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The Best Linux Distro for a New User?
GhostCypher asks: "I've been a Mac user for nigh on 12 years, and recently made the reverse-switch (yes, Mac to PC) due to an unfortunate accident to my PowerBook. Now that I have this spiffy new HP laptop, I want to run Linux or Unix of some flavor on it, but I don't know the best one to run. I've been considering FreeBSD and OpenBSD, as well as SuSE Linux, Fedora, and Mandrake. Could the wisened Linux gurus here offer some insight as to the best package for a former Mac user to introduce him to the greater world of Linux without major headaches in setting it all up?"
Knoppix is your friend.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
There're a thousand good distros out there, but there's really no competition - Xandros is the best newbie distro out there. You don't need command line. It's got most stuff bundled.
Sounds like someone hasn't tried Fedora. If theres one problem in the linux community, it's people who try 1 or 2 distros, and blindly carry the flag as if it's the only one that does the job. Fedora is simply the best, and I've tried nearly every distro over the past 6 years.
Don't go with OpenBSD. OpenBSD has many noble design philosophies however "make the system usable" is possibly at the bottom of their list. I think they view "unusable base system" as the same thing as "confuses hackers if they get in & prevents them from doing any damage".
FreeBSD is considerably better but I'd still not suggest it for a unix newbie.
As far as user-friendly Linux distros go, I've had good luck sending friends to Redhat/Fedora and Mandrake (I'd assume SuSE is in the same boat but I've never given any real consideration to dropping the $$$ for it). Currently, I'd say that Fedora's the strongest option, it's more recent & seems to have more development energy than Mandrake.
Your best bet, however, would be to bite the bullet and go for Debian (or try a HDD install of Knoppix); once you actually get it up it should stay up & up to date (unless you're running unstable and try to update on a day when they're pushing seriously broken packages...).
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
...and tech worker productivity in North America ends early for the week, as everyone gets sucked into a straight-up Linux distro war. And then people will post comments referencing vi vs Emacs or KDE vs GNOME, and those will be taken up in all seriousness, as well.
/home on a separate partition so you can reformat and reinstall easily! **
My advice is:
1) If you have a high-speed connection and a CD burner, download a bunch of ISOs (Fedora, Mandrake, SuSe, Knoppix) and try them out. Probably half will detect your hardware correctly and half won't -- that can be solved but at this stage just use what worked. ** Put
2) Maybe try some of the new friendly distros like Lycoris.
3) You said your PowerBook is dead, but if you have another Mac around, I'd strongly suggest trying Yellow Dog on it.
4) And once you've been through all that learning experience, you'll be ready to switch to Gentoo!
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
No, I've tried Fedora. I've tried FC1, and before it the "TEST" releases, I downloaded and installed FC2T2, then yummed up to test 3, and have since installed FC2 on another machine. Fedora is nowhere near as slick as Xandros. Not a complaint, but I've yet to meet a Red Hat install that could function as a desktop sans command-line. If I had to choose number 2, it would be Mandrake. 9.1 was my desktop for months without a single boot into anything else.
Since 1998 or so, I've used scores of Linux distros - some for "real," some to play around with. Everything from TurboLinux and StormLinux to Lycoris, Lindows, and Ark to Red Hat and SuSE.
If you haven't sprung for Xandros yet, you should. It's friggin slick.
I bet in a few years though, I'll be using Cobind. That pup py is nice looking and will be awesome soon.
It's not the best distro available, but it's easy to set up and run, and comes with installation, migration and operation support as part of the selling price. List price is $100, but it might still be selling for half that as the intro sale. It'd be my "For Dummies" pick.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Anyway, if you want to learn internals, go with LFS or something. Gentoo really won't do it.
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
As people have already told you, it depends on the user. If they want to learn Unix, learn the OS and environment inside and out, how it works, etc., then stay away from the newbie distros. The hard systems are the way to go.
Slackware, FreeBSD, or Debian. Without the handholding, they'll actually learn the system. They'll be forced to drop into the command line to configure some stuff. They'll come to understand how it all fits together. This is a Good Thing(tm).
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Suse let's you do a free FTP install.
