Recommend me a Linux distro

[Nothinman]

Why not dist-upgrade for regular updates? That is what I've always used and have never had a problem.

Mostly because it's not necessary and it's less typing, so why do it? But it is possible for dist-upgrade to remove packages while upgrade will never do that.

upgrade will do only that, if there's packages with newer versions available it'll grab them and that's it. dist-upgrade gives apt permission to upgrade more important packages at the expense of less important ones so if it decides that a less important package needs to be removed (and thus everything that depends on it too) to upgrade the more important one it will.
If you're sticking with stable it probably won't matter a whole lot, but if you're using something that flucuates more like sid you can end up losing half your installation because only a portion of a set of packages made it to your mirror at the time you upgraded.

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Why not dist-upgrade for regular updates? That is what I've always used and have never had a problem.

Mostly because it's not necessary and it's less typing, so why do it? But it is possible for dist-upgrade to remove packages while upgrade will never do that.

upgrade will do only that, if there's packages with newer versions available it'll grab them and that's it. dist-upgrade gives apt permission to upgrade more important packages at the expense of less important ones so if it decides that a less important package needs to be removed (and thus everything that depends on it too) to upgrade the more important one it will.
If you're sticking with stable it probably won't matter a whole lot, but if you're using something that flucuates more like sid you can end up losing half your installation because only a portion of a set of packages made it to your mirror at the time you upgraded.

ah well, I do always stick with stable, and I always review what it's going to do so if it removes something, I either let it or I don't if I know I need the package.

 

[Nothinman]

ah well, I do always stick with stable, and I always review what it's going to do so if it removes something, I either let it or I don't if I know I need the package.

I generally run aptitude these days, it's nice having a UI to alter any decisions before they're committed and since I run sid new packages enter the archive all of the time and aptitude points them out to me. Also aptitude has the nice automatic dependency tracking thing where it marks packages as installed automatically when they're pulled in as dependencies so when nothing else depends on them it removes them for you so you don't end up with dozens of libs installed that nothing's using anymore but that's being moved to libapt so that won't be an advantage for long.

 

[drag]

The thing I like about aptitude is the ability to choose one of several ways to resolve a paticular dependancy.

This isn't a big deal for Debian stable or whatnot, but when you have lots of updates all the time then it can be pretty handy.

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

ah well, I do always stick with stable, and I always review what it's going to do so if it removes something, I either let it or I don't if I know I need the package.

I generally run aptitude these days, it's nice having a UI to alter any decisions before they're committed and since I run sid new packages enter the archive all of the time and aptitude points them out to me. Also aptitude has the nice automatic dependency tracking thing where it marks packages as installed automatically when they're pulled in as dependencies so when nothing else depends on them it removes them for you so you don't end up with dozens of libs installed that nothing's using anymore but that's being moved to libapt so that won't be an advantage for long.

I actually do use the command line version of aptitude, so I would assume I still get all those features. The UI never appealed to me much though. I guess I'm just too busy to do much more than "sudo aptitude dist-upgrade"

 

[aCynic2]

Originally posted by: AmberClad
I'm certainly not opposed to just sticking with what I'm familiar with and going with Slackware. I guess if I was wondering about the popular newer distros and whether any of them are Slack-like. Slackware seems to have become lower on the popularity rankings on DistroWatch -- I don't know if that's just because there hasn't been a new version recently.

EDIT: Oops, spoke too soon it would seem. Slackware 12.0 was released yesterday. I might just have to take that as a sign .

I doubt there is anything else like Slack. It's the most flexible, albeit, being the most unsecure out of the box distro I've ever tried. I ran it for 4-5 years as my sole OS on a 486 during the Win95 years. I learned the most about linux during that time, how to manipulate WMs, softlinks for booting different profiles, configuring procmail, grabmail/mailgrab/whateveritscalled, setting up firewall security, etc.

I'd say it's the most pure and unadulterated form of linux you can get, read as, not for the illiterate or apathetic.

I'm undecided about whether to go with it again, or stick to Debian. I like the ease of upgrading with Debian plus there was the print problem.

 

[MagicConch]

I like PCLinuxOS. I also like Ubuntu, but had some compatibility problems with them in herd 5. I like how Beryl comes pre-installed on pclinuxos

 

[JACK4888]

PCLinuxOS 2007 is the choice for a main stream laptop(Dell, Toshiba, ThinkPad etc). Here is why.

I just tried PCLinuxOS 2007 and was very impressed. This is ONLY distros that recognized my Centrino laptop config Dell Inspiron 9200. It asked me if I wanted to use distros wireless software(sw) or an alternate wireless sw. It asked me what broadcasting wireless was the one I wanted to use and what security if any I wanted to use. I use WPA2 personal. It asked for my key and in seconds I was on the air. No hassle. no special downloads etc. This is the way a distro. should be configured & tested. Everything worked together very well.

This is the one for me!

 

[DarkThinker]

Oh ya? I have one recommendation for you link

 

[zerocool1]

I've had good luck with SuSe.