On Fri 14 Nov 2003 at 11:51:08, Ammon J Christiansen said: > Any votes for anything besides mandrake?
Here are the pros of the various distros I use, or have used: - Mandrake: very easy to set up, good for home users - RedHat: lots of people use it. Commercial support is good. - Debian: very stable; if you already know a lot about Linux, this is the easiest to set up the way you want it, and keep it that way; good for Linux setups that you don't want to be updating every month - Gentoo: build it yourself, ultimate control over the system - OpenBSD: most secure, "pf" is the best firewall on any OS - NetBSD: runs on almost any weird hardware - FreeBSD: fastest, most stable x86 internet server, excellect ports tree (which is copied to the other BSD's) Cons: - Mandrake and RedHat: have the tendency to assume you want to do things "their way" and between upgrades will break a lot of personalized settings. Not as easy to customize. - Debian: *long* release cycle, so you have to run -testing or -unstable to get any of the newer, better apps. Not as easy to set up. - Gentoo: takes a long time to get running. For experts or masochistic, impatient newbies only. - *BSD: not as user friendly as the Linuxes. Hardware and software support is more limited. I recommend getting started with Mandrake or RedHat. From there, go to Debian. Then once you get sick of Debian being six months behind the bleeding edge, install Gentoo on your desktop and (Free, Open)BSD on your servers. Install Solaris x86 periodically to remind yourself how nice the Open Source OS's really are. -- Soren Harward [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ newbies mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://phantom.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/newbies
