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Making the switch-02: Which Linux distro to choose?

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Lashiec:
If you see my list of Linux distributions, you'll faint instantly. I have like 15 or something that I want to try.

During the summer, I'll be celebrating the first Linux Distribution Contest (LDC) to see what's the perfect Linux distribution for my needs and interests. If you were traveling to hotter countries than Belgium we could celebrate it in the meeting ;D

</shameless plug>

Gothi[c]:
During the summer, I'll be celebrating the first Linux Distribution Contest (LDC) to see what's the perfect Linux distribution for my needs and interests.

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One thing I've noticed over time is that the linux distribution only makes a difference initially. Eventually when you're comfortable enough playing with *nix you usually end up setting them up the same, and the only thing that makes the difference from one distro to the other is the package management system and aviable packages, like Zaine mentioned. Be it debian's apt-get, gentoo's portage, or fedora's yum, they are all good tools. And with many distributions you can find multiple installed. Blag, for example has both yum and apt. And portage can be installed on any distro, it doesn't have to be gentoo. So really, the lines between distributions really start to get blurry, as you get your hands dirty.

For users migrating from windows, the distribution is of massive importance however, because these don't have the experience required to fix something if it doesn't work out of the box, and having to do too much fiddling often leads to massive overwhelm, misunderstanding, and eventually giving up, since the unix culture is vastly different from what you're used to on Windows. Some of these distributions do a very good job at gradually introducing you to that culture, as opposed to throwing you in for the wolves.

Personally, I have used slackware, freeBSD, gentoo, ubuntu, blag, mandrake, suse, DSL, and many others, and I can honestly say that I don't have much of a preference. I run blag because of it's philosophy (free software only, no closed source) not because of how it looks and behaves as a distribution. And that's something you'll find with many *nix users. They go for a certain philosophy behind a distribution (be it political, or more technical); the mechanics and software are easy enough to change to your liking regardless of distro.

Hardware support is not an issue because all GNU/Linux distributions use the Linux kernel (this of course excluding bsd and solaris, but those aren't Linux distro's anyway ;)), and you can compile your own kernel with whatever drivers you want relatively easily. However for new users, this again is of great importance, because they want things to 'just work'. I have seen new users switch distribution countless times, just because some device wasn't automatically detected (usually because the developers of the distro have opted to not include whatever driver module) in one distro, but it was in another.

Besides distro, what DOES make a bigger difference is the kernel, I'm expanding beyond the scope of just Linux here, but whether you're new or a guru, there IS going to be a difference between say a BSD kernel, a Linux kernel, and a Solaris kernel. Different linux kernels are easily interchangable though. You can easily use a 2.4 kernel if your distro uses a 2.6 kernel, and the other way around. (Gentoo even lets you use a bsd kernel instead of a linux kernel)

Cool! I'll be close to the city of Namur, at a cave site called Scladina. Maybe we should try and arrange something for any European DC'ers that can and wish to meet up?

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We'll be in Ghent, though Scladina sounds like an interesing place to go see. I remember going there as a kid with my parents :P The Han and Spy caves are very interesting as well. Maybe we should start a new thread about this and invite anyone in who wants to come.
 :Thmbsup:

Darwin:
We'll be in Ghent, though Scladina sounds like an interesing place to go see. I remember going there as a kid with my parents  The Han and Spy caves are very interesting as well. Maybe we should start a new thread about this and invite anyone in who wants to come.
--- End quote ---

Sounds good!

zridling:
Lashiec, share your list!!

Gothi(c), thanks for your input here, we're grateful. So far, what you say has been true to my experience; that is, a particular distro is a matter of comfort, and will likely change, which is good. And in Part-03 of this serial, I had to switch off of Ubuntu again because I didn't have the time or energy over the weekend to fix a reboot death.

And Darwin, that's exactly what you should do, just play with some of the distros — for isn't the definition of learning "meaningful play"? At the least, you'll be able to gauge how far GNU/Linux on the desktop has come over the past two years. It's no Windows replacement, but it's giving more people an excuse to be lured away.

Darwin:
Lashiec - if the previous four or five summers are anything to go on, western Europe will be sweltering (mid to high 30's C - ok, that's sweltering to me, anyway) in July! Don't know if that is enough to lure you to Belgium or not? I'll also be in the UK (Cambridge) at some point and plan to travel to Paris, Leiden, Hamburg on my weekends off. Of course, these plans are completely flexible, other than Cambridge.

Zaine - I guess it's a geek thing... I've been mucking (muddling) around with computers for so long that I have a very limited idea of what is practical for non-computer literates anymore. Ubuntu seems to me to be very much load it, launch it, get your work done with no real requirement that the user have much of an idea about what they're doing. If all your relying on is the "add and remove" software feature, installing new apps is a breeze. Of course, if you have to open a terminal to get something installed this quickly becomes far more complex than a casual computer user will be able to deal with. However, this is just a learning curve as I imagine that the first time one opens a CMD console in Windows to be pretty daunting too - don't really remember as the first computer I touched was either a TRS-80 or a Commodore-64. I suspect the difference is that the necessity of doing this is very rare when playing with Windows but more common in Linux.

No matter, I'm having fun!

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