Distros

[Jonathan Hutchins]

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.