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Beginner's Guide to Linux Distros

Posted by Zonk on from the pick-your-poison dept.

Martin writes "TipMonkies has a nice overview of various Linux distros for those of you with little time to research each distro yourself. The article also discusses some of the advantages/disadvantages of each distro." From the article: "SUSE- The 'U' is hard and the 'E' is soft. Almost like the word sue with an S on the end. SUSE is the other big commercial distro. It was when it was still it's own company in Germany, and now even bigger since being purchased by Novell."

3 of 409 comments (clear)

  1. eh... by ltwally · · Score: 5, Interesting
    "...The beauty of Slack is in its simplicity. The core of the OS is based off of BSD, whereas Debian and RedHat are based off of AT&T UNIX..."
    eh... Is this guy smoking crack or something? I've played with Slack, and have multiple FreeBSD boxes. While Slackware might be the least graphical (and thus, more arcane -- like the BSD's) linux distro out there, it is not based off any BSD that I've ever seen. The kernel is linux, the userland utilities are all GNU, and the location and configuration of all the system files is definitely not BSD related.

    I dunno... while much of this dude's article seemed accurate, after reading the above, I've come to the conclusion that even after all his years of experience, he's still a newb... or he's just plain smoking crack.
    --



    /dev/random
  2. Laptops... by skiflyer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I still just want a distro that works great with my Thinkpad laptop.

    I've been through Debian installs so many times, and I get so close, but there's always one thing or another I can't quite get (used to be sound, now I got that working but the darn thing won't sleep anymore)... I tried Kanotix, again the sleeping issue... downloading Ubuntu now. (Yes, in case you can't tell by the list I'm a big Debian fan... but Fedora is next on the torrent list, lousy 2.7GB download though)

    Is there a reason laptops are so tricky for linux, and yes I know all about linuxforlaptops.com and the other websites which cater, but still, the installs are frustrating, the wireless has finally gotten to a point where it's ok, but still not great (enabling wep and connecting to a varity of networks etc)...

    Does a "for laptops" distro exist?, I'd love it, hell I'd help with it if my skills could be used.

    Sidenote: The old debian installer had much better support for laptops than the new one!

  3. Re:The Gentoo conundrum by iCEBaLM · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Gentoo for me has never been about performance increases, it's been about packages compiled with the options I wanted, instead of what the maintainer wanted.

    No, I didn't want mysql when I installed postfix, no, I didn't really need libjpeg/libtiff/libpng to install samba, no, this box is a server and I don't want X, why is php dependant on X! (and other weird package dependencies I've noticed in various distribs)

    The flipside of the coin is that perhaps I want php or something compiled against postgresql or some other combination of modules which, for instance, fedora or debian won't allow me to have? Gentoo gets around this rather well as everything is compiled and you can link packages against the libs that you want. Also since you're compiling it yourself for your system you know it'll work whereas you can't be sure with rpms these days as they can be made for any number of distribs.

    Gentoo is for advanced users who don't mind compile times and like having things customized the way they want it. It's not a bad distrib, don't knock it because of some of the users.