Current Knoppix is debian with a both kernel 2.4.6 & 2.6.6
I think the only damn person being political here is you. As you won't go with what the better product is, but only be againist what someone else thinks is better. A completely political view.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I know this is flamebait material, but I'll do it anyways - as it's a good question.
The linux distros I've personally used are: Slackware, Debian, RedHat, SuSE, Turbolinux, Storm Linux and Mandrake. I've also fiddled a bit with Gentoo, but not much.
Slackware, for me, was a bitch. I was new to linux, and that was the first distro I tried. It was hell. No good documentation at the time, and nothing worked out of the box. I fiddled with it for about two weeks, then gave up. Forget that one.
Debian. Great system for servers. Used it for four years on various boxes. Only had a few problems with it, namely a single box when I updated from slink to potato, and a box where I attempted to upgrade mysql from 3.22 to 3.23 by using unstable on a few binaries/libraries. This was before potato was out, if I remember correctly. I've always thought that Debian sucks for workstations, but quite a few people disagree. It's neither very easy to install nor very easy to configure. When you've got it up and running it's extremely easy to maintain.
RedHat. Used it for a few servers, and use it regularly as a workstation at the University. To be quite frank - I think it sucks as both. I really don't think it's any good at anything. Neither the installer, up2date, nor default configuration works as it should. And this is "the" mainstream linux? Blargh!
Mandrake. I used to use Mandrake, but they fscked up a lot of things between 8.1 and 8.2 , and I've not used it seriously afterwards. I used to be a paying member of mandrakeclub - but really didn't renew the payment after the 9.0 release which stunk just as much as 8.2 for me. The problem was quite simply that 8.1 just 'worked' on my computers, while 8.2 and 9.0 was riddled with lockups, various flaws and lots of other stuff. It's a very NICE distro though, it's easy to install, shiny, and so forth.
I'll drop commenting on TurboLinux and Storm, as it's several years since I tried them out, and they never did impress me.
Now onto the distro that I really, really like.
SUSE!
SuSE both installs easily, and is slick, shiny and well built. It's obvious that a lot of work has gone into making things work out of the box, especially if you're a KDE user (and you should be). YaST is a really wonderfull tool when it comes to installing and updating stuff, it works wonderfully on my HP Omnibook 6100, it works wonderfully on my servers, my desktops, and all my works desktop computers.. we've also bought SuSE OpenExchange, which works like a charm.
In short, I've got nothing wrong to say about SuSE, and I've been using it for about two years now, after using nothing but Linux the last 5 years. No other distro has shown me such ease of installation, such ease of installing other programs, such ease of security updates, such ease of maintainance, and so forth.
A single negative and important note about SuSE though - it uses ReiserFS as default. Change it to ext3 or something else - ReiserFS is notorious for corrupting data. I've had three systems where ReiserFS has fucked up my data badly. I don't trust that filesystem. Steer away from it like a pest. It sucks. It's bad for you. It destroys your data.
*phew*.
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
1995: SCO UNIX (I know, i know, but I had to use it at work)
1997: Slackware
1999: Debian
2000?: Gentoo
2001?: Back to Debian
Still using Debian (mix of stable+testing) and, barring conflict.dependency issues with mplayer-k7/libvorbis, I've never been happier.
I'd recommend starting with Slackware - it worked for me.
--- We are not in the 8th dimension. We are over New Jersey.
Even though it comes with slightly less software than distributions that have 3 CDs of binaries rather than Slackware 9.1's 2 (originally 1 CD but KDE and GNOME got too big), the system is well picked and is installed in standard locations so ./configure scripts will find them. Slackware also installs fast and in my experience detects hardware now fairly well, though you will have to run xf86cfg or xf86config to configure your graphics card if you want acceleration and higher resolutions.
That having been said if this is scaring you than perhaps something like SuSE would be more up your alley. I tried it and it's an excellent desktop distribution.
Also if you have broadband and want to always have the latest and greatest by cvsupping ports FreeBSD might be a good idea, I'd run FreeBSD as a sort of "source-based" Unix over Gentoo, unless you need to get that last few percent of speed for scientific applications.
NetBSD is also a very interesting system, and actually has less security reports, including services included rather than "default install", than OpenBSD. Unfortunately for me I don't have broadband so downloading most of the third party packages via source just takes up too much time here, though I'm thinking of reinstalling *BSD because I love it as well as Slack. (If my keyboard wasn't USB, which messes up dual-booting *BSD, I'd dual-boot them.)
