On Sat, Oct 29, 2011 at 7:28 PM, Miles Fidelman
<mfidelman@meetinghouse.net> wrote:
A newbie to ANY o/s is going to need some help with installation, configuration, software selection/installation/configuration, general use, etc.
That help has to come from somewhere - either paid, or from a community (or both).
So, your choices come down to:
- a commercial distribution that has good support (which may cost extra), or,
- paying somebody for support, or,
- a distribution that has good documentation and a strong, supportive community
Having said that, there are a few other questions:
- ease of software installation (IMHO apt makes things easier than any other packaging system out there)
- need for current versions of specific software packages (at least for some of the packages I rely on, the packaged versions tend to lag well behind the upstream versions, and I end up installing a lot of stuff from the upstream tarball) - depending on your specific software needs, Ubuntu might be a better choice (though if you plan to explore virtualization, then it's a real contest between Debian, Red Hat, and Suse)
- level of technical expertise - if you're coming from Windows or a Mac, with no serious expertise that's one thing; if you've administered a Solaris or AIX server that's another - if you have deep experience with a non-Linux o/s, then it comes down to WHY you want to install Linux:
- if it's to run software, then it really comes back to availability of software and ease of administration (and really comes down to Debian, Ubuntu, Suse/OpenSuse, Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS for serious use)
- if it's to learn and explore, then Debian is great, but there are also Gentoo, Linux-from-Scratch (for real, in-depth learning), and one might also consider exploring the BSD family of stuff
Of course, this is all one person's opinion - based on:
- running headless servers
- having run Solaris, then Red Hat, then settling on Debian
--- generally running Old Stable until Stable has been out for a year (partially conservatism, partially lazyness)
----- currently running Lenny as Xen Dom0s and for production, Squeeze on a couple of development VMs
--- installing a lot of stuff from upstream tarballs (notably list management and database stuff)
- periodically looking at Suse, every time I find yet another nit with Xen
- periodically looking at Red Hat for a deployment platform (we do some R&D for Red Hat based customers)
- occasionally considering either Gentoo or building a custom distribution from scratch
- periodically eying FreeBSD and NetBSD - for lots of reasons
- throwing up my hands in despair every time I look at the state of OpenSolaris
- running Mac OSX on my laptop - because who needs headaches when writing documents, preparing briefing slides, reading email, and surfing the web - and I can run Windows stuff under Parallels, and open a terminal or X- window and drop into a BSD development environment (don't need to worry about Linux, since I've got other boxes for that, and there's always Parallels)