[Cialug] Which Distro is best?

[Jeff Chapin]

Speaking from personal experience:
Gentoo is great to learn more about Linux, as the install process is 
very hands on, and takes a long time, forcing you to go slow and read 
the documentation. It is pretty easy to make a mistake and either 
compile too much, or compile something un-needed and waste a few days. I 
found that re-visiting Gentoo after becoming proficient with Linux 
helped me learn a lot and apply a lot -- and the install process was 
much easier after a few years of experience.

Debian family/Ubuntu family is where I first got started due to a 
professor from UNI being a huge Debian advocate/user. Given that he is 
one of the most vocal people in the Cedarlug, and was always willing to 
give advice and help, and the fact that many many of the local Linux 
users were impacted, or introduced to Linux thru Debian, by him the 
entire lug up here is *very* Debian heavy. This made assistance while 
learning very easy for Debian. I still have a fondness for 
Debian/Ubuntu, and use it on my laptop.

Redhat/Fedora is something that I have now supported for years in a full 
time, professional capacity, and as such, has bleed into my personal 
life. If you plan on trying to roll your Linux experience into a job or 
career, I would say that hands-down this is the one to learn.

To wrap up this email, Linux is a very varied creature, and what you use 
and learn is very representative of the environment. Various distros 
have their places, there good qualities and bad qualities, and as a 
whole each distro teaches and emphasis es different facets of what Linux 
is. To really learn Linux, I think that you need to learn the big three 
(Source based, RPM based, and deb based) and you really can't go wrong 
picking a starting point.

Oh, and I would advise learning to administer from the command line and 
not use the GUIs. The GUIs are great, but they abstract out and hide 
many details and functions that are very important to defining Linux.

Jeff Chapin

James Shoemaker wrote:
> Colin Burnett wrote:
>> There is no "best".  It would be prudent to try more than one so you
>> can evaluate what's best *for you*.  For me that's gentoo after red
>> hat, slackware, suse, linux from scratch, mandrake, and ubuntu (mostly
>> in that order dating back a decade).  If you can't compare & contrast
>> distros in your own words then keep trying.
>>
>> However, the distro is 99% irrelevant to learning "linux" or 
>> programming.
>
>   With the configuration differences between distros I am not sure I 
> would go 99%.  I personally use debian and at work we have several 
> suse boxes and are constantly frustating me as to where they keep this 
> or that config file, there are times I have had to use grep -r just to 
> find the config option I want to change.  The ubuntu box is fine as 
> it's closely related to my "normal" system.
>
> James
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