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Ask Slashdot: What Is the Best Distro For Linux Lessons?
MBtronics writes "I work at an embedded hardware/software company and we are currently moving all our products for Windows CE to Linux. Our core development team already uses their favorite distro for development, but the rest of the developers are still working on Windows. We are going to give a series of Linux lessons (from 'what is Linux' to installing, using and developing) for everybody in the company who is interested (including non-developers). They will be allowed to choose their own distro, but we will certainly get requests for recommendations. My question to the Slashdot crowd: what distro (and window manager) do you think is the best to teach Linux to the generic public? We are currently thinking of Ubuntu, Fedora or Mint."
Ubuntu is the most common, with the most online forums and such... I would recommend that one.
Why would you teach a different distro than the one you currently run internally?
Slackware for the win!
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
Slackware is great if you want to learn how Linux works - not how one specific distribution does things for you.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
If you're bringing people over from the Windows world, please encourage KDE. It's a pretty good take on the "taskbar w/ a start button" GUI-style and will be immediately familiar to most folks. One word of advice: "Classic Menu Style" for the launcher will help keep things much more traditional.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
If you're trying to teach them to use Linux for general purposes, I'd go with Mint. It passes the Aunt Tilly test with flying colors in my experience.
If you're trying to teach them about Linux and how stuff works, Slackware or Arch would be the choice.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
If you are paying for their time, a question I would ask is do you want to solve problems once, or over and over with all the permutations of each of your distros and versions?
I would recommend against Fedora unless you want to do fresh installs at least once a year (twice a year to follow each release). I would recommend CentOS (7-10 year install length).
Whichever you go with, I would standardize on a single distro. Then when you run into an issue you solve it once, and not corner cases that each distro have.
It really is like learning/deploying/testing 3-4 flavors of Windows all at once (Win2000, WinXP, Vista, Win7) and that's not even introducing 32bit vs. 64bit issues, and actual distro version differences (EL5.x vs. 6.x, etc.).
Let people dink and learn the Linux distro of their own choice on their own time. Just my two cents.
If you get paid by the hour, then Gentoo is the way to go. Pro-tip: use the slowest machine.
It really depends on what you're teaching. If you want to teach them an enterprise product, then RHEL/CentOS/Fedora. If you want to teach them a desktop product, then Ubuntu. I know this probably wouldn't be for the poster, but for others who felt comfortable with Windows and would just want to learn basic Linux commands, dare I commit heresy here, might I suggest Cygwin?
Maybe it's not the kind of answer you were expecting, but FreeBSD is great example for teaching how operating systems work. It's not very different from Linux but is very simple and clean despite doing little to hide its inner workings.
"They will be allowed to choose their own distro,"
don't do that, it's going to be a nightmare.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This is the million dollar question, but also comes with a price tag. If you want support, then you want Redhat. Support includes more than you would get with Mickeysoft for much less money.
RHEL gets you a few other things besides a check book full of support. There are far more experts with Redhat than any other distro (at least in the US). This means if you can't afford, or don't want to pay Redhat you can still find help. Good luck finding that "Gentoo" or "Slackware" expert when something breaks, or good luck affording them since he's booked by some other schlep that went with that brand.
Lets face a simple fact. At home, you can use what ever you want. Who cares about down time, bugs, learning curves, etc... none of that matters. When it comes to business, you need to have something with a support chain. You also need a fall guy when the shit hits the fan.
At work, we strictly run RHEL. Kickstarts include the full KDE suite, desk top is changed to KDE and KDE's Kiosk features are used to manage the desktops and give a common look and feel. RHEL will include everything you want from the standard linux stack, though you may have to get both a desktop and server set of media.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.