I think Knoppix is an interesting idea, but I'm not sure that the questioner really needs a whole different operating system that requires shutting down whatever you're doing and rebooting whenever you want to do a little "grep" or "wc" or whatever. (If Knoppix now works as just another application without requiring a reboot, please respond and correct me.)
As an owner of Macs, Windows PCs, and a Linux server who uses Solaris at work, what I find I need on my laptop is the customized drivers and other goodies that come with it in the version of Windows XP that comes with it, plus the ability to run Windows GUI apps that have no acceptable equivalent in the Linux world, plus the array of command line Unix tools that I find so amazingly useful when I'm working on a Unix/Linux box.
Dual booting doesn't work for me. Having to wait for a reboot to use grep or wc is like having to get dressed in the middle of the night to go out to an outhouse in the dead of winter. (And I guess that makes DOS a chamberpot.)
Unless the machine I'm using is a server itself, in which case I need the full Linux (which is what I do with my home server), I find that combo of Cygwin plus the customized Windows that your manufacturer provides with their hardware to be a great solution (for a laptop, for today).
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Agreed. I've been a Debian user for 6 years and I've been sorely tempted by Fedora Core 2. The install is beautiful but that's not important (you only install once). The real beauty of FC2 is every common management task - add a printer, open a firewall port, add a new network card - has its own graphical configuration wizard. The package management is on-par with Debian now (hell, it IS apt). Fedora Core 2 is just as committed to being fully free software as Debian. The BlueCurve interface is beautiful; everything looks the same, even OpenOffice had the right fonts. All onscreen fonts are anti-aliased. The GNOME setup has all the latest whizbangs including BlueTooth file exchange.
I converted my system from Red Hat to Debian 6 years ago, frustrated by "RPM Hell". Fedora Core 2 is the first distribution that's tempted me to switch away from Debian. I'm running FC2 at work and I can't recommend it highly enough.
ReiserFS has gotten pretty good lately. I've been a heavy user of it on several high-traffic servers since SuSE 8.2 was released and the corruption probs seem to have been all ironed away. Presently running SuSE 9.0 on all my machines with Reiser on all but one (XFS on that one) and experiencing no filesystem corruption at all. I prefer XFS or JFS over Ext3. Where absolute performance is needed I'd rather just run plain old Ext2 and deal with long fsck times.
Went to Linux/Unix on a new x86 notebook and tried a few Linux distro's and FreeBSD, but each of them had a few things that really annoyed me. Some didn't work well with the hardware of my Siemens notebook, but most of the time it were just those small things you miss, that on a Mac just work.
... get yourself a cup of coffee and when you get back it works." Too bad they never told me that we were talking about a dimension in which a minute lasts half a day and that the cup of coffee was to be picked up in Colombia .... In the end, people started taking my machine home, in order to fix it. Yes, support in the Open Source community really rocks. No bad word about that, but a usable machine never really materialized ...
:)
:)
... and got me an alumium Powerbook :)
What I especially didn't like were those "Let me fix it for you" events. Goodwilling Unix cracks that absolutely wanted me to adore my Open Source system. "It will take about five minutes
First of all, I'm not a Unix geek. I learn fast, but it clearly wasn't fast enough. I travel with my computer and I found it h*ll to make the thing work on all different networks I must logon, using all diferent settings... in the end I was just glad when I was able to browse the internet and 'webmail' became my best friend... aaaaaw.
Second of all, I don't like it to mess with my OS each day. I did like the terminal though.
Third: it was clearly a bad choice to put Linux/Unix on a productionmachine of someone not willing to mess with an OS each day. I should have put it on a spare...
After six months of really hard trying, reading manuals, raiding forums and bothering all kind of Unix specialists in my addressbook I gave up and bought a new Powerbook with OS X and put all Linux distri boxes in my cupboard for 'later'
I hope for your sake, that you have better control of your bloodpressure than I have and that the distro's have become a whole lot better since Q1 and Q2 of 2003.
Looking from the bright side: the whole experience made me rediscover the ease of use of my Mac, thought me how to find my way in OS X using the terminal