Favourite Linux distro

[CWoolmer]

Whats your favourite Linux distro?

 

[Nothinman]

Debian.

 

[mcveigh]

gentoo!

 

[oniq]

I like Mandrake, mainly because the install is so easy on my iMac. Thats right, iMac running linux . No slow Mac OS X. I tried debian on it and the install took forever. It has outdated libs, etc. I've only tried Mandrake PPC and Debian PPC on my iMac, so I can't pick anything else (though I don't think the others in the poll mentioned have PPC versions).

 

[nihil]

debian

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

another debian communist right here

 

[thornc]

I like Slackware...but LFS is my favourite...

 

[CWoolmer]

SuSE Linux is my personal fav, its also the first one I ever used. One quick question about it though: is there a limit to the amount of RAM you can have with it?

Thanks

Craig

 

[Nothinman]

I have 1.2G right now, theoretically you can use up to 64G if you have a 32-bit processor with PAE or a 64-bit processor. But if you want to use over ~890M you need a kernel with highmem support, not sure if SuSe ships with one or not.

There's also strange problems that may only crop up when highmem is enabled because of bouce buffer usage, device drivers inability to deal with highmem addresses and devices inability to DMA directly to highmem. Basically, I've been using a highmem kernel for a while but YMMV.

 

[rip22]

Red Hat

 

[jcmkk]

If you can successfully get it installed, Gentoo wipes the floor with any other distribution I've used.

 

[hoihtah]

Originally posted by: jcmkk
If you can successfully get it installed, Gentoo wipes the floor with any other distribution I've used.

wipes the floor?

hmm... i gotta give it a try then.

 

[rip22]

If you can successfully get it installed, Gentoo wipes the floor with any other distribution I've used.

Cool i will give it a shot.

wipes the floor? hmm...

i gotta give it a try then.

lol

 

[Electrode]

<< I like Slackware...but LFS is my favourite... >>

LFS is the ONLY way to use Linux. Nothing can really come close to running a distro that you put together yourself.

<- Registered LFS user #2945

 

[ProviaFan]

Linux From Scratch

 

[Tiger]

Depends.
If you've got some Linux chops----->Gentoo.
If you're chopless----->Mandrake.

 

[Nothinman]

A couple things kill Gentoo or LFS for me:

1) I need another distro to install LFS, they should just give you a CD like SuSe's live eval CD to compile from.
2) Why wait for all that to compile? With today's PCs you hardly notice anything from compiling with optimizations unless it's a real number cruncher app and on my old Tbird 900 just X took 45 minutes to compile, I can have all of Debian installed and running in under that time.
3) Architecture support, I run Debian on x86, Alpha and UltraSparc.

 

[Tiger]

IMHO the one thing Gentoo has over Debian is up-to-date packages.
I did a Debian Woody install last week that came with a 2.2.20 kenel. Debian always seems to be a year behind everybody else. If you take the time to update Debian to Gentoo standards the time investment is a push.

 

[Nothinman]

The 2.2.20 kernel is default because Debian doesn't consider the 2.4 series stable enough for their distro, but there are 2.4 kernels installable with apt/dselect if you want.

If you run Debian woody most of the software is up to date. If you want really bleeding edge versioning run sid. I run woody on my day to day workstations and the convenience of Debian packaging and Debian package QA overshadows any minor things that might be lost in the slight version differences.

 

[ProviaFan]

Although the optimizations are a small part of it, I like LFS more for it's ability to teach me a lot more than I currently know about Linux (which currently isn't very much)
Also, about optimization - I consider RAM usage part of optimization; currently, the Redhat 7.2 installation that I'm using to build my LFS system uses almost all of my 256MB of RAM with KDE+a few small apps. This is not good, and with LFS I will be able to optimize this aspect of system performance much more easily. With LFS, you choose to only include what you want. With Redhat (and others), you choose what you want to exclude - a different philosophy, and a very inefficient one if you don't want 75% of the things that they think you need.

 

[Nothinman]

As a learning tool it's a good thing, but I wouldn't use it for a day to day workstation.

I'll bet money you see the same memory usage with LFS that you do with RH, because the software is all the same (unless you just happen to build a different version than the RH software and the one you choose has a fixed memory leak or something, but not likely).

Also I'll bet money that a good chunk of that 256M is used for filesystem cache, because that's just how Linux works. If you give it 64G of memory it'll use all of it for filesystem cache until something else needs it. At first glance it just seems like 'holy sh!t where'd my memory go!"

If you really want you can select every package you want in RedHat too, people seem to think RedHat hardwired the need for a lot packages when it isn't true. I don't personally like RedHat but it's not a bad distribution.

And for the record I was comparing with Debian, in which a basic install of ~100M (IIRC) is very easy and you can dselect/apt install just what you want and not have to wait for it all to compile.

 

[bigrash]

I like RedHat the best. I've used a few different distro, but I keep coming back to Redhat for some reason

 

[andrey]

I've used Mandrake, SuSE and RedHat and from these three distros RedHat is my favorite. I'm currently running RedHat 7.3 on my IBM Thinkpad T23.

 

[lowpost]

After many failed attempts to install Gentoo on my hardware bugged linux box, I went back to Red Hat 7.2. Gentoo's compiles kept crashing, no matter what stage I tried to install from. If I could get gentoo running, I'd use that. For now though, Red Hat is my choice because it's the one I'm familiar with it.

 

[TheOmegaCode]

I gave up on Linux. I just use win2k and FreeBSD right now. In time, I'm sure I'll come back to it...