Ask Slashdot: New To Linux; Which Distro?

An anonymous reader writes "I'm a very new user to Linux looking for a distro that allows me to control and customize, but I'm not sure where to start. I had a friend install Ubuntu 12.04 on my computer, with the E17 window manager and somehow I managed to crash it during the copying of some non-important files and now my computer won't boot (the hardware's fine though). I've found descriptions of Arch Linux to be spot on to what I'm looking for and want (Slashdot user serviscope_minor mentioned Arch a couple weeks ago and it caught my attention), but my experience in the terminal is literally about an hour. That said, I really want to learn more, don't mind hard work, enjoy challenges, and am perfectly willing to spend hours and hours for months on end to learn command line. Any suggestions, projects to start with, books to read, or tutorials to do to try would be appreciated."

Comments

Reinstall Ubuntu.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't go looking for trouble. If you couldn't handle Ubuntu, Arch will drive you insane.

Re:Reinstall Ubuntu.

[AliasMarlowe]

And, as pointed out in the Firehose: if you crashed an OS (be it Windows or OSX or Linux or BSD or anything) by moving some files around, then either (i) they were not unimportant files and you must have been running with privilege escalated, or (ii) you have some kind of hardware problem, which could be intermittent.

Re:Reinstall Ubuntu.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, nonsense. If you are moderately technically competent, the distros which try to be "user-friendly" are usually the worst, as you have to get used to all their complex quirks and custom methods.

Something simple like Slackware or Debian stable is a much healthier and less frustrating learning experience.

Re:Reinstall Ubuntu.

[ZeroPly]

As a long time Linux user, I agree wholeheartedly. I started with Slackware before version 2.0 came out, in the early 90's. I used Slackware for years, then Red Hat, and nowadays Ubuntu. If you want to be cool and different, yeah, there's plenty of niche distros out there. For my main work computer (at home), I don't want drama, and I'm not intent on making any ideological points. I just want Gnucash, LibreOffice, etc. to run reliably, updates to be easy, and maintenance time to be a small fraction of usage time. Ubuntu works great for that. If you want to experiment, throw a distro on a VM, or on a spare test machine.

Yes, there's lots of discussion about GUI and the direction Canonical is heading in. I don't care. I have an Ubuntu Server 12.04 box as a firewall in my basement, another Ubuntu Server 12.04 box right next to it for DNS/DHCP/file shares, and Ubuntu Desktop 12.04 on the computer I'm posting this through. Works great, excellent uptime, and upgrades/installs are fairly fool-proof.

Re:Reinstall Ubuntu.

[Jane Q. Public]

This. BUT personally I go with Kubuntu. KDE is the interface with "least surprise", and you don't have to worry about what direction vanilla Ubuntu is going with Canonical's frankly bizarre ideas about window management.

Re:Reinstall Ubuntu.

[chmod a x mojo]

It's Ubuntu. Don't take my bashing it the wrong way, it is a good thing to have an intro level distro for new users as well as pushing to make Linux more mainstream user friendly, but....

The way Ubuntu does things is, in my opinion, insane. They track Debian unstable snapshots which is only minimally tested and then introduce their own bugs on top of the existing bugs in unstable, then try to iron out the worst of the bugs before the next point in the 6 month release cycle comes due. This does not lend itself all that well to making a truly stable user experience. You can even see that at work by tracking users reactions to releases, there have been flop releases that pushed users to jump ship to pure Debian ( seem look / feel / package management experience, just less general hand holding) or rolling back to previous releases and refusing to update.

  I know they can't really track stable since Debian has a much longer release cycle, but at the very least they should track testing. Testing generally has the worst of the major bugs worked out ( or the packages wouldn't have been able to move out of unstable ) while still remaining "fresh" enough with updated packages when not in release freeze.

Secondly, it depends. With bug free code you shouldn't be able to crash an OS beyond repair un-intentionally, unfortunately Ubuntu, like every other piece of software out there, is not bug free. It is also possible to be updating sensitive files when doing something else causes a full blown kernel panic instead of a recoverable oops leaving said sensitive files in an unstable / un-bootable state. Not knowing exactly what the OP was doing at the time means we can't only point and say "it was this".

Re:Reinstall Ubuntu.

[Larryish]

This!!

Re:Reinstall Ubuntu.

[adolf]

You still install Windows updates on a new install the old fashioned way?

http://download.wsusoffline.net/ and don't look back: Push the button, come back later. It self-reboots and just sorta gets it done.

Xubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

Xubuntu. Customization + hardware support + debian repo. :-)

SuSE

[Rydia]

SuSE has the best installation and configuration utility and has a ton of helpful user-run repos for packages. It also has builds for basically every windowing system, so you can pick your preference without any hacking, and when you do want to get down to brass tacks, the system will get out of your way (now that suseconfig is gone) and let you tinker as much as you please.

