I think it's one of the best desktops available today, much better than Fedora, for reasons I've been discussing.
About four years ago, I upgraded my hardware so I could actually get work done under an Xwindows session, and have been glad to work almost exclusively in Linux since then.
I diverged into SuSE for a while because I had unreasonable expectations about what Novell would do for them. I never did like Novell, and they proved true to form.
I manage a Gentoo firewall and a samba PDC fileserver for a small office for about the last four years. Don't like it. See other discussion.
I recently migrated the former Gentoo workstation to Kubuntu, and now it does what I want it to do, including play streaming audio while I work, which was constantly failing in gentoo. I like the ubuntu systems, but don't know the apt/deb package management as well as I know RPM. There are things I have come to know and prefer about the way the RedHat systems manage startup and running software.
I've also used tomsrtbt, and knopix, and linux defender live CD's for various purposes such as rescuing Windows PC's (with NT filesystems no less), and I have a distro called Boot'n'nuke that is specifically for wiping hard drives on decommissioned systems.
I like linux because you can find out just about anything about how things work and how to fix them, and you are in such complete control of your environment, you're not running a bunch of spyware that benefits the company packaged it and their allies.