Linux flavors

So I’ve been using Linux for the past couple of years. By no means am I an expert on the varying flavors nor do I think that there is one that is better than others for all circumstances. I think this is a healthy forum for discussion and I’m always open to input from the community.

First of all, I’ll list the flavors I’ve used. With that in mind, you’ll notice that I haven’t used all of the distros. My experience is from my limited exposure to those I have used. Keep in mind, my goal was to provide the best development environment for my laptop with my level of experience.

My first introduction to Linux was with Kubuntu.While that was a great introduction to KDE, it was a little more advanced than I was ready to dive into a new Linux user. I used it for a couple weeks and switched to Open SuSE. Open SuSE is still, in my humble opinion, the best distro for new Linux users. It provides a simple to use package manager, has a great community for support and offers some of the latest features with minimal filesystem and architecture knowledge needed.

I became a little frustrated with the SuSE KDE package manager, YaST. It seemed to take forever to load each time as it was constantly updating the repo lists. I decided I wanted a simple to use CLI package manager and my next installation was Debian.

Debian offers a great package manager; Aptitude, which uses simple commands to query and install from repositories. Debian was extremely stable and I was able to install Compiz for use with my Acer Aspire 5100 laptop, which includes an integrated ATI video card (to install Compiz, I had to install the proprietary ATI drivers).

While, I enjoyed Debian, I came to realize that the outstanding stability came at a price. The cutting edge features, such as KDE4 and Compiz required quite a bit of labor to get them running effectively. I decided I’d give Fedora 9 a try as it claims to be bleeding edge.

Well, safe to say, it’s definitely bleeding edge, and they waste no time pushing out updates. You have to be prepared for a bit of follow-up on some of these updates. If you perform much in the way of advanced configuration, it’s possible that you’ll sacrifice a bit of stability as the new features are all worked out. I still prefer Fedora at this point, although it took quite a bit of configuration initially. It didn’t offer support for my ATI card, so, again, I needed to install the proprietary drivers. The problem with installing these drivers was that the drivers aren’t caught up with the X Server version yet.

This means you’ll have to downgrade your X Server to support advanced features, such as Desktop Animations, including Compiz. I also still have issues with random system hangs when running Compiz. By far, Yum is my favorite package manager. It offers an easy to review output and syntax very similar to the Aptitude package manager.

I’ve built a Gentoo router at my house as well and if following the Gentoo router guide, it’s simple enough to get up and running. Gentoo is by far the most stable distro if you compile everything from source as the software is being built around the hardware. The package manager is great and offers a ton of flexibility. All in all, it is a bit advanced to manage and takes a bit more experience to comfortable manager.

To wrap this all up, I will remind you that after all of this, I’ve chosen to stick with Fedora for the meantime. It offers the verbose package manager, cutting edge technologies and a great community for support. I hope this helps some of you out there to pick a distro. Linux has really hit some serious milestones over the last couple of years and you can’t beat the cost…free… Viva la Linux!!

Tags: aptitude, debian, development, fedora, gentoo, kubuntu, Linux, open suse, operating system, package manager, yast, yum

This entry was posted on November 2, 2008 at November 2, 2008 and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.