And when you screw everything up (half the fun, right?), it ships with a fantastic system repair tool to get you back on your feet. You can also use SuSE Studio to make a custom image if you have weird hardware.

It's a really great linux experience.

slackware

[Anonymous Coward]

... because it still works just like 1994

Re:slackware

[mr_shifty]

Even though I'm a diehard Mint user nowadays, I agree with this.

I started out with Slackware, and I used it for 8 years before moving on to Ubuntu, and finally Linux Mint Debian Edition.

Slackware, while it has a learning curve, is also (as odd as it may sound), actually quite simple. It does what you tell it to do. No more, no less.

It's rock-solid stable.

It's fast.

It forces you to learn about how Linux works, because you have to tell it what to do and how to do it. It isn't as much work to get running as Gentoo, but it makes you think about things like kernel versioning, what's going on in /etc and where your system logs are, and how to compile applications from source from time to time.

I've taken what I've learned from Slackware and found that it's applicable to every other Linux I've knocked around.

I use Linux Mint more like a "casual desktop user" these days, but if I need something rock solid stable and reliable, I will go back to Slackware, because I trust it. It's not a Cadillac like Mint is, but a stock car that has everything accessible and tweakable, so you can bend it to your will and it'll serve whatever purpose you have in mind for it.

So, to sum up, while it doesn't sound like a newbie distro, I still think Slackware is a great way to cut one's teeth in the Linux world, especially if one is truly setting out to learn Linux, not just using it as a launch platform for a browser and an email client.

If you're interesting in an IT career

[Anonymous Coward]

CentOS might be the best; it's a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, without paid support. (Red Hat's stated position is that it doesn't mind CentOS's existence). So if you learn that, you'd be able to leverage that for job opportunities based on RHEL, which is the industry leader on the server side.

One drawback: RHEL (and by extension CentOS) is oriented towards the enterprise rather than the consumer desktop; and towards the tried and true, rather than the latest and greatest. This is response to what its customers (IT administrators who have serious work to accomplish) have told them they're interested in. So it's probably not going to be a great platform for running games, for example - well it could be, but you'll have to be spend a lot of time downloading RPMs and trying to get things to work.

Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

Most other distros copy it anyway, might as well get the real McCoy.

If you're concerned about software freedom, consider is gNewSense, a Free-only debian derivative.

Linux Mint

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're new to Linux, don't use Arch. Arch requires far too much hacking to get work and although I myself am a fan, a newbie will likely rage right back to Windows. The best casual distro right now is Linux Mint (With Cinnamon as a display manager) IMO. Linux Mint fixes what Ubuntu got wrong (Unity) and Cinnamon is a beautiful display manager with intuitive and familiar design.

As for working with the terminal, you need some motivation to keep you revisiting. Personally, my motivation was coding in C using gcc as a compiler, and vim as an editor. If you are up for a 'fun' time learning, use Vim exclusively as your text editor.

Grenade!!

[RedHat Rocky]

Very touchy topic, which distro to run.

I think Ubuntu is an okay start for you, mostly because it will mostly work and there's plenty of help (including various levels of help) for you to use.

Problem one for you:
1. You caused the boot issue. How?

2. Fix it.

This will start the learning process, a large part of Linux for me is it leads to learning. It's all there for one to figure out, eventually.

Re:Seriously.

[pijokela]

Somebody has to actually answer the question for there to be good pages for google to find. This sort of thing also ages pretty quickly, so I think it's worth reanswering at least yearly. Finally, this guy seems to want something that will teach him interesting stuff - not just something that has working flash etc.

So I definately think that this is a good question for SlashDot.

And personally I would recommend reinstalling Ubuntu. If you only have an hour of experience with the command line you probably haven't noticed that underneath Ubuntu is just about as "Linux" as any other Linux. Reinstall it and this time create a separate /home partition so that reinstalling the next time will not be painful. And then, learn to program - that's a nice 10 year project. :)

Run a live distro off a memory stick or CD

[kawabago]

Test the different distros live disks to see which works best in your situation. Then install it.

Re:Seriously.

[aoteoroa]

Somebody has to actually answer the question for there to be good pages for google to find. This sort of thing also ages pretty quickly, so I think it's worth reanswering at least yearly. Finally, this guy seems to want something that will teach him interesting stuff - not just something that has working flash etc.

I'm not sure the question has a straight answer. It reminds me a little of when I asked my dad about how to evaluate a good wine (about 20 years ago) I expected him to educate me about legs, tanin, body and other quantifiable methods for evaluating a wine. Instead he said it's quite simple really....you drink a lot of them and after a while you start to develop preferences.

In the late '90s and early 2000's I took the same approach to Linux and installed nearly every distribution I could get my hands on. Back in the day they were varietes of Red Hat, Mandrake, Corel, Slackware, Gentoo, Debian...after a while you develop preferences and one distro doesn't fit all needs. To this day I prefere slackware servers, ubuntu desktops, and ipcop for routers/firewalls. But everybody will have their own preferences./P