OT - Which Linux?

[Daniel de Kok]

On Aug 20, 2009, at 12:07 AM, Jason House wrote:
> Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distro at the moment. It's easy to  
> install, keep up to date, and find help. I highly recommend it for  
> newcomers to Linux. I have not tried the other distro's recommended  
> in this thread but do like Ubuntu better than others I have tried.

There are a couple of factors that you may want to take into account:

- Number of packages: Ubuntu and OpenSUSE are very comfortable in this  
respect, since they do not only offer many packages in the default  
repositories, but allow users to offer personal package repositories.
- Bleeding edge-ness: Some distributions ride on the edge, the upside  
is up to date software, the downside is that they break more often.  
E.g. Arch, Gentoo, and Fedora are typical bleeding edge distributions,  
while Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)/CentOS are very conservative.
- Support time: some distributions are supported for years with  
security and reliability updates (for instance seven years for RHEL/ 
CentOS), while others are only for a short amount of time.
- User-friendliness: Slackware, Arch, and Gentoo let you configure  
everything by hand Red Hat-ish distributions, Ubuntu, and OpenSUSE  
provide nice graphical configuration tools.
- Hardware support: some distributions include closed-source binary  
drivers or make it easy to install them, some don't. Generally, those  
who do are easier to install.

Ubuntu seems to satisfy in most respects: it provides many packages,  
it is user-friendly, has good hardware support, and the LTS version is  
also supported for a very long time. If you like to get rid of all the  
shiny stuff after some time, you can try Debian, which is the base of  
Ubuntu, but requires more knowledge to configure.

Take care,
Daniel (typing on OS X, which has found the sweetest spot :p)