[pm-h] Linux Distribution Selection

[Steven Lembark]

On Thu, 7 Jan 2016 15:31:48 -0600
David Ibarra via Houston <houston at pm.org> wrote:

> I would say Fedora, it's what I use, and matured in the past 2 years or so.
> You can do in place system upgrades, and seems a lot more work has been put
> into stability than in the past.

If you aren't buying commercial support I'd suggest checking out 
whatever support forums you think you'd use with each distro 
[including buying whomever you'd panhandle support from a beer] and
see what they look like. If one of the support forums [or local
user groups] seems preferable then use whatever they support.

The "main" distros today include SuSE, RH, Debian, and all of their
progeny.

The real difference in all of these is the package mangler, initial
desktop setups, and whether you can escape from whatever desktop
settings they've chosen for you. After that it's still linux running
largely GNU[ish] software: if you're willing fondle what's under the
hood you can do anything with any of these. 


Depending on your tolerance for learning how to actually manage a 
working linux system, Arch Linux has a nice package manager, uses
pre-compiled content, and avoids much of the cruft found on RH or 
Debian [and derivatives]. Catch is that you have to care enough to 
determine what to install. 


I personally use Gentoo for both servers and desktop: the package 
mangler is based on BSD's ports system, compiles from source, and 
avoids most library-version-from-hell tangles. It also allows you
to select openrc if you havn't already taken the plunge into hell.

Good thing/bad thing: On the one hand you get to choose things like 
the desktop manger, terminal types, and service utilities... on the
other hand you get to choose things like the desktop manger, terminal
types, and service utilities. If you specifically don't want to know
about choosing these things then choosing them becomes annoying :-)


-- 
Steven Lembark                                             3646 Flora Pl
Workhorse Computing                                   St Louis, MO 63110
lembark at wrkhors.com                                      +1 888 359 3508